Original Message
My PC and I have this dream of building Mizahar's first department store out of Red Diamond Fashions. To explain my PC's rationale - when someone wants something beautiful, be it clothing, jewelry, or throw pillows, she wants them to come to her. However, I'm struggling with the details of how it would actually work. There seem to be two main problems:
- A single PC cannot logically create and maintain an inventory of more than a few types of items
- Employees are a loss-only asset, requiring payment but returning no increase in profits
The combination of these two issues is the result that there way to expand a business beyond what a PC can physically make with their own hands unless their profession is a high-enough paying one to support the loss of paying multiple employees. |
If you are reading this, I'd like to think you are open to the option of developing a way out of this issue.
Say my PC already has her 3 business skills maxed out (Sewing, Fashion Design, and Philtering), but she also wants to add shoes to her brand. Even if she learned cobbling, there's not logically enough time in the day for her to maintain the other sections of her business and still be able to make enough shoes to sell. In the real world, department stores buy from outside brands and mark them up to make a profit. Due to huge inter-city travel times though, any outside businesses she could buy from would have to also be in the city, making even the idea of markups silly – no one would buy it from her when they could just go up the street. This only leaves the option of hiring someone to make them in-house which, as I mention above, would currently provide no profit.
The issue gets more complicated when a PC is hired instead of an NPC. When I
added a PC business to the RDF brand as a solution to the above problem #1, I wanted that PC as a partner instead of an employee. This was partially because of the above problem #2, but mostly because I wanted the PC to be able to increase her skills and profits as much as she wanted without being limited by what Rosela herself made. While at L1, an employee is completely affordable, but if she grew to L3-4, with a base pay the same as Rosela's herself, almost all of Rosela's own pay would go to paying her employee. With NPCs, paying a higher level employee is no longer a problem as their skills obviously do not increase.
So, I've laid out the issue, but haven't provided any possible solution.The option to start allowing employees to provide profit increases to the business owner seems to me the most straight-forward, though there are a lot of secondary questions that need answered along with it:
How much should employees increase profits: slightly less than their own pay, or slightly more than it? This is a very fundamental question that I admittedly missed on my first draft of this writeup. It's extremely difficult to answer, as it depends on how you, the creator of this system, feel about it. I feel both options have solid arguments for and against.
Having benefits slightly less than the employee's pay provides a check on the system so an owner can't basically hire someone for free, but it doesn't solve the issue of employees being a loss-only asset, it just makes them less of a loss.
Having benefits pay slightly more than the employee's salary allows basically the reverse of the above: it makes employees a real asset to the business, but it does mean an owner is, when looking at the bottom line, hiring someone for free while gaining a (for example) 5% increase in profits.
Of the two options above, I feel the latter is closer to the reality of a business hiring employees. However, because this is Mizahar, a series of very quantifiable checks and balances should be implemented to keep people from abusing the system. I address my ideas for these checks below.
How to keep PCs from abusing the system, such as hiring a dozen 1gm laborers to inflate profits for a business that doesn’t need that many people? I have a couple different ideas for this, and the solution could be from a combination of any of them:
- Profit increases for any employees come 1 season after they are hired, negating any get-rich-quick benefits. This also makes sure only people who can already afford the base pay of an NPC can hire one, usually meaning they have to be at L2 or 3, depending on the trade. A variation of this would be that 50% of the total profit increase kicks in 1 season after hiring, and the other 50% is added yet another season later. If implemented, this should likely be attached to the actual date of hire, to prevent hiring sprees at the end of the season.
- After a certain number of employees, non-benefit supplementary NPCs must be hired, such as an accountant or project manager. This will offset the monetary gain of hiring more than a couple people.
- New businesses may not start with any workers who provide new types of inventory (I call them 'class 4' type, see below for ideas on classes of employees), and cannot hire any until after a certain number of seasons of their business being active.
- When hiring class 2-4 workers, the facility for them to work in must already be built and the owner must already have a certain level in the relevant skill. The IC reason for this could be that a manager must be skilled enough to provide quality checks on the work that is sold under their name.
- To make class 4 workers even more difficult to attain, a business may not hire them until a certain number their primary business skills have been maxed.
Should all employees increase profits the same? I believe employees should fall into one of four classes, depending on their role:
- Desk clerks and the like provide no benefit, as they increase neither profits nor sales.
- Skilled support staff, such as in-house people who create raw materials for inventory (agriculturists for a philtering shop, weavers for a clothing shop) provide minimal benefit, as their work would increase profits, but only indirectly. This could work in conjunction with or on top of the existing Creativity bonus that accounts for creating one’s own raw materials.
- Skilled workers who increase the inventory of currently sold items provide a minimal-modest increase as higher production can create a wider variety of items which can increase sales.
- Skilled workers who create new types of inventory provide a modest increase as the much wider variety of items would increase sales.
How to manage the benefits of workers who only work part-time? I had originally worked out an extremely complex system of dividing percentages based on the above class system, but to take Jen’s philosophy and KISS, the simple route would be to multiply the benefit percentage by the percent of days they worked that season. For example:
Bob provides a 5% profit benefit to the business. He worked 50 days this season, meaning 54%, so 5% multiplied by 54% would be 2.7%. Therefore, Bob provided a 2.7% profit benefit to that season’s profits.
I believe that rounds out my proposed addition to the business system. I realize that there is a very small number of people who are interested in expanding their business to the level that paying employees is a problem. I attempted to get some stats on the number of people who have requested secondary income skills and found...only Kavala, Rosela, and Miro (who's retired anyway). I'd like to think there are more business-minded people out there, but maybe it's just not a big area of interest for people.
This was a lot of fun to write up, so even if you don’t want any of it, I’m glad I got to get in the swing of developing again with something as interesting as this. As always, thank you for your consideration.
by Rosela on September 24th, 2012, 11:53 am 
