Big Ambitions 1.0 is finally here, and there is a lot more to manage now that the full game has been released. If you’re just starting out, it can be a little confusing to figure out where to spend your money, which business to open first, and when you should start thinking about things like staff, warehouses, and headquarters.
In this Big Ambitions guide, I’ll walk you through the important things you should know when starting your business empire. We’ll cover the best way to get started, which businesses are worth considering, how to manage your employees, and when it makes sense to set up a headquarters.
I’ll also go over some of the useful 1.0 changes, including the new Pricing Manager, logistics system, banking changes, car repairs, and a few quality-of-life features. So if you’re playing Big Ambitions for the first time or coming back after an older version, you should find something useful here.
Big Ambitions 1.0 Beginner Guide – Early Job, First Business
When you first start Big Ambitions, you have around $10,000 to work with. You also get a free apartment at 453rd Street from Uncle Fred, along with a starter car that looks quite a lot like a taxi.
Your first day is mostly about getting your basic needs sorted out before you start worrying about building a business.
I recommend going to the supermarket first and grabbing a basket. You can carry up to 10 food items, so I’d suggest buying all 10 instead of only picking up the minimum three. Since you’re already there, you might as well make use of the full carrying capacity.
After that, cross the street and head to Square Appliances. Grab a trolley and buy the standard fridge, which costs around $1,800.
Take everything back to your apartment, place the fridge, put your food inside, and eat one of the items. Once that’s done, claim your free car and drive over to Aika, which is basically the game’s IKEA-style furniture store.
There, you can buy a bed for around $400–475. Place it in your apartment and sleep until early morning.
Best Early Job
The next day, Uncle Fred stops paying your rent, so you’ll need to start making money yourself.
One of the easiest early jobs is working as a cashier at the nearby supermarket. You can make around $25 per hour, which is enough to help you get through the early stages while you prepare for your first business.
I also recommend taking the Basic HR course at Manhattan Business School as soon as possible. The course costs $30 per hour and takes 10 hours in total, but there’s an important reason to do it early: you can’t hire employees without completing it.
Getting this out of the way early means you won’t have to stop your business plans later just because you haven’t completed the required training.
While you’re getting started, keep an eye on your three main needs: energy, hunger, and happiness.
Happiness has received some changes in Big Ambitions 1.0. The Fresh Start and First Apartment bonuses eventually disappear, while things like rain can make your character wet and unhappy. Being homeless or relying too much on the subway can also hurt your mood.
You can improve your happiness by doing things such as visiting parks. Later on, items like a television and a simple gym mat can also help.
Choosing and Opening Your First Business
When you’re ready to open your first business, don’t just choose a location because the rent looks cheap. Location is extremely important in Big Ambitions, especially when you’re still starting out.
Open your phone map and go to Buildings for Rent. From there, filter the results for retail locations and check both the traffic index and customer capacity.
For a first store, I’d generally look for a traffic index of 30 or higher. Around 39+ is considered excellent for an early location.
However, once you get past the very beginning, customer capacity can become more important. For example, a building with 75 customer capacity and an average traffic index can potentially perform better than a tiny store with excellent traffic simply because the larger location can handle more customers.
Good Starter Businesses
There are several businesses that can work well in Big Ambitions 1.0, but two options stand out to me for newer players: gyms and coffee shops.
Gyms can be a great choice because competition is relatively low in some neighborhoods. Trainers can also handle around 20 customers per hour, making them useful once you start getting a steady flow of customers.
Coffee shops are another solid option. They’re relatively straightforward to stock and can bring in a high number of customers.
For a coffee shop, you’ll need equipment such as an industrial coffee machine and a bakery showcase for pastries. As your business grows, you can expand your selection with things like ice cream, salads, soda, and fruit.
Gift shops and fast-food businesses can work as well, but you may face more competition depending on where you decide to open.
