Commercial and financial policies in family firms: The Small Business Growth Management Flight Simulator

An interactive learning environment (ILE) was built to reproduce the budgeting process of a small family-owned entrepreneurial firm and to capture how current decisions affect business growth in a longer time horizon. The ILE matches the accounting-related perspective through which spreadsheet-based budgets are drawn up, with the system dynamics (SD) view. Such a goal has been pursued through a connection of traditional Excel spreadsheets with POWERSIM SD models. Playing the SMALL BUSINESS GROWTH MANAGEMENT FLIGHT SIMULATOR allows one to learn how (a) to draw up a budget based on an SD perspective, (b) long-term goals may be affected by current decisions, (c) business/family survival and growth are strongly influenced by current policies, and (d) linking short-to medium-and long-term policies and commercial to financial and equity management issues is critical to business growth.