For your team · The Boardroom
Integrated Business Strategy — 4-role C-Suite Team · Integrated Business Strategy — 4-role C-Suite Team
Run a real DTC brand as a 4-person C-suite. Distinct roles, shared P&L, per-cycle decisions, live leaderboard.
The Boardroom is Vanguard SIM's hero business simulation and the closest students will get to actually running a company inside a course. Teams of 4 take distinct C-suite roles — CEO strategy, CFO cash + pricing, CMO growth + brand, COO inventory + suppliers — and operate a DTC brand for 25 cycles across 5 weeks (M-F default). Every real week = 1 in-sim year, and the last active weekday of each real week is the Board Meeting: that's when the year closes, annual reports generate, and strategic decisions in the draft table commit. Each role logs into their own functional dashboard, makes decisions in their domain, and hits submit before local midnight; a nightly engine reconciles pricing, inventory, ad spend, competitor moves, brand equity, and a fixed 3-competitor market to produce the next morning's P&L. Teams coordinate through a built-in Slack-style chat with a team channel, DMs, and a system-alert channel. Consequences of every decision ripple through the interconnected sub-systems: if the CMO runs a promo but the COO didn't stock inventory, revenue is lost; if the CFO cuts price without the COO's supplier renegotiation, margin evaporates. Company Value at end (brand-tilted 4×–8× TTM EBITDA + cash + inventory + brand equity − debt) sets the leaderboard.
Every team is scored on four pillars that compound across the sim. They aggregate into a composite the leaderboard ranks by, and the professor can see per-pillar deltas in the gradebook.
CEO's domain: north-star, capital allocation, hiring, guardrails.
CMO's domain: channel mix, creative tiers, brand equity, retention.
COO's domain: inventory turns, supplier quality, fulfillment SLA.
CFO's domain: cash runway, pricing, margin, forecast accuracy.
CEO, CFO, CMO, and COO each get their own functional UI — real levers in their domain, not a shared dashboard.
Fixed AI competitors (Priceline / Prestige / Growth) plus other student teams create real share-of-market pressure. Not a solo optimization exercise.
Every local midnight the engine models demand (price × ad × brand × stock), runs competitors, updates market share, and generates the morning's P&L. Cron-driven, timezone-aware.
Team channel + DMs + system-alert channel built in. Role interdependence forces coordination; the chat is where it happens.
Legible valuation formula (brand-tilted 4×–8× TTM EBITDA + cash + inventory + brand equity − debt; multiple lifts as brand score climbs). Composite team score plus per-role individual KPIs.
Pet products, skincare, snacks, apparel — each with its own SKU catalog, supplier tiers, ad-channel efficiency curves, seasonality, and event pool. Professor picks per class.
25 cycles across 5 weeks Mon-Fri (canonical). Optional 8-week extended and semester (14-week / 70 cycles) variants.
Designed for teams of 4 (or 3 with role doubling). ~20-30 students per class. Multi-team classes get within-class leaderboard.
MBA strategy and general management capstones. Any course that wants a full-cycle DTC business simulation that is modern, visual, role-based, and interactive.
Only sim with 4 distinct role dashboards, a live 3-competitor market, and built-in team chat. Depth over cleverness — leans on visuals, interactivity, and team-role realism.
One of many pre-authored prompts from the sim’s Year 1 Board Meetinglibrary. Grounded in the team’s actual decisions and used as a scheduled teaching moment.
Year 1 Board MeetingPositioning bet: did you pick, or did you drift?
Each team: in one sentence, what's your Year 2 positioning bet: mass, premium, or niche? Point to the ONE decision you made in Y1 that proves it.
A single in-tray event drawn from the sim’s live event catalog — the kind of decision a student team sees in their inbox on any given active day.
A national retail chain wants a 6-month exclusive distribution agreement. It comes with a $30K listing fee upfront + guaranteed shelf space, but you'd have to pause DTC growth to honor the exclusivity.
Canvas, Blackboard, Brightspace, Moodle via LTI 1.3. Students launch from your LMS with single sign-on; one-click grade publish posts scores back with the rubric breakdown as the comment.
Per semester. No platform fee, no per-section charge, no seat minimums. Institutional invoicing available.