Once you rent your building, give the business a name and choose a logo. I recommend temporarily closing the store while you’re setting everything up. Buy the required equipment, arrange the shop, and then focus on getting your employees ready.
Staff and Training: Making Your Store Actually Work
Your employees can make or break a business in Big Ambitions, so don’t just hire the first people you see.
You can recruit workers through the recruitment agencies. When looking at candidates, make sure you check their individual demands.
Some employees may want full-time hours, while others might refuse to work weekends. Some may also care about things such as having a happy boss or working in a clean environment.
Once you find employees that fit your business and budget, hire the best ones you can afford and start training them.
To train an employee, unassign them from their normal work and send them to training. Once their skill percentage improves, you can assign them back to the store.
Getting employees all the way to 100% takes several in-game days, so you’ll need to sleep through some of the training time. However, it’s worth doing because better-trained employees can make a noticeable difference in customer satisfaction and sales.
When you have your employees ready, make sure you schedule their shifts properly. The copy-and-paste scheduling function can save you a lot of time here.
Once you have two reliable shifts of trained employees, your store becomes much easier to manage. Instead of constantly standing behind the counter yourself, you can let your staff handle the day-to-day work while you focus on expanding.
Putting Music in Your Store
Music is another small detail that can make a difference in your store.
Customers can complain when a store feels completely silent, so adding speakers is an easy way to improve the atmosphere and customer satisfaction.
You can purchase loudspeakers from furniture stores such as Aika. You’ll usually find them sitting on desks or shelves in the showroom.
There are different sizes and prices, so you don’t need to spend a huge amount of money. Buying one or two speakers should be enough for a small store.
Take the speakers back to your business and place them wherever you want. They can technically go on the floor, although I prefer putting them on a small table because it looks much better.
Once they’re placed, they’ll automatically play the game’s radio stations. You can click on a speaker to turn the radio on or off and adjust the volume.
If you have a larger store, you can use multiple speakers to make sure the entire floor has good coverage.
Headquarters and the Logistics Manager
After you have two or three stores running, you’ll probably start getting tired of manually restocking everything.
That’s when it’s time to start thinking about a headquarters.
For your HQ, you’ll need to rent an office building where your management staff can work. You’ll also want a warehouse for storing your products and supplies.
Inside the HQ, buy desks, computers, and chairs for the employees you plan to hire.
You can then go to City Workforce Inc. to recruit your management staff.
The main employees you’ll want to consider are:
- HR Managers: They handle passive training, temporary replacements when employees get sick, and later health insurance.
- Purchasing Agents: They purchase goods from wholesalers and importers and bring them into your warehouse.
- Logistics Managers: They handle deliveries from your warehouse to your businesses.
- Pricing Managers: They allow you to manage product prices across an entire neighborhood instead of changing prices manually at every individual store.
The Pricing Manager is one of the useful additions in Big Ambitions 1.0. Once you assign one to a workstation at your HQ, you can change prices for products across an entire neighborhood at once.
A skilled Pricing Manager can also suggest daily price adjustments, which can save you a lot of time once you have multiple businesses.
The Logistics Manager is the Key to Automation
The Logistics Manager is particularly important once your business starts growing.
One Logistics Manager can run one warehouse. You assign the employee to a computer workstation in your HQ and put them on a proper schedule.
After that, open the Bisman app on your phone and go to the Deliveries tab. Here, you can create a delivery plan and tell your Logistics Manager which stores or warehouses should receive products.
You can also specify how much of each item should be delivered.
The number of locations a Logistics Manager can handle depends on several factors, including their skill percentage, the number of vehicle slots available at the warehouse, and the type of vehicle you’re using.
There’s also an important requirement for drivers: they need at least 50% skill to operate the larger trucks.
Deliveries leave around 2 AM each day, so your stores can receive their stock before the next business day starts.
Make sure your stores have enough storage shelves ready for incoming goods. The delivery system is designed to send products based on what each store actually needs and how much stock it currently has.
