Can you run this?
A small-business simulation

Can You Hire Your First Employee?

You run a one-person design studio. Clients like you, you bill $85 an hour, and you’re turning work away while working 52-hour weeks. It’s time to hire. But a new person costs your time before they give any back: you have to find them, train them, check their work and keep them. Decide who to hire, how to train them, how much to hand over, and what to do with the hours you get back.

  • 4 monthsone decision page each
  • +8 monthsoptional, to the end of the year
  • Your hoursthe thing you’re really managing

About this simulation

Difficulty
Beginner Low risk. A few clear levers; mistakes cost money but rarely end the run.
Length
4 months + 8 more, about 10 minutes for the first part
Category
People & career
You decide
Salary, productivity, workload, cash

How it plays

  1. Month 1 · The hire — Make your first hire
  2. Month 2 · Still learning — Get through the second month
  3. Month 3 · Capacity — Use the hours you bought
  4. Month 4 · Keeping them — Keep the person you trained

After the debrief, “Keep going — to month 12” continues the run with calendar events, new challenges and opportunities that build on what you chose earlier. Every decision page has a live preview that shows what your picks do to the numbers before you lock them in.

What you get at the end

A debrief with your outcome, charts of where the money went, your biggest mistake and roughly what it cost, and a full report you can copy or save as a PDF. Everything runs in your browser: no sign-up, nothing to install.

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