Polar Ice LLC : A Look at the Successful Ingredients

Abstract

Polar Ice LLC, located in Sterling Heights, Michigan, produces and/or sells ice and dry ice. The author worked as a Product Distribution Manager, involved with every aspect of the company, as is the typical small business owner. While working there, he became very interested in what affects the sales of a small business. With a few ideas of what affects business, he set out to find what factor( s) have the greatest affect on business. Using data that obtained from Polar Ice and the National Weather Service, the author used SPSS 9.0 to run a regression to find out what factors really do affect this small business. Temperature, as one might imagine, has a strong effect on business. But he also found that the experience of the owners and general managers have a lot to do with sales as well. Combing these two factors, temperature and experience, the author calculated a line of regression that predicts sales accurately 70 % of the time.