We are thrilled to unveil the newest inductees into the MikesBikes Advanced Hall of Fame for the first quarter. These exceptional students have demonstrated remarkable excellence, achieving their positions through unwavering dedication and relentless hard work. From all of us here at Smartsims, we extend our heartfelt congratulations to all the new entrants!

In the Multi-Player Hall of Fame, we have four new entrants.

We have two teams from Keyano College – in 6th Place we have Akira Inc lead by Christer Carlo Camacho, Francis Miguel De Leon Dela Cruz and Justine Nicolle Lim. In 17th Place we have Charveca Bikes with Charisma Timbreza Anquillano, Heaven Lara Manahan and Danica Babor Manzanilla.

We have two teams from Slippery Rock University – in 12th Place we have RCB Inc. with Christian Aloi, Ruth Bergquist and Brendan King. In 13th Place we have MK Cycling lead by Logan Keast, Jeffrey Keiter, Angelina Marsh and Evey Mertens.

In the Single-Player Hall of Fame, we have seven new entrants.

From Webber International University, we have Douglas MacCraw in 5th Place, Allen Noah Michael in 7th Place and Jason Robert Robinson in 12 Place. From Algonquin College we have Matthew Thomas in 9th Place and Jesse Piggott in 15th Place. In 10th Place we have Deepak Kumar Angurala from Selkirk College. From Keyano College we have Francis Miguel De Leon Dela Cruz in 14th Place.

These students serve as living proof that hard word and dedication yield results. They stand as beacons of inspiration for fellow students undertaking the MikesBikes Advanced business simulation.

Get to know the first quarter MikesBikes Advanced Hall of Fame entrants here.

We are thrilled to announce these individuals who have earned a well-deserved place in the MikesBikes Introduction Hall of Fame for the inaugural quarter of 2024. These exceptional students have demonstrated unparalleled skill, strategic acumen, and unwavering dedication in navigating the dynamic world of MikesBikes Introduction to Business simulation.

Sincerest congratulations to the newest members of the MikesBikes Introduction Hall of Fame!

In the Multi-Player Hall of Fame we proudly acknowledge two teams from Drexel University.

We commend KJBM Cycles, led by Ben Bloom, Max Guillot, Karen Lin and Julie Tran securing 11th Place and Vroom Vroom Inc with Jackson Bello, Quinton Brewster, Luca Bruns, Aarva Khanna and Clint Lin in 14th Place.

In the Single-Player Hall of Fame we proudly introduce seven new entrants whose achievements have earned them a well-deserved place in the Hall of Fame.

From University of Adelaide we have Timothy Gibbons in 2nd Place and 3rd Place in the Single-Player All-Time Hall of Fame, Mitchell Love in 8th Place, William Hunt in 11th Place. From High Point University we have Ngoc Minh Thu Bui in 9th Place. From Santa Clara University we have Olivia Chi in 13th Place, Liv de Jounge in 17th Place and David Cheon in 19th Place.

We acknowledge the students’ hard work, planning, and determination that led to this achievement. Their success inspires others, showing how strategic thinking and innovation can lead to excellence.

Explore the newest Hall of Fame entrants here.

In 2023, we celebrated the 15th anniversary of MikesBikes World Champs, and the competition concluded with Steven Szeles and Griffin Wirth of Pikes Bikes from the University of Idaho emerging as the new MikesBikes World Champs Winners!

Steven and Griffin share their MikesBikes journey and advice to future students:

Our decision-making process was not overly complicated, we analyzed the previous years market as well as the reports made available to us. With the information it provided we identified the product(s) with the highest possible profit, then invested our resources in the most efficient way possible to achieve the max profit.

Our strategy going into the simulation was to buy SCU early so that we would be able to produce more bikes in the later years and not be limited by our capacity. Apart from this we tried to find what decisions would yield the most profit rather than the most revenue or market share.

One challenge we faced was adapting to the advanced simulation from the intro simulation. We also faced the challenge of predicting what our opponents would do. With so many options and other competitive teams it was hard to predict what people would do and how we could adapt to their decisions. We tried to be aggressive while still being realistic to ensure we didn’t overextend ourselves.

