Small Business (Part 2) - Contracts and Industry

Last time I talked about the "job hour" being the core of the small business system. Contracts are an extension to this system that can amplify your profits or losses.

Let's look at opening a flower shop as an example. When working a flower shop's regular job hours, the income you generate is largely determined by how the retail industry is doing (since people are more likely to buy flowers while they're out shopping for other things).

A flower shop can also accept a contract to supply corporate offices, where your business agrees to supply a corporation with flower bouquets for a fixed number of months in return for a fixed payout. The payout of these contracts is naturally impacted by how well the professional services industry is doing.

This agreement is simulated via adding job hours to be completed each month.  As you work those job hours, they count towards fulfilling your duties of the contract. 

This means if retail is in a downturn but professional services is booming, you can still make ends meet by taking on more corporate contracts and perhaps even closing your shop to regular sales.

For multi-year contracts, you should also look at where inflation is headed before deciding whether to accept the contract. If we consider a worst-case scenario, imagine agricultural inflation is rising so your cost of flowers is rising rapidly.

The retail industry is also booming, so the cost of hiring florist employees is also rising.

The problem is that once you've accepted a contract, your payout remains the same! In this scenario you might end up losing money if the trend of increasing expenses continues and you didn't account for it.

Of course the opposite could happen where your expenses decrease over time but you locked in a contract while the payout was high, in which case you'll be swimming in profits.

This is probably the most complex system so far in This Grand Life 2. There's a few things to think about when trying to eke out a profit from the contracts system and I'll be making tweaks during development to try make it as easy to understand as possible.

As a final note, I've been focused on getting a demo and new trailer ready before the end of the year so look out for that coming soon.