Those in college’s first class to graduate with bachelor’s degrees score in top 100 in world
Corey Milar and his business partners decided to take a big risk with their athletic shoe business.
They sold all their plants and moved production to the Asia-Pacific region to take advantage of cheaper labor and higher efficiency. The risk paid off in the long run, leading their company to be ranked the 64th top company worldwide.
“We changed our strategy every year,” Milar said. “We have tried to forecast what other companies were going to do in the next year and differentiate from other companies.”
However, this wasn’t a real company. Instead of making the decision from an office in a big city, Milar and his teammates Kyle Bata and Kerry Lofy worked on their strategy from a classroom at Colorado Mountain College in Steamboat Springs.
The scenarios are part of The Business Strategy Game (BSG), a worldwide competition played through an online tool. The outcomes are based on specific decisions and strategies of teams, called companies, each running an athletic shoe business.
The game is part of the curriculum for the Business Strategy class, a capstone class that all CMC business students in the bachelor’s degree programs at Leadville, Steamboat Springs, Spring Valley (near Glenwood Springs) and Breckenridge/Dillon take their senior year.
“It works well with our strategy class,” said Fred Hampel, associate professor of business at the campus in Steamboat Springs. “They have to make decisions under the gun with consequences.”
“It pulls together all of the functions they have learned in independent courses,” said Susanna Spaulding, associate professor of entrepreneurship at Colorado Mountain College in Leadville. “Business decisions are complex and interconnected.”
Leadville, Steamboat teams rank in top 100 in country
Colleges with business programs, both undergraduate and graduate, participate in the game. Rankings are released every week after teams make key decisions for their businesses. Julie Gonzales’ team from Leadville, which tied for the 15th best overall score in the world for the week ended April 28, has been the highest-placing team at CMC. The college’s teams in Leadville and Steamboat Springs have consistently reached the top 100, among 4,776 teams participating from 302 colleges and universities worldwide.
Every week is counted as a year for the simulation game and the game lasts 10 weeks, or in the simulation, 10 years. Teams decide how many shoes they want to produce, where they want them made, at what price and at what quality. Students also make decisions on key strategies such as branding, corporate/social responsibility and celebrity endorsements.
But there are also factors that the teams can’t control, including the market each year and what the other competing teams do.
“There’s no magic bullet,” Hampel said. “It depends on what the rivals do.”
The teams are ranked against each other on 11 competitive factors that determine unit sales and market share, including price comparison, advertising efforts and footwear styling/quality.
“The best students in each of these scenarios had to try to find that point where cost exceeds the gains from productivity,” Hampel said.
Milar, who will be graduating in the spring, wants to someday own his own business. He said he found the BSG simulation gave him valuable insight and put together everything he’s learned while earning a bachelor’s degree.
“We followed the book and used strategies we’ve learned in class and that helped us get to the top,” Milar said.
By Stefanie Kilts