How to Choose a Business Simulation Provider
A talent development manager at a company you've heard of emailed me in January. She had a budget, a rollout date, and a shortlist of four providers. I had to tell her we were booked through the end of the year, which is a lousy thing to say to somebody who found you and liked you.
So I did the next best thing and wrote her everything I'd want to know if I were sitting in her chair. She wrote back and said it was extremely helpful. That email is basically this post.
In full disclosure, I own one of these companies. I’ve built and facilitated custom and tailored business simulations for leadership development inside large enterprises for over 20 years. But, and this is important, I get a lot of email questions from people who have heard of me and past clients. So read everything below knowing I’ve had a stake in it but that I enjoy helping people avoid the wrong path even if they have no intention of purchasing from me. I'm also going to spend a good chunk of this post talking you out of the most expensive thing, which should tell you something about how often it gets sold to people who don't need it.
First, try to talk yourself out of it
Before you compare providers, spend twenty minutes trying to kill the project. Seriously, take a hard look at why you think you need this and make sure you need something elaborate. You likely don’t. Sometimes you do, but oftentimes you may not need to invest as much as you think.
Business simulations are complex, threaded, tough to manage, hard to learn, and require a strange mix of skills to facilitate. They're fantastic when they behave. But they're also shiny, and shiny is dangerous when you're spending somebody else's money.
Three questions I'd ask before you talk to anyone:
Could this money and resources do more good somewhere else in the program? Pro tip: Take a step back and have a hard look at the training content before thinking about a business simulation.
Is there a simpler tool that gets you 80% of the outcome? In most cases, there is.
Can you write down three measurable objectives that only a business simulation can solve on one piece of paper, right now, without a meeting?
That third one matters more than people expect. If you can't name three objectives, the simulation will grow to fill the space where the objectives and content should be. Every provider you talk to will happily help it grow.
Also worth saying plainly: simulations don't teach on their own. If you're expecting to drop people into a scenario and have them come out the other side knowing your content, you'll be disappointed, and so will they. The business simulation applies content that already exists. If the content isn't built or built right, the simulation isn't your next purchase. Read between the lines here: training content is 10X more important than the business simulation.
The market, roughly four kinds
I'm not going to rank companies. Categories are more useful anyway, because within each category the providers are more alike than they'd like you to think.
Off-the-shelf platforms. Predeveloped simulations you run participants through. Cheap, fast, low ramp-up, and many are built so you can facilitate them yourself, which is a real advantage. They're a great fit for mass rollout to lower-level employees and for general business acumen.
What they can't do is apply your content to your business. That's not a knock. It would be unfair to expect it. But if you're aligning people around a new strategy or your leadership competency model, you'll be doing the connective work yourself in the debrief, out loud, in front of the room. And it’s not easy. In leadership development this usually frustrates emerging leaders, and for executive education I'd generally avoid it.
Custom builders. Firms that write the business simulation around your goals, your strategy, your business, and what's actually weird about your company. These are from blank slate on up. Often not necessary and is the result of an oversell. High engagement, high applicability, because participants know it's about their jobs. When it works, nothing else is close. But in my experience, it's very rarely needed and often gets in the way of real learning.
The trouble is the other side of the ledger. Custom sims are a beast to manage and always more expensive than people think. Not always at signing but later, in change requests, in the second cohort, in the year the platform needs to move. Ask early whether the provider has a prebuilt quantitative engine that flexes, or whether they're writing the math from scratch every time. That single question moves the price more than anything else on the contract. You also need to be absolutely sure you really need a custom solution. The only time I actually cave on accepting the need is if the goal of the program is to teach a new business where specific business decisions are absolutely required. Even then, I’ll go toe-to-toe with executives to ensure it’s really needed. In most cases, truly custom solutions are not needed. A tailored solution will often do a better job 95% of the time.
For the honest truth if you really need a custom business simulation, read the article: You Probably Don’t Need a Custom Business Simulation
Big-firm experiential arms. Consultancies and large leadership development firms with a simulation practice inside them. They have real advantages: they can facilitate at volume, the materials are polished, and a senior audience takes them seriously. If you need eight facilitators in four countries next quarter, this is the category that can actually do it. Bring your checkbook. Seriously, these are expensive. Not a waste of money, just very costly. There are additional risks to be aware of.
The risk is structural, not moral. The simulation is a delivery vehicle for a larger engagement, which means the center of gravity of the relationship drifts upward and away from you. More on that below, because it's the thing I'd want a stranger to warn me about.
Academic and case-based. Simulations and cases from business schools and academic publishers. Rigorous, well-tested, cheap per seat, and they carry a name your executives respect. Genuinely good tools. I think business cases with basic tools are fantastic. Cheap, focused, manageable, and effective. It’s far easier than you might guess to build these.
They were also built for students with a semester, not leaders with a day. There's no company specificity, and the quality of the experience rests almost entirely on your facilitator. If you have a strong internal facilitator, this category is underrated. If you don't, it goes flat fast.
And the one nobody lists or offers. A well-designed paper-based simulation built by your own instructional designers, or built with you by a provider and then handed over. Not glitzy or glammy. Just engaging, challenging, and effective, and roughly free to run forever. I've watched paper beat software more times than is comfortable for someone in my business. I also wrote an entire book about this. I’m happy to send you a PDF version for free (just drop me a form request). Kindle book here. Wrote this a while ago but the concepts still apply.
