Running a business in Britain, page 8
246 articles on what it actually takes to run a business in Britain: VAT, staff, rent, rates, tenants, stock and sites. From the studio that simulates it.
- Tendering, and the job you win by pricing it wrong. You priced it at £184,000. It went for £161,000. You were both looking at the same drawings, which means one of you priced something that is not there.
- Retention, stage payments and the cash you have earned but not got. Practical completion was eighteen months ago and £4,200 of your money is still in somebody else's account. Nobody is being difficult. That is just how it works.
- The Construction Industry Scheme, in plain terms. Your first CIS statement arrives and £1,100 of what you invoiced went somewhere before it reached you. It is not lost. Knowing where it went is the whole scheme.
- Employment status on site, and who decides it. He has been on your books for three years, drives your van, works the hours you set and invoices weekly through a limited company. Somebody has decided he is self-employed.
- Fixed price, moving costs. You quoted timber in February and bought it in June. The difference between the two prices was your margin, and the contract said fixed price.
- The programme, the critical path and the six weeks of rain. Rain delayed the groundworks by six weeks. Whether that costs you money, costs the client money, or costs nobody anything depends entirely on where it sat on the programme.
- Snagging, practical completion and the defects year. Practical completion is not the day the job is finished. It is a legal switch that moves insurance, releases half your retention and starts a twelve-month clock you cannot ignore.
- Hire it or buy it. A three-tonne excavator at £180 a week hired, or £34,000 bought. The answer is not about the prices. It is about how many weeks a year the thing is actually in the ground.
- When the HSE visits a site. An inspector arrives unannounced at nine on a Tuesday. What happens over the next two hours depends almost entirely on decisions you made months earlier about scaffolding and paperwork.
- Why main contractors go under at the top of a boom. Contractors rarely fail in a recession. They fail eighteen months into a boom, with a full order book, because turnover was bought at a margin that could not survive one bad job.
- Finding a bricklayer. You need two bricklayers for six weeks starting Monday. There are none at the rate you priced, and the four weeks you lose finding them cost more than paying over the odds would have.
- Design and build, and who carries the drawing that is wrong. The architect's drawing was wrong. Under a traditional contract that is a variation and the client pays. Under design and build it is your problem, and you signed for it at tender.
- How we build Business Baron. A deterministic Rust engine, a tax code taken from real legislation, and a hundred and sixteen invented businesses. Here is how the simulation is actually assembled, and what we cut.
- The same seed gives the same game, every time. A player sent us a save and a seed. We ran it, watched the same haulage firm fail at the same month for the same reason, and fixed it that afternoon. That is what determinism buys.
- The research behind a business you can lose. Getting the 1979 VAT rate right is easy. Deciding what a village pub took on a wet Tuesday in 1984 is the actual work, and it is where we are honest about guessing.
- One game, one Britain. There is one game, and there will not be others. What is free, what £19.99 adds, what the four tracks are, and where the other five ideas went.
- Free to play, and not a demo. The free version of Business Baron is the real game with five business types and no clock. Paying opens more businesses. It does not change the simulation.
- Playing through a century of British economy. Decimalisation, the three-day week, Big Bang, Black Wednesday, 2008. Nearly a century of British economy, described from the point of view of somebody trying to pay their suppliers.