A collection of questions and answers for GoVenture Small Business
Answers provided by MediaSpark/GoVenture
NOTE: The answers below were compiled specifically for theGoVenture Small Businesssimulation. These answers may or may not apply to other GoVenture simulations.
Business Advice
Review the advice provided in the blue ADVISOR window and review the SUCCESS GUIDE.
The Success Guide is a brief document that provides suggestions on how to solve specific business problems and how to improve business results. Refer to this document frequently for guidance. The Success Guide is available in the left menu after you login to GoVenture Online. If you are not using GoVenture Online, ask your instructor for a copy of this document, or find it on
Pausing the simulation
The simulation does pause on several screens, including Home, Setup, Performance, Time, and Help. The clock can also be slowed down by clicking the TIME button.
Preparing the business BEFORE customers arrive
When starting a new simulation, the clock remains paused to allow you become comfortable with the interface. When you click the banner labelled CLICK HERE WHEN YOU ARE READY TO START, the clock starts at Monday 9AM. By default, your business is scheduled to open to customers at 9AM (unless you choose a QuickStart, which may begin at a different time). This does not provide you any time to order and receive inventory or do other preparations before customers arrive. To give yourself more time before customers arrive, change the OPERATING HOURS to a day and time in the future. Do this BEFORE you click the banner labelledCLICK HERE WHEN YOU ARE READY TO START. You will now be able to manage your business without being open to customers. Keep in mind that changing your Operating Hours will affect your schedule in future days as well, so you may want to change it back later (for example, if you set Monday as closed, all Mondays from that point forward will be closed, unless you go back and change it again).
Customer Feedback and Analysis
In the real world, customers rarely give you direct and honest feedback. GoVenture does provide some customer feedback (all honest), but it is up to you to frequently monitor and analyze this feedback. Watch customer comments as they appear on the MANAGEMENT screen and in the top activity window. Analyze the information provided on the CUSTOMERS screen. There you can see historical customer comments and customer satisfaction, number of customers arrived, served, and lost, and customers lost because of store capacity, equipment capacity, employee service, and lack of inventory.
Financial Analysis
GoVenture provides a significant amount of data to help you analyze your business. Your analysis can be extended by exporting the financial report data to a CSV file format, which you can then import into a spreadsheet application to add formulas, conduct comparisons, and generate charts and graphs.
Weather and Calendar
GoVenture uses days of the week, but not months or seasons. As a result, the weather will vary day to day. The key learning objective with the weather feature is to allow players to understand the effect that weather has on a business. Adding months and seasons would add more complexity to the simulation, with minimal added learning value.
Stress
Stress builds as you work more than 40 hours each week, and as stressful events occur (employee problems, financial problems, etc.). Stress can be reduced by taking time off, and running the business successfully. Just like in the real world, stress reduction does not happen instantly. You may have to do stress-reducing activities for many days or weeks before you will see stress begin to reduce.
Hire an accountant
You cannot hire an accountant to do your bookkeeping. Most small businesses cannot afford to hire an accountant to do their bookkeeping. But, they will often hire an accountant to help with specific financial issues, advice, and tax filing. GoVenture requires you to do some, but not all of the bookkeeping necessary to operate a small business. Most of the tasks are automated, including the most time-consuming activities, such as inputting receipts, receivables, and other double-entry postings, as well as generating financial statements. This allows you to focus on operating the business. The specific accounting activities required in GoVenture, such as payroll anddeterminingwhen and how much to pay on each bill, are an important part of learning how to operate a business and demonstrating sound financial practices.
Running a business becomes repetitive
If you run a business for hundreds of virtual days, you may find that some of the activities needed to manage the business will become somewhat repetitive. Players that establish best practices sooner rather than later will find themselves repeating those practices. This is common to mostsuccessfulbusinesses in the real world as well.
Repetition is actually a good thing for two reasons: First, it helps you memorize and internalize the best practices - this is important to the learning process; and, second, it frees your mind to think about how you may be able to apply what you have learned to other activities. If you were to be constantly faced with new, never-ending challenges, your mind would not have the opportunity to pause and reflect on what you have learned, and be better prepared for how to apply what you have learned in the future.
It is important to note, however, that even though you may be consistently profitable by repeating your self-discovered best practices, it may not necessarily mean that you have mastered the business. It may be that there are more profits to be made, or more metrics that can be improved.
Instructors who may wish to avoid the possibility ofrepetitionaltogether may want to consider having students play multiple shorter simulations instead of one very long simulation. This is actually the recommended approach for maximum learning effectiveness. See the Instructor Guide for details.
Expand the business
GoVenture is designed to provide a specific type of small business experience within a certain time frame. Features to expand to more locations, interact more deeply with employees or marketing initiatives, use of 3D-immersive environments, etc. have not been included because they would make the experience too complex and time consuming for mosteducationalenvironments. Instead of having one business simulation with every feature, GoVenture is a series of simulations, with each product providing a different level of learning experience. Please review our many other products for additional experiences.
Results are too realistic or too unrealistic
GoVenture is built using realistic economic data, variables, and relationships. Player decisions and artificial intelligence algorithms drive the results of the simulation. As realistic as GoVenture is designed to be, it is important to note that GoVenture is specifically designed to be a highly-effective learning experience. It may provide insight into how the real world works, but it is not designed to be a tool to forecast real world results.
In order to meet theprimary objective of being a learning product, many of the consequences and results are accelerated and exaggerated from what they may be in the real world. For example, you would not want to wait 6 months before an employee issue were to arise, or wait 2 years before an unexpected event, such as malfunctioning equipment,were to occur. Experiences need to be generated within a reasonable time frame. And, when they are, their consequences need to be identifiable so that you can see and act on them. In the real world of business, many consequences are difficult to discover, particularly if you are new to learning about business. As a result, gaining valuable learning experiences can take years of effort, much risk, and with no certainty that the conclusions you may be making are correct. GoVenture strategicallyaccelerates, exaggerates, and highlights results to make learning as fast and effective as possible, while still maintaining a high level of realism.
Text is too small
Some computers have very high resolutions with small displays making text smaller and harder to read. If this is the case with your computer, lower the resolution of the display setting while playing GoVenture.
Technical Problems
If technical problems arise, please submit the help form at The solution might be simple.
The answers above were compiled specifically for the GoVenture Small Business simulation. The answers may or may not apply to other GoVenture simulations.