Service Firms
Service firms bring four familiar high-street businesses into the game: fast food joints, pizzerias, cake shops and coffee shops.
See the New Products From Service FirmsA factory and a shop in one building
What makes a service firm different is that products are prepared and sold in a single operation.
The 3×3 layout will look familiar from manufacturing. Input units procure ingredients, a Prepare unit turns them into the finished product — and then, unlike a factory, the Prepare unit feeds a Sales unit directly. There is no distribution chain to build.
Think of it as a hybrid: the production function of a factory with the sales capability of a retail store, in one firm. The challenge is balancing the two so neither starves the other.
Setting one up
Build the firm
Choose Service Firm from the Build menu and pick a type. This example builds a Pizzeria.
Open the Preparation Guide
Click the large [+] icon. The Preparation Guide is the service firm’s version of the Manufacturer’s Guide, and lists what this firm can make. Here we chose Chicken Pizza.
Add floors for more products
A service firm expands to a maximum of three floors. Here a second floor was added to make Beef Pizza.
The icon at the bottom right of the firm detail window shows every product on every floor at once — so a three-floor pizzeria’s three pizzas can be read at a glance instead of floor by floor.
Marketing and firm-level brand
Click [Marketing] at the top right of the firm window, then [Link Media] to choose media firms to advertise with.
The important difference from a retail store: brand is held at the firm level and shared by every product in it. Products in a service firm have no brand of their own — they take the firm’s rating into their overall rating.
Which is how it works in life. You recognize the pizza restaurant’s brand; you do not hold separate brand perceptions for its different pizza flavors.
So advertising the brand benefits every restaurant you own under it and every product they serve.
Brand awareness and brand loyalty
- Brand awareness rises with advertising.
- Brand loyalty comes from consistently serving high-quality products — the same rule as product-level branding.
- Overall brand rating is the sum of the two.
The customer traffic boost
Service firms raise local customer traffic. Open more restaurants in a shopping area and the whole area gets busier.
Each service firm product class carries a fixed Customer Traffic Boost value. Hover over the icon highlighted below to see it.
No icon means no boost — none of the product classes that firm serves are attractive enough to draw people in.
The firm’s brand rating adds to the boost as well. Together they lift the sales of neighboring retail stores — and raise the market value of the real estate around them, which is a strategy in its own right.
Appendix: Prepare unit vs manufacturing unit
In the game data they differ in two ways, both reflecting the smaller scale of a service firm:
| Attribute | Prepare unit, against a manufacturing unit |
|---|---|
| Production speed | Half — a factory produces at a larger scale. |
| Setup and operating costs | Half — for the same reason. |