What you'll pay, and what moves the number
Nobody in this industry publishes prices, which is its own tell. Here's the honest average price of a business simulation based on various providers to the best of my knowledge (based on what clients have shared with me).
| Category | Estimated Pricing | Primary Fit |
|---|---|---|
| Off-the-Shelf / Ready-to-Go | ~$168 / seat (100+ seats) | High-volume classroom & foundational learning |
| Tailored Simulation | ~$150K+ | Adapting an existing engine to core company metrics |
| Custom Simulation | ~$350K+ | Rare ground-up builds (almost never actually needed) |
| Facilitation | $25K+ starting | Expert delivery, co-facilitation, and strategic debrief |
What actually moves the number, in rough order of impact:
How much of the quantitative model has to be written from scratch. This is the big one. A tailored solution on a proven and flexible quant engine can move things down towards off-the-shelf pricing and do most of what custom does.
Whether you facilitate or they do. A single facilitated day pulls a consultant away from their normal work for three to four days, and you're paying for all of it, every time you run it.
Licensing. If you paid to have a full custom build, you should own it outright with no per-use, per-seat, or transfer fees. Some providers will verbally agree to this and then discover at contract time that they can't.
Number of objectives. Every objective past three multiplies the model.
Variants — languages, regions, business units.
Program length. If it's running more than two days or needs more than one facilitator, something has gone wrong upstream.
For more details about Business Simulation Pricing, read: What a Business Simulation Actually Costs.
The warning
This is the part I'd want somebody to tell me, so here it is.
Watch what happens to your seat at the table. I’ve seen this far too many times and it angers and saddens me like the first.
The pattern goes like this. You run the search, you pick the provider, you're the buyer. Somewhere around month two there's a meeting with your VP "just to align on objectives," and you're cc'd. Then a working session with the executive sponsor that you hear about afterward. Then the scope grows, because the sponsor said something encouraging in a hallway. Six months on, you're booking rooms for a program you no longer control, and the thing you're accountable for no longer matches the objectives you wrote down.
Providers push T&D aside to get to the "decision makers," and then they take over the account. I’ve actually heard providers brag about this. An exact quote I’ll never forget “We’re the investment bankers of the training industry.” I’m still not 100% sure exactly what that actually means but it’s not meant kindly and it rarely ends well.
I want to be fair about this, because it isn't always malice. Consultants are trained and compensated to sell upward. That's the business model, and the people doing it are often good at their jobs and pleasant to work with. It's also true that a lot of these projects get out of control because the buyer couldn't say no, not because the provider was predatory. A partnership takes two.
But you're the one who owns the outcome, so protect the position. Three things that help: 1) Ask directly, in the first meeting, who owns the relationship and who they'll come to when something changes. Watch how comfortable the answer is. 2) Get it in writing that scope changes route through you. Not as a legal weapon but as a thing you can point at cheerfully in month four. 3) Pay attention the first time they go around you on something small. That's the tell, and it always happens on something small first.
There is too much arrogance in this industry, much of it unjustified. These firms work for you. You should never feel bullied into a solution you didn't ask for, and if you do, that's information about the next five months.
Four questions that sort providers fast
Have you ever turned down a client? Why? Nobody can do it all. If they've never said no, they've said yes to things they shouldn't have.
Have you ever failed a project? What happened? You're listening for a real story with a real recovery, not a reframed win.
What do you do when a client asks for something you don't do? The right answer is that they refer it out. I do it several times a year and it costs me nothing.
What are you bad at? Ask it plainly. Anyone honest has an answer ready.
Then call the references, and ask them things people forget to ask: questions about the process more than the provider. Questions such as: What did you wish you knew before leveraging a business simulation? What did you wish was different about the program? How did you measure success and how were the average outcomes? You’re trying to get behind the scene here. Asking about the provider will result in great answers. They’ve been pre-vetted to ensure so.
Two more, quickly. Say no to Junior! Plenty of firms sell you an experienced lead and then hand facilitation to somebody with little to no actual P&L, management, or real executive experience standing in front of your leaders. And match size to your facilitation volume, not your ego. A small firm will likely give you better attention and usually costs less, but if you need more than four facilitated sessions a month and can't run them yourself, a small firm is a terrible fit and they should tell you so ahead of time.
When you shouldn't buy one at all
Skip it, at least for now, if: your content is just “ok” or hasn’t been finished; you can't name three measurable objectives; the real goal is to communicate a message rather than to practice a skill; nobody internally has the time to own it; you already have a silo or rivalry problem and were planning a competitive format; or you're running it once with no plan to repeat, in which case the cost per use is brutal.
And skip it if the honest reason you want one is that it's exciting. I understand the appeal. I build these things because they're the most fun work I know. But moth, meet flame.
If any of that describes you, the useful move is to find someone in this industry who'll spend an hour with you for free that enjoys talking through the reality and is happy to share the truth. There are more of us than you'd think.
Sorry, that went long. I can talk about this stuff all day.
If you take one thing from it: find a partner, not a provider. You'll disagree with this person, probably several times, and you need to be able to say no, slow down, explain that again, why are we doing this. If you can't picture saying those words to them, keep looking.