Chapter 2, Problem 1CS

Attracting and retaining the best employees is crucial to operating a business. Employees will join a company based on opportunities for advancement, training, company culture, and salary and benefits provided. One business that is often listed in Fortune magazines 100 Best Companies to Work For is Recreational Equipment Inc. (REI). REI is committed to inspiring, educating, and outfitting its customers for a lifetime of outdoor adventure. REI offers competitive salaries as well as benefits, including paid sabbaticals, an onsite fitness center, healthcare coverage, telecommuting, and a compressed workweek. The accounting department at REI is responsible for determining salaries/wages and benefits for employees, calculating payroll deductions for taxes and other expenses, and ensuring that company payrolls are processed in a timely and accurate manner. In this chapter, you learned how companies such as REI complete the payroll records for their employees. Why do you think timely and accurate payroll information is so important to a company such as REI?

Jacks Apps Company researches, develops, and sells traditional applications (i.e., apps) for middle-aged mobile phone device users. In an attempt to tap into the large young adult app market to boost sales and advertising revenues. Jacks CFO, Daniel, is considering hiring students from area high schools and universities to drastically increase the innovativeness of the companys apps. Specifically, Daniel hopes that Jacks new student employee pool will make Jack's next wave of phone apps inventions popular with young adults by providing innovative services, such as exchanging payments for late-night food deliveries, arranging informal dating and other social gatherings, exchanging perspectives on different professors, and identifying unusual debit card purchase patterns to assist with early fraud detection notification. Based on cost estimates from Jacks finance team and surveys of its new target customers (i.e., New Customer Financial Survey), Daniel estimates that this new customer market would increase Jacks annual net income by 10,000,000. In addition to the New Customer Financial Survey. Jacks management team conducted a Business Sustainability Analysis. Specifically, the stakeholder engagement portion of the Business Sustainability Analysis revealed that four of Jacks most important stakeholder groups (advertisers, regulators, employees, and customers) would react stronglysome favorably and others unfavorablyto the decision to push its app business in the direction of the young adult market. Specifically, ten percent of its existing advertisers would drop Jacks as a client, thereby reducing its annual advertising revenue of 10,000,000. Also, confidential discussions with competitors suggest that the new fraud detection app would require sensitive customer information that Jacks would be unable to protect perfectly from data hackers, thereby resulting in annual fines of 1,500,000 from regulators. In addition, employee engagement meetings indicated that they would strongly favor the expansion into the young adult market. Daniel estimates that improved employee morale would significantly increase their productivity and creativity, thereby increasing annual sales revenue by 2,000,000. Finally, focus groups with existing customers revealed that they would highly value the increased workforce diversity of Jacks hiring a large number of talented young female employees with an expertise in technology. Daniel estimates that this positive customer sentiment would translate into an additional 3,000,000 in annual traditional apps sales. Required: 1. Using the New Customer Financial Survey and the Business Sustainability Analysis calculate the net change in Jacks Apps Companys net income that would be expected from pursuing the young adult app market. 2. Based on the calculation in Requirement 1, should Jacks Apps pursue the young adult app market? Explain your answer. 3. CONCEPTUAL CONNECTION Describe two additional considerations that Jacks Apps Company management might be wise to consider before making a final decision on whether or not to pursue the young adult apps market.

Start-Up Businesses Being an entrepreneur in a small and young market like Oman is not easy. It is difficult to launch a new product with only some 3 million citizens as your potential clients, launching a new product without thoroughly studying the market needs is not a good idea. An Omani entrepreneur Qais Al-Khonji admits that he failed at his first startup because he did not research the market’s needs, and did not follow a lean methodology. But Al-Khonji has embraced his failure, and moved on to his next projects. “I try and learn even though this means losing. I consider the benefits to be in learning and failure a step towards success,” he says. He's started five startups in the past three years, and he's embraced failure with most of them, closing down four. But business is what he loves, and he's ready to get back up and do it again. “I want to be my own boss and work at what I love doing,” he admitted. Al-Khonji worked in banking for many years and in 2010, he decided to…