Found a Cafe | One-Lesson Business Start-Up Challenge
A complete one-lesson decision challenge for A-Level Business: students found a fictional London cafe on paper and defend every choice in writing. No tech needed — just this booklet, a calculator and 60–75 minutes.
Ten written decisions, every one spec-tagged and AO-tagged:
PART 1 — FOUNDING (7 decisions): name and one-line promise (branding/USP), market position (premium, volume, specialist or balanced), choice of eight London sites with rent, footfall and rival data, team size with real wage costs, price and a £1,500 marketing budget split, a full break-even calculation with a worked example, and a synoptic launch pitch that links every choice into one argument.
PART 2 — YEAR ONE (1 decision): deal each pair one of six crisis cards (bean price shock, chain rival, transport strike, viral moment, hygiene rumour, wage rise). Students diagnose whether it hits costs, demand or reputation — then respond.
PART 3 — BOARDROOM (2 decisions): value the firm with a profit-multiple method and defend the multiple, then one honest reflection.
Included: teacher guide with minute-by-minute timings, eight photocopiable site cards, six crisis cards, per-decision AO1–AO4 marking notes, a whole-booklet banding grid and an Edexcel 9BS0 spec map (D1–D10 across 1.3, 1.5, 2.2, 2.4, 2.5, 3.1–3.3). AO3 and AO4 are exercised eight times across the ten decisions.
Written for Edexcel 9BS0 but the decisions map directly onto AQA 7132, OCR, WJEC and IB Business Management — the reasoning chain is the same.
13 pages, A4, print-ready. There are no right answers in this lesson — only trade-offs students can defend. The marks live in the reasoning.
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