To help prepare ourselves for the Mikes Bike World Championship we reviewed information made available online regarding the competition. Watching video analysis of previous winners’ decision-making process was integral to the strategy we inevitably employed. We also consulted with our professor to clarify things we didn’t fully understand.

The simulation was a lot of fun. However, with enough time you can break down the simulation and begin to understand how every decision will affect shareholder value. With shareholder value being the only determinate of the winner, it promotes aggressive and unsafe business decisions. Every year you are trying to gain the most shareholder value and thus are not making decisions that would be considered long term. In this way the simulation loses its real life feeling and becomes like a game.

The Mikes Bikes simulation project in our Business 190 class was the highlight of the semester, being the first hands on opportunity we’ve received to apply what we have been able to learn both in class and in the real world, it stood out as an exciting chance to showcase the work we have both put in outside of the classroom.

The number one piece of advice we would give new students would be to put profit first. Many people try and lower price and try and get as much market share and sales as possible. This is flawed as it lowers your profit and profit is the number one driver of shareholder value. Profit will drive your shareholder value, revenue alone will not.

It is a huge milestone for Belmont Abbey College as this is their first time to win the MikesBikes World Champs title! The winning duo from Belmont Abbey College, Jake Rybarski and Timothy Gosnell of Abbey Bikes share their experience and the lessons they have learnt in the World Champs.

What is your decision-making process within the simulation?

Before decisions are made, we like to look at what everyone else is doing and mainly go for sure thing sales as opposed to compete on the advertising and PR, although these are important and maintaining an average rating on them is a must to avoid slipping behind.

For every period we had a general idea of what we wanted certain ratios to be such as the gross margin percent and the operating margin. For every period we looked through essentially every report and collected information to look at trends. After a lot of practice with the simulation in class this semester, you begin to sort of develop a decent intuition about how high some expenses should be. The advertising and PR budgets were prorated based on the viewership for the target audience which is given in the reports. The internet section involves more analysis and that section as it usually sees one of the quicker upticks in the budget and the fastest cutoffs, at least for our decisions which are based on the viewership reach based on spending graph that is given in the reports.

What was your strategy going into the simulation?

Our main strategy was mainly competing on the variables with high sensitivities in their respective industries. For instance, we competed with prices in the kids and commuter bike markets, for adventurers, it was a bit of everything, but mainly price and later in the simulation, product specs, and for racers we tried to ensure product spec accuracy was high and maintain rising quality levels with every rollover. We found both in the qualifying rounds and the final rounds that teams like to charge a little more than us or less, but quickly lower or raise prices to our levels. This resulted in our team gaining more sales after the first rollover than we compete for with advertising and quality. We also watched teams that spent a lot on advertising and PR and focused on gaining more of a market share for our team in these segments in order to make their cost of sales even more detrimental to their bottom line. Usually, this can be done through a simple price adjustment because several segments will respond more acutely to price than an increase in advertising awareness. After this happens, Teams then lower their prices in a sort of panic mode. Though, they keep advertising expenditures high, so their strategy of selling for a higher price but more awareness doesn’t work if you have a team that focuses on these things. We instead maintained our price levels and we observed in every game we played teams would adjust their prices closest to ours and in a sense, we maintained the industry standard. If you can get in the lead, this phenomenon will only become more pronounced as the teams that lag behind will begin to copy the front leader as a strategy to catch up. In the spirit of Napoleon, we did not “interrupt our enemy [competition]” when they were making a mistake by raising our prices in panic mode.

It’s tempting for teams to close the gap between worker SCU and plant SCU early in the simulation to maximize the work gained from a single factory worker. However, A large increase early on makes maintaining quality levels extremely expensive. We observed several teams fall into this in the first rollover by doubling their plant sizes and their quality levels in future rollovers were quick to fall. Our goal then was to slowly increase plant size, and in fact never closed the gap between factory and employee SCU, as this is not actually strictly needed and provides the ability to gain higher quality for less cost. With virtually every team entering every market, the sales one team can gain in an economic way never truly reaches a point where massive amounts of plant size are needed.  

