Tutorial : How to start a profitable business - Part 5

Day 811, 03:28 • Published in Indonesia United Kingdom • by Apotygma


Nowadays, everyone in eRepublik wants to start a company. Starting a company is the first step towards the wealth. It is also part of one of the main elements in eRepublik : economy. A lot of people seem to forget that eRepublik isn’t only about war, especially with the WW4 taking place right now, but also about economy. Every single product on the market is produced by a company owned by a player or by the state, even this last one can be considered as a player.

During the next couple of days, I’ll be presenting you how to run a successful company through different part of my (extensive) tutorial. Today, I’ll publish my second part : the financing of your company. If you didn’t read the first part, read it. You will find it here :

- PART 1 : The organization
*In english (published in UK)
*In Portuguese (published in Brazil and Portugal)
* Turkish (on his way)

- PART 2 : The financing
-In English (published in the USA)
-portuguese (Published in Portugal)

- PART 3 : The projections
-In English (published in Canada)

- PART 4 : The company
-In English (published in Australia)

If you want to translate this tutorial in another language, please PM me.


Part 5 : Starting up the company

Today, great day, if you followed the tutorial since the beginning you should now have your very own company with enough money to start things up. That’s what we are going to do today : start your company while giving you instructions to be certain that you don’t make mistakes or lose too much money while doing it.

1 – Your Employees



This will be the biggest cost post the first couple of days, being able to have 10 employees as soon as possible is our target today. To explain quickly, why do you lose money the first few days?

It is very easy to understand and you will be unable to prevent it most of the time. Usually when you put job offers on the market, they will get filled pretty quickly. But, new employees have the tendency to work directly after they took the job. This has as consequence that you first employee will work in a company with only 1 employee, the second in a company with 2 employees, etc.. This is very important because the productivity of employees is directly affected by the amount of workers in your company.

Let’s take the usual example : Skill 5 worker, 90 wellness, in a Q1 manufacturing company. Depending on the number of employees you have, the productivity of your employee will be :

- 1 employee : 23.1
- 2 employees : 25.2
- 3 employees : 27.3
- 4 employees : 29.4
- 5 employees : 31.5
- 6 employees : 33.6
- 7 employees : 35.7
- 8 employees : 37.8
- 9 employees : 39.9
- 10 employees : 42

As you can see, your employee will produce nearly twice as much if he is working at the ideal amount of workers for your company. Knowing this is essential (it is also written on your company presentation page) :

- Construction : 20 employees
- Manufacturing and land : 10 employees

So, having this number of employees at all times is very important and shouldn’t be a problem if you follow exactly the tutorial.

2 – General tips



A - The wages to set on the Job Market

If you followed part 3 of the tutorial you normally calculated the wages you can set if you don’t want to lose money. This will be the first thing we are going to use. The easiest tool to recruit employees is through the” Job Market”, people usually take the job with the highest possible wage. The first rule is thereby very easy when you are starting up : “Always make sure that your offer is the highest on the market”.

This way you will be sure that everyone that is looking for a company will join yours. Why is the maximum wage important? It’s important because you will know what is the maximum wage you can set. If you know that at a certain skill you will lose money, you will have to think twice before you decide to put an offer at that skill. I’m going to explain to you :

When you are starting up, the most important thing is to get 10 employees as fast as possible. You don’t really have to care about if you are earning money yes or not. “Wait, you said the opposite 2 lines before” : I know. The most important thing is that you get 10 employees as fast as possible, after that you can start to fire and hire people in order to get as good and profitable employees as possible.

So, first thing you do when you start up is set the highest wage in every skill, BUT don’t lose too much money ! Take a look at your calculations and add 10% to each wage, if the market offer is really too high, don’t propose : not worth it. The best you can do is always target low skills : 0 – 1 – 2 – 3 and 4 when you start up. Those skills have the most people playing and will get filled the quickest, thereby, they are cheaper than any other skill.

So try to fill as quickly as possible.

