Running an enterprise is essentially just running a bunch of corporations. The only thing is that their "ideal" parameters are different than state corporations.
Choosing profitable corporations is essential to having a profitable enterprise. Observe what types of corporations other enterprises are using.
If you wish to take a more technical approach, these pages will provide you with useful information (the links are for LU, but there is a corresponding page for each world)
https://sim05.simcountry.com/cgi-bin/cgiw?tradeprices and
https://sim05.simcountry.com/cgi-bin/cgiw?productutil To find these pages, click World Trade on the side menu... the pages are linked with the titles, "world market: demand, supply and prices" and "factory utilization last month".
The first page will show what products are in demand, this directly influences market price of the products... ideally, you want market price peaking out on any product you sell. The easy way to tell if a product is peaking in market price is by checking the historical graph, it'll look something like this |\|\|\. An example:
https://sim05.simcountry.com/cgi-bin/cgi2nova?SN_ADDRESS=wwwCountry&SN_METHOD=w3graph&miTable=tldhist&miKey=166&miColumn=vTradeMarketPrice The purpose of the utilization page is to determine what products are in a production deficit... if all corps on the world are producing less than all corps are using, then you have a production deficit. This means that when combined with a negative supply/demand, the product will maintain high market price in the future.
Anyway, this is just for picking corps.
After you've chosen your corps, you'll need to obviously build a lot of them. Maintaining a full queue of 10 corporations waiting to build at all times is essential for quick growth. However, each corp will cost money to start up. Personally, I don't like accumulating debt so I use other revenue as start-up money for enterprise corps. It is worth noting that interest on debt is very small though so if you're confidently planning a profitable enterprise no shame in acquiring debt.
For choosing countries to build, there are two factors to consider that will influence your profit. One is tax rate. Pretty simple, your profit will be taxed at that rate. I'd say using C3s as a baseline is best, so any country with 30% tax or lower is good (C3s have 30% taxes). The second is the welfare index. Higher levels will increase your production, which will increase the amount of products you sell obviously... it will also increase raw materials use, but this increase is way below the increase in revenue. Anyway, higher levels of this index in countries are a plus, but using C3s as a baseline, any country with welfare above like 80 should be fine for building quickly.
If you'll be building your enterprise slowly, I recommend only building in countries with 15% or lower taxes and 100 or higher welfare index.
So much for what countries to build in.
Anyway, past this there are basically three factors you have control over that will influence profit:
1) Trade Strategies
I personally don't think of this as very important, but they still influence profit. As long as my corps are paying about market price for supplies and selling at about market price for production, I consider myself winning here.
The biggest thing you can make a mistake on here is failing to "follow quality" in your sell strategy. As far as hard numbers, I've been using sell strategies of:
Sell below quality 1% and reduce 5% per month.
Sell above quality 20% and reduce 10% per month.
For buying strategies:
Buy 8% below market and raise 10% per month.
Buy 2% above market and raise 5% per month.
The game balance for trade strategies is altering so I've been experimenting, but keeping the goal of selling/buying at more or less around market price is probably ideal.
2) Salaries
The goal of salaries is mainly to ensure hiring in enterprise is as close to 100% as possible. I'm using 210 salaries currently and my largest enterprise is around an average of ~97% hiring so I figure it's good enough. Salaries will also increase production much like welfare index. I'm unsure of an "ideal" salary level as I haven't spent time bothering to figure it out, but I imagine staying below about 300 salaries in your corps is best.
3) Supply Quality
There's a lot you can do for supply quality. The average quality of the supplies a corporation uses (weighted by amount used) minus 100 is multipled by the Production Process Quality (see quality upgrades) to produce the quality of the products you sell. The effectiveness of supply quality for private corps caps out at 170 I believe (because private corps have a 333 sale quality cap, and I believe earlier research indicated a maximum sale price of 300% market price no matter the quality either way).
4) Quality Upgrades
Buy upgrades to quality for all corporations. Period. These will increase the maintenance cost by a small amount, but will directly increase the final quality of the products you sell, increasing revenue by a greater amount than the increase in costs.
5) Effectivity Upgrades
For an enterprise, these are mostly unimportant. I say mostly because they do decrease the total salaries by a small amount with a subsequent negligible increase in fixed cost last I checked and use less, but more educated workers. If you're building mainly in player countries with high education indexes, it is recommended to upgrade. If you're building mainly in C3s, there is no need to upgrade. If you find yourself short on funds, you would be well advised to save these upgrades for later.
Other tips:
If you wish to profit, you would be well advised to stay away from military corps... the market is usually surplus. It can go into demand, but I suspect that these products are more or less directly supplied by the GM and players frequently unload large stocks as well.
When you're starting up an enterprise, I'd recommend setting the default ordering quality for supplies to be set at 120 as it won't be fully effective yet.
Anyway, you can set the numbers for all these corporate settings to be automatic for new corporations by using the page on the top menu:
Settings >> Automation >> Automatic systems
So... any questions?
Other viewers any questions or additions/subtractions to this?