Once your Purchasing Agent keeps the warehouse supplied and your Logistics Manager handles deliveries, a lot of the boring manual work disappears.
This is one of the points where Big Ambitions starts feeling much more like an actual business empire. Instead of spending your entire day driving around and carrying boxes, you can focus on opening new businesses and growing the company.
Repairing Your Car in Big Ambitions
Your car will take damage whenever you hit things around the city. Walls, other vehicles, light posts, and even pedestrians can damage your vehicle.
You can see the vehicle’s condition while driving by looking at the gear icon at the bottom of the screen.
Try to keep your car in good condition because eventually it can become too damaged to drive.
If your vehicle still works, open the map and filter for Gas Stations. Look for a gas station that also has a garage section. The locations in Hell’s Kitchen and Murray Hill are good options.
Drive into one of the green marked garage spaces. Once you’re in the correct spot, a repair option will appear.
Select the repair option and pay the required cost. Your vehicle will then be repaired back to 100%.
What to Do If Your Car Breaks Down
If your vehicle is completely broken and won’t move, you’ll need to call NY AutoTow Service.
Choose the option to tow your car to the nearest auto repair shop. Keep in mind that towing costs $500, and you’ll still need to pay the actual repair bill afterward.
Because of this, I’d recommend avoiding unnecessary damage whenever possible.
It’s also worth keeping a Jerry Can inside your vehicle. If you run out of fuel, having one with you can save you from needing to call a tow truck just because your car ran out of gas.
Banking Got a Full Rewrite in 1.0
The banking system has also changed quite a bit in Big Ambitions 1.0.
One major change is that negative interest is no longer a thing. Loans now require a higher income to qualify and come with higher interest rates and minimum daily payments.
On the positive side, the maximum loan size is larger, and you can make partial repayments.
Investments have also received changes. You can now use daily auto-investing and make partial withdrawals when necessary.
Taxes have more deductions available as well, so it’s worth paying attention to your finances instead of simply ignoring them.
I recommend checking the EconoView app regularly. The old strategy of setting everything up and completely forgetting about it doesn’t work quite the same way anymore.
Growing Beyond the First Store
Once your first business is running successfully, you should start paying attention to the numbers in the Bisman app.
Keep an eye on things such as daily customers, customer satisfaction, customer service, cleanliness, theft, and your current stock levels.
These numbers can quickly show you whether your business is doing well or whether something needs to be changed.
Marketing becomes more useful once you’ve already taken care of the basics. There’s not much point in spending heavily on marketing if your store is struggling with poor service, low stock, or unhappy customers.
You should also pay attention to your competition as you expand. Rivals can react when you start moving into their neighborhoods, so don’t assume every expansion will be completely effortless.
The new Hamptons neighborhood is particularly interesting for the later stages of the game. With its mansions and retail areas, it’s a great place to expand once your business empire is already established.
New Quality-of-Life Features in Big Ambitions 1.0
Big Ambitions 1.0 also adds a couple of useful features that make moving around the city less frustrating.
You can now hire a Private Driver from Onyx Luxury Chauffeurs in the Hamptons. Once you have access to the service, you can summon the driver whenever you need a ride.
There’s also Speedy Bites, which lets you order food directly to your home or business. If you prefer, you can also take delivery jobs yourself to make some quick money.
Both features remove some of the unnecessary running around that could make certain parts of the game feel like a chore.
Don’t Ignore Your Character’s Needs
While it’s easy to get completely focused on making money, don’t forget that your character has needs too.
The early happiness bonuses eventually fade, so you can’t rely on them forever. If your character becomes unhappy, tired, or hungry, it can make managing your growing empire much harder.
Make sure you eat properly, get enough sleep, stay dry when it rains, and take some time to visit a park when you need to improve your mood.
It might not feel important when you’re focused on opening your next store, but keeping your character in good condition makes the entire experience much smoother.
After all, there’s not much point in building a huge business empire if the person running it can barely function.