Here are the things you need to do to reduce your labor costs, decrease shipping & selling time, and increase your profits:

- Expand your factory to the maximum – level 9, 18 jobs at a time.

- Expand your warehouse to the maximum – level 9. Jobs of 100 will take less than an hour to load (as long as there aren't lots of huge jobs in at the same time).

- Buy shop advertisements & upgrades; most people get these to the maximum.

Once all those things are done, you can build again and again and again.

But… how do you get from the first build to that stage?

Second Build:
When the first jobs sell out, check the current price of raw goods, and see how much it would cost for enough raw goods to refill the factory back to the same number of jobs as it had before. If you can afford to do that, and have enough cash left for the salary, shipping, and manager's salary while you wait, that's great. Hopefully you'll have enough to do that and more – but it depends on those raw goods prices. When your factory is at level 9, the raw goods prices won't be as much of an issue because your salary per plushie will go down. If prices are high, wait. Check back next update.

After you know how much it will cost to refill the factory and pay for the salary & shipping & manager, see how much cash you'd have left.

You may have enough to buy more goods and expand the factory again. Sometimes I do, sometimes I don't. If you do have some NP but not enough to expand the factory, consider expanding the warehouse or buying more ads & upgrades.

If your plushies sold fairly quickly but they took forever to load, you may want to expand the warehouse first. If they sold slowly, you may prefer to increase your sales rates by buying more ads or upgrades. Both of those are good things to do -- you just have to decide which one best suits your own game

Note:

If you are building late afternoon game time, and your plushies won't get into the shop until after the 5 pm update anyway, don't spend NP on the warehouse quite yet!

Subsequent Builds:
Since larger jobs take longer to sell, I highly recommend that you stick with building jobs of 100 plushies until you can fill your level 9 factory every hour that you build, and your warehouse is level 9. Only if you have NP left over when doing that should you start making larger jobs. Of course, you may decide that you've done enough by then – you may have over a million CoH, which gets you the top prize. Am I serious? YES! I've been able to reach a million CoH in less than four days. The only problem I had then is to remember to check back every week and pay my rent! You really don't want to be evicted after all that work.

Hiring a Workforce:
This is one of the most difficult parts of the game for many people. In the TampTree guide, I recommended starting with about 250 workers and 25 managers. You do not need more workers than that for 18 jobs of 100! Once the factory is larger, the workers are more efficient. When you start doing jobs of 200, then you'll need to increase your workforce.

One way to decide how many workers to hire is to see how much you'd be paying in salary per plushie. (Some people on the PT chat boards call this LCCP – labor cost per plushie.) For the example on the TampTree page, I paid 9.75 nps per plushie in salary, because there were only 8 jobs in the factory. If I'd been able to have more jobs in, I could have paid less per plushie. When choosing a workforce for a larger factory, you need to see how much it will cost per plushie.

Calculate how many plushies there are in the jobs to be made in the factory. If you are doing 18 jobs of 100, that's 1800 plushies; ignore any partially built jobs when you do this calculation. Then estimate how much you'd like to pay per plushie. Personally, I don't want to pay more than 5 np per plushie in salary (once my factory is level 9); when I do jobs larger than 100 plushies each, I prefer to pay a little less. Multiply your number of plushies by the salary per plushie – for example, 1800 by 5 to get 9000. Now hire workers (including managers) to reach that goal. Remember to keep about 1 manager for every 10 workers. If you strike a good balance, your workers should be able to send 13-15 of the 18 jobs to the warehouse in one hour.

Calculating Costs and Profits:
How do you know if you are making a profit? You need to calculate what a job of plushies costs you, and then how much it sold for. If it cost more than it sold for… that's not good news. You'll need to figure out why that happened and fix it!

The cost for a job of plushies includes these things – the raw goods, the labor, and the shipping.

Shipping - always 278 NPs per 100 plushies.

Raw goods – add up what you paid.

Salary – divide the salary you paid by the number of plushies produced.

There are two ways to calculate the number of plushies produced – the exact number made (no matter where they are), and the number of plushies sent to the warehouse. The number of plushies sent to the warehouse is a bit easier to calculate, and since those are the only ones that can be sold, it makes sense to use those.

In the example in the TampTree guide, I paid 5850 NP per hour if for 250 trainees and the 25 managers. They finished 6 of the 8 jobs, and got a small start on the last two jobs. I divided 5850 by 600 to find that I had paid 9.75 NPs per salary for each of those plushies that made it to the warehouse.

My raw goods prices were: 158 for a roll of green fabric, 159 for neocotton, 1461 for gems, and 389 for paper bags. The plushies used 3 rolls of green fabric, so the total cost for raw goods was 2483 NPs per 100, or 24.83 each.

The total cost was 37.36 per plushie, and they sold out for 54 nps, for a profit of just over 16 NPs per plushie.

Later, when you are producing more plushies, your salary per plushie can drop to 4-5 nps per plushie, resulting in more profits.

Now what?
Once you get going, you won't have to calculate the cost per plushie every time you build. You'll get an idea of what raw goods prices are profitable, and which plushies sell faster than other… and which sell for more. As plushies rise in supply, however, their prices will fall, so you never quite know exactly what will happen.

Sample games

Michele
m_evard at NeoPets

Thanks to sirinja, rosebud2554, parkerchempro and melibunni for sharing their game details for this guide, and to all my PT friends who have made this into a social game! Thanks always to flighttime for a fun game -- and for changing it so often, to keep it fresh!