Report on Ballarat Business Confidence Analysis - MIS770 Assignment 2

This report analyzes the business confidence of Ballarat City Council's local businesses, based on a sample of 150 businesses. The analysis, conducted for the MIS770 course, involves interpreting data from questionnaires to provide insights into the marketplace. Key areas of focus include the proportion of businesses with growth strategies, the number of employees, the age of managers, and the likelihood of new business openings. Statistical methods, including confidence intervals and probability calculations, are used to derive conclusions about the regional business landscape, including the impact of growth strategies on revenue and the required sample size for future surveys. The report provides a detailed overview of the data, assumptions, and findings to assist in business growth and expenditure-related activities.

Introduction:
This memo is in reply to your memo same subject. We need to analyze given data in the
provided excel sheet, interpret and appraise output based on the questionnaires. As a specialist
analyst for Business Intelligence (BI), one of the municipal authorities named Ballarat City
Council has asked to analyze a random sample of 150 businesses in the region to understand the
marketplace confidence of the Ballarat businesses that support their local community and come
up with insights. Ballarat City Council requested an overview of the people that local businesses
employ in their region and estimating the proportion of all businesses in their region employed
growth strategy, businesses registered in their region that do have a growth strategy, average
number of staffs for businesses with and without a growth strategy and age of the managers,
likelihood of opening more than 15 businesses and less than equal to 5, sample size for next
year’s survey.
To: Ballarat City Council
From: Nick Black
Subject: Response to further analysis of Business confidence and expectation
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These are the assumptions considered while estimating for mean
 Population is normally distributed
 A confidence interval of 95% is assumed
The first question is about the summary of the sample data. Here we summarizes different variables and
observations. The data consist of 150 local businesses which have been given names as retail trade,
accommodation and food services and many more. These businesses are managed and run by business
managers and owners who comprises of both females and males in which the number of male’s
managers are higher than female’s managers. The ages of business managers are also summarized such
that the eldest business manager is 77 years. Most businesses have been operating for more than ten
years with the businesses that operates for a short period has operated for two years. Most people are
employed as casual workers whereas some businesses are self- operated.
For question two when determining the proportion of all businesses in the region that had a growth
strategy on the percentage sales, after analyzing the data using 95% confidence interval the proportion
of all businesses in Ballarat City Council region that have a growth strategy is between 52.75% and
66.67%.
On question 3 using the 76% confidence interval we find that there is evidence to suggest that the
proportion of local businesses that do have a growth strategy could be less than $ 3442 and therefore
impacting on revenue in the region. Using the 76% confidence interval the proportion of the number of
staff for businesses with a growth strategy is lying between 28 and 41 and without is between 10 and 25
and therefore business with a growth strategy is more successful when the number of employees is
high. For question 4 we realize that most managers for these local businesses are young since their
average age is approximately 48 years which is indeed less than 50 years.

Moreover, on question 5 we observed that an average of 10 business open each year and here we
assume that the mean is 10 and standard deviation is 2 and therefore we calculate the probability using
z table, the probability that next year more than 15 businesses will open is 0.9938 and the probability
that the number of business that open will be 5 or less is 0.0062. On concluding, as we respond to
question 6, when this survey is done once again next year the sample size for the estimate average
number of people that local business employ to within 4 employees is 85 and that of the estimate
percentage of business with a growth strategy to within 2% is 25.
Summary
Analysis have been done on the provided questions I believe that this detailed analysis meet the
requirements, in case of any additional analysis you are free to contact me. Am hopeful that this will
give insights on expenditure and related activities to assist in business growth.