In summary, the strategy was to compete in “high” sensitivity areas so that our firm could go for the “sure thing” sales to better predict outcomes and maintain stricter control over costs.

What challenges did you face? How did you overcome these?

A challenge we had in the qualifying round was buying more plant one the first rollover than we would usually do since we thought this would give us a slight advantage in the subsequent rollover. Instead, it made cost projections more difficult and quality levels suffered as we entered the high margin market of the racer segment. We had good control over the gross margin percentage increases for all the rounds except one, though we quickly adjusted with more careful planning and being more exact in data trends.

Was there anything, in particular, you did that you think helped to prepare yourself?

Practicing in single player, in class this semester, and paying very close attention and maintaining detailed records to identify trends with the closest accuracy possible.

What do you think of the business simulation?

Jake: I really enjoyed the business simulation, and we think the results showed. It was always a fun and competitive challenge which had our team striving to do better every round.

Timothy: really like the simulation because I like constructing models, analyzing data, and making that data tell me something that isn’t explicitly contained within it. The business simulation gives me a lot of data and information to use and makes it so that my work in excel and have actual results that can be tested against the predictions I made.

Comments on your experience in your course simulation and with the MikesBikes World Champs

I really like the business simulation and think it’s a must for any student studying a business related major. It gives you the opportunity to see how well you perform based on how much work you put into it. I think we put a lot of work into winning the World Champs. The mikes bikes champs were also fun, challenging, and just a bit stressful, but only because we really wanted to do well.

Advice to future students

The most important thing is to make sure you read every single report before every round. The more information you can correlate, the better. The operations report and marketing report are going to be the most important. Also, keep a close eye on the manufacturing quality report. You’ll want to make sure the quality index is slowly increasing. What will be the biggest road block to increasing it steadily will  be purchasing too much plant in the first round. Purchase some, but in manageable amounts so as to prevent the quality systems index from having to receive a massive infusion of cash to maintain current quality levels.

If you find yourself behind the other teams, evaluate your cost of sales. This issue seemed to be common in our game as we observed several teams spending a lot on advertising and PR and the benefit was much less than the cost. It will take some time to find the balance, especially while competing, which is why we think the best strategy is to focus on those areas where target audience has a “high” preference for something, as outlined in the reports.   

We are proud to present the final list of competitors in the Qualifying Rounds of the 2021 MikesBikes World Champs!

These teams and solo competitors will be competing from the 7th until the 12th of December in the Qualifying Rounds to land a spot in the Top 10 for the Final Rounds!

We have over 113 students representing 27 universities and colleges around the globe.

Keep an eye on their progress here and show them your support on our Facebook page. You can also use #2021SmartsimsMWC on Facebook.

Wishing everyone all the best! Hope you enjoy and find this to be a valuable experience!

Get to know the 2020 MikesBikes World Champs Winner, Ivan Bondarenko from Webber International University. He shares his experience in the simulation, his strategy and advice to future students.

What is your decision making process within the simulation?

In terms of managing the company, I was always trying to make the most accurate decisions based on the goal of long-term profitability and market growth. My main objectives were to become a company with a dominant market share while providing quality products to my consumers. Therefore, I based my decisions upon selecting specific strategies that would give me the highest possible chance to achieve my goals. Besides that, a big part that helped me came from analyzing my opponent’s strategies. After selecting the way to achieve my objectives, I had to analyze if those would be a good fit according to the current market conditions and the market power my company possessed in that specific period. In other words, my main decision-making processes and changes were based on two main goals:

To achieve and sustain the highest profitability and market share.

To analyze the decisions of my competitors to make short-term reworks and changes to achieve and sustain the first goal.

What was your strategy going into the simulation?

There is one strategy that I follow during any activity in my life. That is to gather as much knowledge as possible from the opportunities I have been provided. My main strategy during the simulation was to acquire the necessary knowledge about conducting business operations. I believe this knowledge will help me a lot in real life too.