B – The national forum



Don’t be afraid to ask on your national forum or to your friends if they want to work for you. A lot will accept because they will know there employer, nothing more frustrating than people you don’t know above you. People that never PM you, help you or care about you.

Furthermore, on the national forum you will probably find people that are active ingame and that want will work every single day. Those are very interesting because an employee that doesn’t work will not earn you money (neither cost).

C – The skill-level to target



Now let’s presume you managed to fill your whole company with 10 employees. Some of them are “crap” like we call them : people with low wellness (under 40) or costing you a lot of money. Now you will be able to start hiring and firing people.

First thing to do, check if at high skill there are job offers for people with high skill. Most of the time you will see that there are none for low quality companies. This is a big mistake ! A lot of people think that high skilled people only work in high quality companies (3-4-5) this is NOT THE CASE. A lot prefer to work in a Q1, why? I don’t know, but some do. If you manage to hire one or two of those you will earn big bucks with them. Still, be aware that due to their high skill they will produce a lot and that you need to have the market to sell everything that they produce. If you know or see that the market is quite slow, don’t hire directly high skilled : you will probably not be able to sell everything they produce and you will lose money.

Now you can also start to hire good people, people with high wellness and that are working every day. You see that an employee didn’t work for 3 days last week in your company : ask him why and if it continues fire him. You see that an employee always works at low wellness : help him out, if he doesn’t answer fire him. For this always look at the productivity ! Not the final wellness, why?

This is very easy, most of you probably don’t know it but you gain more wellness from a Q1 bread when you are wellness 50 then if you are wellness 90. What a lot of people do is end their day at wellness 50, and the next day fight once => heal to 100 wellness => work/train => Fight 4 times back to 60 wellness. This is the easiest way for them to always work at 100 wellness !

So how can you check it compared to the productivity? Easy, take this calculator : http://erepublik.kazequotes.com/index.php, enter all the parameters and make the wellness change until you have something need the productivity that you can find in the “Employee page” of your company.

Last point, why do I always say : PM first? This has everything to do with management of employees which is my following topic.

D – Update the wages



It is very important to have a good relation with your employees. How better your relation, how more your employees will be ready to do for you. If you take the time to build up a relation with them, if you are going through rough times, you will be able to cut their wages without them leaving. This can be done through several ways.

The first one is update the wages regularly. This will make your employees feel important and probably also a little overpaid compared to the market price. A lot of people don’t do this because they only think in the short run. As I demonstrated in part 2, it can be very interesting to survive a period of low prices and losses because after this you can earn a lot of money.

One of the ways to survive this is by lowering the costs : your wages. If you slightly overpaid your employees and made their wages evolve through time you will be able to lower their wages or change to a donation system (more on this later).

So : regularly update your employees wages. A good system is every time there skill raises by 0.33 or 0.5, most of them will ask for it anyway, but if you are doing it in advance you will look better than if they have to ask you. So if an employee reaches one of this “limits” raise his wage a little, not too much. 5% is far enough most of the time.

E – Stay in touch with your employees !



The second way to achieve a good relation with your employees is to stay in touch with them, PM them when they join the company is the first step. Most of them will be glad you did that because they know they can talk to you if needed.

If you start a low quality company (1 or 2) you will probably also hire skill 0 and skill 1 people. Most of them don’t know the game very well and you will see their wellness drop day after day. It can be very interesting to PM them and help them out, such people you “trained” will be grateful for that. They will be ready to help you out if you need it !

It is not that hard, just PM them if you see they work at low wellness with a standard message like

“Hey,

I saw that you where working at low wellness the last couple of days. I am currently losing money with you, but I am ready to help you out if you need help to raise you wellness. PM me if you want more information, but if you don’t keep it high I’ll be forced to fire you.

Greeting

The manager”

It is a very easy message, but most of them will react on it. Be aware that under level 5 people cannot fight to keep their wellness high, in such case you can still PM in order to help them keep their wellness above 45-50. Inform them about higher quality bread, gifts (offer them to gifts them if they donate you the gifts !), etc.. Once they reach level 5 tell them how to fight !! Just a link towards a tutorial is enough most of the time.

