What running a company for 6 weeks taught me about real decisions

Earlier this year, through my International Business studies at Kingston University, I took part in the BOSS global business simulation run by Revas. The BOSS competition is a worldwide competition where student teams build and run a company across multiple rounds, making live calls on everything from pricing and HR to marketing budgets and supplier contracts. Our team of three competed against 112 other teams internationally. We finished 20th!

The simulation set us up as the leadership team of a travel agency which we named “AtlasLux”, operating in a competitive market that kept shifting under our feet. From round one, we were making decisions quickly and with information that was never quite complete, which was probably the most realistic part of the whole thing.

What caught me off guard was how fast the complexity of the competition ramped up. Early on it felt manageable: set your pricing, sort the budget, check the scorecard. But by the middle of the competition we were juggling new service lines, extra departments, and a competitor landscape that looked different every single round. My teammate Sapna summed it up well: "As the rounds progressed, the decisions became more complex with the introduction of new services and departments. This increased the pressure to respond strategically. We analysed competitor performance, discussed the most profitable actions, and made calculated decisions to keep our travel agency competitive throughout the simulation."

'Cycle, analyse, discuss, decide, go again', became the rhythm of our Sunday meetings, which is where most of the real work happened. After comparing our results against our competition, we were faced with a level of urgency to strategically think about and complete our tasks and that created lots of excitement during our Sunday meetings. The urgency was genuine, but it actually helped. Having a live ranking and a hard deadline forced us to think in a way that open-ended assignments just don't.

As CEO, I quickly worked out that my job wasn't to have all the answers, it was to make sure the team could actually reach one together. That meant getting the information organised, being honest about what we didn't know, and making sure everyone's views were aligned before we committed to anything. My teammate Mehak reflected on this afterwards: "Amelia really took charge when decisions were tough and objectively organised information to come to the most reasonable decision while simultaneously making sure that everyone felt included by asking our opinions before finalising anything." That balance between moving forward and bringing people with you is something I think about a lot, now I'm working in a real business development role.

The analytical side was also more hands-on than I expected. We were building demand forecasts across multiple service categories, working out staffing needs against seasonal patterns, and pressure-testing financial assumptions round by round. The spreadsheet work wasn't just tracking what we'd decided, it was actively informing the decisions we were making. That felt like a step closer to real commercial work than most things I'd done up to that point.

Finishing 20th out of 113 teams globally was not something I saw coming when we first logged in. But honestly, the ranking isn't the thing I think about most. What I took away was a much clearer picture of what good decision-making under pressure actually looks and feels like, and how different that is from reading about it in a textbook.

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