In terms of technical aspects to acquire the highest shareholder value, my strategies were to dominate in the two most high-quality demanding markets which are Adventures and Racers. The reason for it is because capturing “quality markets” requires more time and investments than other segments. That is why it is important to start investing in quality as early as possible. To accomplish that I referred to the knowledge gathered in my management courses about the TQM techniques. That is why in the beginning I decided to invest heavily in the quality aspects of the company to become a company where quality matters a lot. I managed to become a dominant force Adventures segment which gave me enough financial freedom to invest more in quality and cash to finance my capital expenditures required to get into other segments. After establishing and capturing markets where the quality of your products makes the most weight, I acquired an opportunity to invest more in another segment while maintaining my dominance in high-quality markets.

What challenges did you face? How did you overcome these?

My main enemy was my ignorance which sometimes did not allow me to have fully comprehensive and realistic expectations towards the future of our competitive market, rather than expecting a favorable outcome based upon my hopes and mathematical forecasts. Based on my experience in the simulation there are always operational and financial risks related to conducting business operations. However, with proper analysis, there is always a way to minimize your risk (also known as “to hedge” your company) against unreasonable and unexpected market swings which could happen due to the competitors, or something even more dangerous like the inappropriate demand forecast. To avoid those mistakes I decided to refuse to look at risky methods of profiting which could potentially collapse my company, thus I went with a more “safe” approach which provided me with less risk but limited potential net income for each year.

Was there anything, in particular, you did that you think helped to prepare yourself?

The best thing which helped me to prepare myself for the simulation is the ability to learn. Spending time in school with different students and professors helps a lot with acquiring new skills and knowledge which you can use in your daily life. The information and knowledge I managed to comprehend in my classrooms were necessary for obtaining the results during the competition. In other words, something that you learned in your life can have an impactful meaning towards achieving the necessary goal if you will find a proper way to utilize that knowledge.

What do you think of the business simulation?

This is one of the best tools I know which is used for learning about business and the conduction of business operations. I would even go as far as to say that it is my second favorite tool (after books) to acquire important knowledge about a specific subject. So far it has been the best business experience in my life and I greatly appreciate people from SmartSims for creating and improving such an interesting learning tool. You guys are tremendous!

Comments on your experience in your course simulation and with the MikesBikes World Champs

That was a wonderful experience full of learning and enjoyment. The competition was very interesting and something I will be remembering for a long time. I did my best in acquiring as much knowledge as I could and I am happy to feel that way. I hope you will keep developing the simulation and will come up with new comprehensive ideas to implement within the simulation for future students!

It is worth mentioning that my success would not be possible without the important people who supported me in my educational journey. I appreciate my school at Webber International University for providing me with proper business education. Also, I am very grateful to Dr. Thomas Aaron and Dr. Jeannette Eberle for supporting me a lot during my student journey and giving their best so I could get the most essential knowledge throughout my college life.

Advice to future students

There many things which could be said and considered the most important to succeed. As for me, there is one thing that I put above everything else. It is to have fun. There is nothing more important for me during work than feeling joy from the process I participate in. Results are important, and you can work your hardest to get great results. But the best results come from the process in which you like to participate and you have a passion to do it. Knowledge is important when it is fun to obtain. The competition is truly interesting and meaningful when it is fun to participate. The results are meaningful only when they are obtained in the process of passion and enjoyment. Fun is a truly enormous and powerful tool that can lead to great achievements under proper selection and guidance.

We now have the final list of Qualifying Round competitors for the 2020 MikesBikes World Champs!

These teams and solo competitors will be competing from the 8th until the 13th of December in the Qualifying Rounds to land a spot in the Top 10 for the Final Rounds!

We have over 140 students representing 28 schools around the globe.

Keep an eye on their progress here and show them your support on our Facebook page. You can also use #2020SmartsimsMWC on both Facebook and Instagram.

Wishing everyone all the best! Hope you enjoy and find this to be a valuable experience!