Blog Schedule and TechMark

Today was the last day of our team-based business management simulation, entitled “TechMark”.  If you’d like to read more about my experience, I write about it in more detail after the jump.

My week aside, I’m going to be making an effort to add posts for art business on a weekly or biweekly basis as the semester gets underway, as I know my time will be limited.  If you have specific questions, please let me know and I’ll work them into a post.  Coming up… tax reporting for the freelancer on your Schedule C.

TechMark

The idea, in general, was that we were in the technology industry producing goods (3 products, one of which was non-branded) in competition with 4 other companies in the exact same market.  We had 3 countries in which we could sell our goods, and we had to meet certain parameters by the end of our 5th quarter.  We had to have less than 25% debt to asset ratio, between 4% and 9% inventory to asset ratio, an average return on investment of over 7%, and an average return on equity of more than 8%.  Our decisions for each quarter had to be made in usually 90 minutes.  (Yeah, 1 minute real-time = 1 day sim-time.)

In spite of a first quarter in the red, my company pulled ahead strongly by our third quarter and profited over 74 million dollars by the end of the simulation, with no debt left at all after buying $5 mill worth of shares back.  Our ROE was at 27%.  Now THAT’s a company I’d like in my portfolio.  We  were the second most profitable team as a whole, and we would have won the grand prize of tickets to an entrepreneurship forum if we hadn’t oversold.  In an unexpected turn, we sold much more inventory than we had expected, and were hedged out by just two percentage points in the inventory to asset ratio.  It was extremely surprising to us, since in previous quarters we had sold almost nothing in that same market, and as a precautionary measure, we had more than doubled our price to discourage sales.  We couldn’t have known that no one else bothered to produce in the final quarter, driving our sales up artificially.

It was a fantastic experience.  My group consisted of 7 people in total, all very different in personality type and in work background.  We each fit different roles and managed to have productive and respectful conflict that made for a stellar team.  Conflict is not a bad thing when it’s managed well- in fact it makes you better for your differences.

The takeaways from the simulation are numerous.  It is designed as a learning tool in addition to a team building exercise.  I was very excited to be on a team that performed so well, and felt like my role as a focuser and a time manager was productive and useful.

TechMark was great (we even got T-shirts) but I’m ready for classes to start.  I’m big on immersion when it comes to learning, so the more information saturated I can get, the faster I will absorb.