Is there an 'easiest' company?

I could ask a hundred questions that all probably have a wiki page so I'm going to stick with appealing to opinions of older business owning players. Looking back, is there a business you wish you started with to make the learning curve smoother or are you happy with your first business?

Try and finish all the city jobs to get the benefit forever: Medical, Law, and Edu

Then stay in edu for the working stat till you feel like it's high enough.

Afterward, js join any company that suits your play style :)

After 3.5 years and all the business classes, I considered buying a 5–7* mine but couldn’t swing the cost. Read the guides: new businesses, especially mines, offer few perks or trainings to attract players. Everyone wants high work stat employees, but they’re rare and in demand. With my Clothing Store, I can train a noob to be beneficial—not ideal, but solid. Mines need much higher work stats, making recruitment a nightmare. Look at the work stats needed for the positions in various companies - the higher the harder those positions will be to fill.  Glad my first and so far only business wasn’t a mine!  There's nothing wrong with mines and similar high-stat biz, but you should probably be in a leadership role in a top 200 faction or be part of a large national organization to own one, so you can fill the staffing needs.  

I started with a sweet shop and can 100% recommend it as a company to learn the director things. You can make solid money, learn about things like stock, train selling/taxing and has low work stat requirements so you can recruit easily. After you mastered that one you are ready for pretty much everything else if you talk to current directors to learn what specifics it has. Most like to share their knowledge with you if you ask nicely.

General recommendation, especially as a beginner: Buy an older, established 7+* company to avoid the hastle of recruiting and staring up. You can do that when you know what you are doing and how to recruit properly.

I was not so smart and had zero stocks and educations but wanted to try running a company. Started a music shop just to aim for 3* for the gym experience. The faction I was in at the time focused on new players so finding employees was the easiest part for me. 

Took a lot of time and money but I learned a lot and benefitted greatly from the perks, currently sitting at 6* and turning a small profit. 

Glad I chose a music shop but I also know that next time I run a company I definitely want one that is cheaper to stock. Also finish the educations and grab the stocks lol. 

At around 365m networth, it's a bit too soon to really make a solid go of running a company.  For the competitive ones, you'll be struggling with the operating costs, the ad budget, and you won't yet have the funds to buy the advertising stock block.

That being said, I've heard that running a cheap company, like a fireworks stand, and then using it as a means to sell trains to new players can work decently well on a low budget.  After the employee stats get up a few thousand, rotate having a few of them work the trainer role for a few days, and use the extra trains they generate to train up the other employees, then swap positions and repeat. As a newbie, I happily paid for bulk trains at 350k each in order to fast-track my stats to an actual point where I could get decent job roles in this game, and I'm sure a bunch of other ambitious new players are thinking the same thing.

So even for the most basic of companies, Fireworks, Sweets etc. how much capitol would you recommend to have ready to go to advance as quickly as possible? That is presuming the earliest available purchase of upgrades like employee faculty size is the way to go if the funds are available even allotted for that purpose. I also have no objections to using RL $$$ to gain an advantage via selling DP's for game currency. I'm not claiming a bottomless cup but possibly enough for an entry level company. OR I take the advice to purchase a 6 or 7 star established company and reverse engineer learning how to run it.

I mean, you probably want the sales boost and advertising boost stocks, which altogether run close to 1b collectively.  I'd probably buy a 3 to 5 star company, because then you will at least have some stars for a few of the job specials, and some passive income on company trains.  That level company should be considerably more affordable to buy, and a hell of a lot easier to rank up so you can flip it for a bigger sale in the future.

Clothing store is probably a good option, as last time I checked they seem to be far less cut throat in competition, and the job specials are rather useful to newbies, making it easier to hire/fill slots for staff that are happy to work without a salary.

Flipping companies? That's a thing here? So there's also naturally an opposite end of the spectrum where players run multiple companies. Would they own competing companies or would they typically run one company in different markets and if there's a way to boost income by running competing companies, what is it?

I worked for a guy that owned/managed multiple companies, and yes, each of them were different types.  A property broker, an adult novelty, and a hair salon. Typically he would have trusted friends run each company for him, and pass the Lion's share of the excess profits over to him, and retain the right to sell the company later on.  You can only be director for a single company yourself,  so it requires having people you can really trust to hold the various sub-director positions you hand each business off to.

Also, yes, buying a company at low or mid tier stars, managing it well enough to add a few more stars to it, and re-selling it for a substantial increase in sales price is absolutely a thing.  In that case, the money you earn is whatever net profits you could get, plus the price bump when you eventually sell it. 

Well I already have the first Yazoo block and my free ads start in 3 days it says. I didn't plan it, just randomly chose them to bank with because they had the smallest price. Since I'll still be learning prerequisites when my free banner ads start I'll just use my forum signature to promote my bazaar instead. Do I still need to have the $45 million on hand when I post the 90 day ad then it just gets reimbursed when the ad is accepted or rejected? *Also can I change the ad that's running halfway through the ad rental period or am I stuck with one ad for the duration?

Yazoo is nothing to do with a company. It is purely those free adverts.

You pay up front, and if the advert is accepted you get refunded the cost.

It suggests I can use it to find employees.

I've started with a Flower Shop with only having the education done, got it to 8 stars, it wasn't really making big money and probably had a negative net profit over all the time but it was a good learning experience and fun. Biggest hurdle to overcome is getting employees when you start a company from scratch in my experience.

After selling the company I've made a Law Firm which barely was able to stay on 6 stars, and a Pub that was 7 stars when sold.

It's a fun aspect of the game, if you don't mind losing money and not minmaxxing, just do it, you'll learn as you go.

the easiest is flower shop because of their low stats for the employee, makes you easy to recruit newbies.

after you getting how the company works, you can probably try AN or sweetshop for better perks and money.

I got a friend who can run a *7 or *8 flowershop with probably 50% of the edu and no stocks.

starting from scratch is tough indeed, but still doable if you have patience and determination.

i got reccomended a firework stand after finishing edus and managed to get mine to 10* starting from scratch without having the stock benefits. Stock is made in-house as long as you have employees assigned to the position needed to produce stock, the stat entry is low and if its set up right can generate enough daily income to cover wages/ad budget.

I was lucky my ex was still active when i started it so i had a consistent employee for a while but as long as yoire persistent you can get people hired and build it up, especially if you use a little extra funding to pay appealing wages.  Once youve got a good setup you can even sell trains from it, generating significantly more profits