Service Firms Strategy Guide

By Stylesjl

Service firms extend your business into food and beverage service — fast food, coffee and more. This guide covers how to fold them into a business so they maximize profit rather than merely add revenue.

How a service firm works

A service firm is a manufacturing firm and a retail firm in one building. It takes basic products — tomatoes, burger patties, burger buns — prepares a hamburger from them the way a factory would, then sells it directly to customers the way a store would.

The fast food joint above buys the ingredients (a purchasing unit), prepares them (a manufacturing unit) and sells them (a sales unit).

Three differences from ordinary retail and factory firms

• Brand is per firm type, not per product. There is one rating for your Fast Food Joints, another for your Coffee Shops, and so on.
• You cannot sell service products to other companies. Everything prepared must be sold in the same firm.
• Some ingredients are also retail goods — burger patties and burger buns among them — which is what lets a service business and a retail business feed each other.

The four firm types

Each needs different ingredients, and some ingredients are far easier to obtain than others. That single fact drives most of what follows.

Two broad approaches

• Start with service firms and use their products to expand into other industries.
• Start with another business — food, beverages, snacks — and use its products as the base for moving into services.

Strategy 1: starting with service firms

This is the trickier route. Services are highly competitive and competitors can enter at very low cost, so you need an edge early and you need to hold it.

Which firm to start with, and why it matters so much

The decisive question is which products you begin with, because their ingredients differ enormously in cost.

A single hamburger needs:

• a farm producing tomatoes, frozen beef and wheat
• a factory turning frozen beef into burger patties
• two more factories: wheat into flour, flour into burger buns

Which is why you should start with coffee. It needs only:

• coffee beans
• milk
• sugar — for one of the coffee types
• paper — for all but one

All of those are cheap and easy to get early — with one exception, paper, which the steps below deal with. On a low budget, coffee is the best service firm to start with.

Build a medium farm, close to the city

Proximity keeps freight costs down.

Produce milk, coffee beans and sugar in that one farm

Saving money matters more than anything in the early stages. Set training to maximum so raw material quality reaches 100%.

Build the coffee shop where the traffic is

Find available land in a high-traffic location — the higher the better. Shopping malls are excellent: the up-front cost is very low and the mall’s traffic tends to rise as other companies add their own stores.

If your game settings allow it, add two more floors and sell a different coffee type on each.

Buy your paper, do not make it

Paper needs a very expensive logging camp and paper factory. Buy it from another company or a seaport until you can afford that supply chain — it is a small burden, because paper is cheap and coffee shops use very little of it.

Advertise

Run a campaign to build the brand. Only one shop needs to advertise — the brand applies to every coffee shop you own.

Cut prices at first, raise them later

Low prices attract the first customers. Once quality and brand have improved, put them back up.

Add shops across the city

The Duplicate Firm button makes this quick. Do not place shops too close together — unless the existing ones cannot keep up with demand — and do not place them in low-traffic areas. Both waste money.

Reinvest, and watch your crop inventory

The shops should now return well. Put the money into more stores, and into more productive farms if demand outruns supply.

Consider R&D — but not yet

An R&D center for higher-quality coffee is optional, and the numbers explain why it can wait:

So R&D is not important early. It becomes an edge once competitors arrive.

Expand into pizza next

Pizza sells well and needs relatively few ingredients: flour, frozen beef and chicken, olives, tomatoes and parma ham.

Set up the pizza supply chain

• A medium farm producing frozen beef, chicken and pork together.
• Another medium farm for tomatoes and olives — more crop units on tomatoes, which are in greater overall demand.
• A small or medium factory turning frozen pork into parma ham.
• A medium farm dedicated to wheat alone.
• A large flour factory.
• Optionally, R&D for the pizza types, the flour and the parma ham — though as with coffee, research is only 50% of quality and quality only 35% of the overall rating.

Place pizzerias beside your coffee shops

High-traffic locations, and preferably adjacent to the coffee shops — service and retail firms close together boost each other’s traffic. Advertise, and cut prices initially to get product moving.

Then cakes and fast food

Same techniques. Note that every cake type and fried chicken need a great deal of flour compared with everything else, which is exactly why the large flour factory and a big supply of high-quality wheat matter.

Turn the surplus into a food business

You should now be making tens of millions a year. Sell the burger buns, burger patties, eggs, frozen beef, pork and chicken and parma ham your service firms use directly in supermarkets as well.

Create new products from small additions

A few extra raw materials open up whole new supermarket lines. The lemons for lemon tarts make citric acid, and citric acid makes yogurt. Adding glass to your existing milk gives bottled milk. Olives become canned olives. The Manufacturer’s Guide has the full list.

Consolidate the position

With food, beverages and snacks conquered you are well placed to expand anywhere. Ways to strengthen the service firms themselves:

• Vertically integrate the whole supply chain — produce your own paper, glass, aluminum and the rest.
• Control media and internet firms so your advertising is effectively free.
• Cluster your retail and service firms so each boosts the others’ traffic.
• Fund R&D fully to stay ahead of the competition.
• Buy out competitors and build towards a monopoly on food and services.

Strategy 2: starting in food, then moving into services

Build another industry first and enter services with its profits and supply chains behind you.

Start with livestock products

Frozen pork, beef, lamb and chicken, plus eggs. Add two factories for parma ham and burger patties. Sell it all in supermarkets and push quality up with farm training.

Move into more sophisticated food

Flour for burger buns, olives for canned olives, then milk, sugar and cocoa. With aluminum or glass available from another company or a seaport you can add bottled milk or canned soup.

Move into services as soon as the chain nearly covers one

You do not need every food type first — only enough of the supply chain. Producing frozen chicken, flour, burger buns and burger patties already means fried chicken, so fast food joints are the logical next step. Add tomatoes and hamburgers follow. French fries can wait if potatoes are outside the budget.

Then pizza

Once the tomatoes are growing, pizza is available. At this point you produce nearly half of all service industry products and most food items — but no snacks or beverages:

Expand food and services in parallel

Each new food item tends to unlock a service one. A cereal bar means you already have the flour and eggs for strawberry cakes. A bottled milk business is the moment to move into coffee.

Expect a fight in cakes and coffee

By the time you reach them the competition will be established — and in coffee you will also be behind on coffee bean quality. Spend aggressively on advertising and offer cut-rate prices until quality catches up.

Consolidate

With services and the food, beverage and snack industries conquered, the same consolidation advice as in strategy 1 applies.

Using subsidiaries

With the Subsidiary DLC you control companies that expand into other industries on your behalf. When choosing what a subsidiary may expand into, restrict it to the industries that reinforce this strategy:

• Beverages
• Cakes
• Coffee
• Food
• Fast food
• Pizza
• Snacks