4 Discussion Forum Posts. Each should be 250 words. Include reference for any sources used. Please use in-text citations at the end of sentence. Example: Mulberry states that cars are fast (Mulberry, 2009).
Discussion Forum Post 1:
As a small business owner, the buck stops with you on what price to charge for your products, what inventory levels to carry, how much of a product to order, what products to carry, and a thousand other decisions. If you are manufacturing a product, you have to consider various vendors and take into consideration the quality of the different components they supply.
What types of analysis can be done to help with some of these decisions? For example, economic order quantity (EOQ) is one way to determine the optimal quanitty to order for each product in order to minimize ordering and holding costs.
Discuss three other types of analysis a small business owner do that can help with decision making on the operations side?
Discussion Forum Post 2:
How do you figure out who your customer is and key characteristics about where your customer lives? Explore your data options in the library this week to come up with a customer profile for the business you may be proposing, or an imaginary business.
For example, ladies, you may have considered working with one of the personal selling businesses like Thirty-OneTM, but before you sign on for anything, you should do some market analysis in your area to look for some key elements of the target population:
1. How many females are in your area in the target demographic?
2. How many potential consumers, male and female, are in the geographic area?
3. What is the disposable income on average in your target market?
4. What tie in activities are available in your market that could help you sell (sporting events, flea markets, convention centers, etc)
Help your classmates to explore their ideas. Be sure to indicate if your idea is REAL or FAKE...if you are exploring a real idea, we will attempt to help you flesh out your thought process.
Discussion Forum Post 3:
As a manager, it is going to be important for you to gain an understanding of your employees and more specifically, what motivates each of them to be successful. Money is very rarely the answer as you learned in the reading this week, " Why Cash Doesn't Motivate," by Freifeld.
Do some additional research on employee motivation and come up with your own motivational theory based on what you learn from the theorist that have come before you. How will you motivate your employees? What levels will your model consist of? What will your model be based upon (age, income, seniority, etc).
Be sure to provide a solid defense for your thought process, and critique the processes of your classmates. It is better to learn here before learning crucial lessons in the "live" classroom that end of costing you money.
Discussion Forum Post 4:
Using what you know from past performance, you can predict what will happen in the future if you know how to conduct analysis on your various financial statements. One of the predictive analysis small business owners should know how to do is pro forma statements. What are pro forma statements, how do you derive them, and why are they of benefit to you?
What other types of analyses are crucial to the success of a small business owner and why?