When I first was learning the Business Strategy Game, I did a lot of research to see what strategy tips were available to try. Unfortunately, I found that a lot of the information available was wrong and misleading. So I thought I’d post some of my strategies here because they were so successful.
I’ve observed that a large percentage of teams focus on the bidding for celebrities, usually with a couple of teams bidding the maximum in the first years. This is crazy and foolish. I looked at dozens of game reports for the BSG winners of the Best-Strategy Invitational in my research before playing the first round. Many of the winners HAD NO CELEBRITIES AT ALL, for the whole game. That’s because they calculated a bid that would be profitable if it won, but some other team would win the bidding process and lose money. That’s winning a battle while losing the war. Nearly all of the lowest ranked teams HAD LOTS OF CELEBRITIES at high prices. The easiest way to lose this game is to overbid for celebrities. I recommend that you do NOT bid for celebrities until you learn how to submit a bid that ensures that you make a profit on any bid that gets accepted. Since other teams are basically guessing about how much to bid, usually the WORST TEAM with the craziest bid will “win” the celebrity.
This is like an auction for a $10 item where most of the bidders have no clue about how much the item is worth, and they’re all bidding with monopoly money that has no real value to them. If all the bidders are given $10,000 to bid in the auction, there’s a big chance that some of them will bid $10,000. One of them will win the auction without realizing that they just bought themselves last place and they will probably never be able to recover from that mistake. In this case, anyone who bids more than $9.99 is making a bad decision, since that’s the highest possible bid that will be profitable, since you would at least make one penny if the bid is accepted. Bidding $10 for a $10 item is not profitable, and any penny bid above that is a guaranteed loser.
So to make a profitable bid, you must first calculate how much the celebrity is worth in increased revenue and then bid something lower that includes a safety margin plus a profit margin. At the start of the game, the good players will probably not win a single celebrity. That’s OK. The main reason to bid in the first rounds is to merely ensure that no other player will win a more profitable bid than you, and if they do win the auction, their bid will cost them more than the celebrity is worth.