Young Farmers' Club

we reduced our prices, but so did our competitors, and due to a large increase in the sales market we were left with a large number of units in stock. This in turn led to us not investing enough in our comparatively small plant, a mistake which cost us dear in the third round, when a 9% increase in the market meant we couldn't meet demand, and so lost some of that vital commodity that only the Business Game represents with hard cash — goodwill. However, an absurd price reduction in the fourth round helped us to get back our advantage and we emerged from a somewhat confused fifth round the winners of the heat.

After Christmas we started on the second round, playing with three of the Ica schools (out of the original 393) who had got through to the next stage of the competition. In this game we took a step closer to the harsh realities of the Easter Term when we learnt that for the first two rounds there would be a transport strike, meaning that we would be limited in our sales in other areas. At the suggestion of two of the most vociferous members of the Board, we tried to undermine the efforts of one of our opponents by concentrating our small amount of transportable units in their area. The extent to which this benefited us is uncertain, but the unlucky opponents (who had made the biggest profit of all in their first heat) were pushed into third place by the end of the game.

We had learnt from the first heat the importance of increasing our plant to keep pace with the expanding market that is a feature of every game, and we were cautiously optimistic that the extra production capacity in which we had invested (using the money saved on transport) would enable us to win through in the last two rounds. Unfortunately, an error in the third round in allocating enough funds to our now fully operational transport system meant we missed out on a chance to sell all our produced and lost a lot of goodwill. A double blow. All sorts of radical measures were suggested to help us win back our lead — cutting our advertising expenditure by £200,000 , lowering our prices to rock bottom values and so forth, but none seemed to promise results, and in spite of what our I.C.L. expert commentator called "an excellent final round" we could only content ourselves with the fact that we had come a very close second.

Nevertheless, we learnt a lot which can be passed on to future Directors — the importance of investing and so on, and, of course, we had a lot of fun in our occasionally riotous Board meetings; our thanks go to Mr. Armstrong for presiding over them, and indeed for his persevering organisation of our foray into the world of big business.

C.J.E.B.

The opening meeting of the year selected a new committee as follows: P. Swiers remained Chairman, C. Burdass was appointed Vice Chairman and Minutes Secretary, S. Buckle was appointed Treasurer, T. Coleman became Club Secretary, and S. Prest and R. Rowbottom were elected to the committee.

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