If you do this, there wellness will be higher most of the time and you will earn more money !

About the number of days they work, inform them about the hard workers medal. This might motivate them. I had the case of someone with familial problems, his father just died and he couldn’t log on for a couple of days. I assured him that I would keep him and did so until he came back. This person has been a good employee since that never left my companies whatever wage I paid him. Those employees are nearly priceless !

Of course, if they don’t react and their wellness keeps dropping, don’t be afraid to fire them You did your job : offer them help. If they don’t react… If you have to fire them, put some job offers on the market first and fire the person as soon as you get a better employee. The best is to wait until they join the company, otherwise the person might just join again to annoy you and the other people will be able to work at “full capacity”.

2 – The raws

Most of you now know that you have to buy raws and most of you also know how much. But not of you know how. This part is really easy for all of them that already did it once, so they can skip it and wait for the next part. Others, just read this.

If you are planning or opened a RAW company, you can skip to §3.

A – The market

The easiest way you have to buy raws is through your local market. Even if you are in a country with no high resource region, some people might export raws towards your country and you will be able to buy them directly from your company page. Be aware that this is a little more expensive than the method explained in B, especially in small countries !



So go to your company page and go to “Buy Raw materials”. This will lead you to the market place, I used firefox and the script “eRepublik Plus” in this screenshot. This is a very useful and legal script as it will allow you to see what is the cheapest RAW.



Next to the quantity, you have the price in gold (in green the price per Q1) and next to it the price in the local currency. If you want to buy local, buy the one that costs the less per Q1 ! If you can’t use Firefox with eRepublik Plus, look at this page on eRepTools (http://ereptools.net/market/raw) and chose the one with the lowest price per Q1 in your country (watch out because you will have to look to the good Quality material).

Here make sure that you are buying with your company account ! (next to the amount of the currency you have).

B – Donation

As already said earlier, in Part 1, it is cheaper to have an org stationed in a country with a very low price per Q1. Most of the time it will be a lot cheaper at the end. The procedure to buy raws is a little more complicated.

Go to the marketplace of the country where your org is settled and look at the offer with the lowest price per Q1 and buy it with your ORG account. You will see that you will only be able to buy 20 (if you have nothing in your org). This means that you might have to do this procedure several times before you manage to fill your company with raws for a couple of days.

Ok, now since you have brought 20 raws go to your company page but clic on “Donate raws” this time. Donate all the raws and start again until you have enough raws in your company !

3 – The wages



We already talked about how to convert your gold in the local currency in PART 4, so I invite you to look at it if you are wondering how you have to insert enough money to pay the salaries !

This is of course if you pay your employees through the classic way to pay wages. What people often don’t think about is that there is a second way to pay wages to your employee, that is more profitable for both of you : donation.

When an employee works for (ex.) 25 GBP per day in your company in eUK, he will in fact only receive 17.5 GBP as he will have to pay 7.5 GBP in Income Tax (this can be checked in your country page here : http://www.erepublik.com/en/country/economy/United-Kingdom). You wages is thereby lower than what you actually see on your company page. Company owners kind of “lose” money with this.

With good employees you can try and cut a deal to both earn more money. For example :

- You set the wage of the employee the lowest possible (1GBP) and gift him every day a certain amount more. Let’s say 19.3 GBP, which gives him a salary of 20 GBP all taxes included. He will earn 2.5GBP more than before
- You will only need to pay 20 GBP per day and your profit will rise by 5 GBP per day for this employee alone !

Governments don’t like this way as they lose a huge amount of income and I don’t really think this is a good idea in War Time, but as I want my tutorial to be complete I mentioned it (I’ll also explain how to prevent the taxes on “Collect” later on !)

I warn you that this is a very risky business because you have to log on every single day to pay the wages of your employees. 1 day delay me accepted by them but most of them will not allow this way of payment, most don’t even realize that they pay taxes when they work in eRepublik !.

4 - Varia

And of course the varia part, as a lot of people seem to like it.