Business Studies: The Life of a Business Owner – Ownership Simulator:

Experience the full arc of founding, growing, and exiting a business in a dynamic, choice-driven simulation. Students step into the role of founder and make recurring decisions across funding, hiring, marketing, operations, compliance, and strategy, while responding to shifting stakeholder expectations and real-world shocks such as recessions, supply-chain disruption, regulatory scrutiny, and rapid technological change. The simulation unfolds across clearly signposted phases—from scrappy start-up to scalable operation and, if the strategy supports it, a public listing—with a live dashboard for cash position, revenue trajectory, workforce size, reputation, staff happiness, legal exposure, ownership share, and stakeholder trust. Each cycle surfaces trade-offs, reveals second-order effects, and rewards thoughtful risk management.

Learners begin by choosing an industry, articulating a mission, and setting an initial capital structure that matches their appetite for control and liability. From there, they explore different routes to finance—bank lending, new partners, community crowdfunding, or external investment—and evolve their ownership structure to balance protection with ambition. As the months roll on, they make calls on recruitment, equipment and technology, pricing and promotion, quality assurance, governance, and market expansion. The simulation reacts to these choices with clear feedback on the dashboard and with in-world responses from customers, employees, investors, regulators, and suppliers. Scheduled scenarios such as compliance audits, product recalls, and intellectual property disputes test ethical judgment and long-term thinking, while unplanned shocks demand calm crisis leadership and practical contingency planning. A concluding debrief summarises financial health, growth momentum, reputation, people outcomes, and the final ownership structure, inviting learners to justify their choices and propose improvements.

By the end, learners can explain and justify the strengths and weaknesses of different forms of business ownership, showing how structures evolve as firms scale and as risk, control, and funding needs shift. They can manage stakeholder trade-offs under time and budget pressure, defending decisions with reference to likely consequences for customers, employees, investors, and regulators. They can trace cause-and-effect in strategy, linking choices in financing, hiring, technology, pricing, and compliance to observable changes in cashflow, reputation, staff morale, legal exposure, and competitive position. They can apply entrepreneurial thinking by weighing opportunity cost and optionality, adapting strategy as new information arrives, and reflecting on how priorities change from early survival to disciplined growth and potential exit. They also strengthen data-informed decision-making by interpreting the dashboard, spotting patterns, and forecasting plausible next steps.

Now includes an updated and alternative version