For more than 30 years, Andromeda Simulations International has been helping people understand how business works — not through spreadsheets, intimidating lectures or abstract financial terminology, but through hands-on simulations that transform business finance into something visual, collaborative, deeply practical and, in many instances, life-changing beyond the scope of work.
The company, known for its flagship simulation Income|Outcome and its pioneering approach to “visual finance,” has spent the past three decades partnering with Fortune 500 companies, universities and business schools worldwide to deliver simulations that build stronger financial literacy and overall business acumen. Along the way, it has helped organizations break down siloed thinking, improve communication and create cultures where employees understand not just what they do, but how their decisions affect the business.
“We give people a way to visualize business activity and business finance concepts that many people struggle with because they don’t have a way of seeing the big picture,” says Robin Helweg-Larsen, owner of Andromeda Simulations. Robin co-founded the organization with Eliza Helweg-Larsen, who serves as chief creative officer, in 1993-94.
Since that time, what began as a passion project for Robin and Eliza has evolved into a globally recognized learning organization whose simulations are delivered in a dozen languages across industries and continents.
Yet despite the company’s reach, its core philosophy has remained consistent: People learn business best when they can see it, experience it and connect it to the real world.
Better business acumen for all
Andromeda Simulations is built on the core tenet that business acumen isn’t just for those in finance — it’s for everyone in the company, because everyone makes decisions and impacts results. When people understand how a business works, they make better choices, collaborate more effectively and contribute to success.
“It’s not just teaching people to understand business,” Eliza explains. “It’s about helping people understand how their decisions affect the results of their own department, influence the decisions made in other departments and ultimately affect the results of the business.”
For Andromeda, understanding financial statements, terminology and even the bigger picture is only the beginning. Their approach to business acumen has three essential elements: the ability to understand how the pieces of a business fit together, including knowing where to find the data and how to use it; making decisions with a clear expected outcome; and checking whether the financial results match what was expected.
“It’s not just teaching people to understand business. It’s about helping people understand how their decisions affect the results of their own department, influence the decisions made in other departments and ultimately affect the results of the business.”
Eliza Helweg-Larsen
Andromeda’s Income|Outcome family of board game business simulations, which are available to employees at every level of the organization, immerse participants in this same three-part process, guiding them to examine the components of a business, make deliberate decisions aimed at specific outcomes and take responsibility for those results.
“By putting participants in the position of managing all aspects of the business — bid preparation and sales, cash flow, working capital, operational improvements, day-to-day costs — they develop an understanding of the interrelationships of business activity,” Robin says. “By modeling everything they’re doing on a game board with all P&L items happening on one side and all balance sheet items, cash, receivables, inventories, payables, etc., on the other side, they’re able to understand financial statements by looking at them as simple, dynamic reflections of a company’s activity.”
And because business acumen develops over time — with repeated exposure, applied thinking and real-world decisions — Andromeda uses a learning continuum it calls “Survey to Mastery,” a practical way to match learning design to how people actually grow in their roles. This approach ensures every group can gain relevant and usable business acumen, no matter where they start, matching the learning experience to the audience, available time and desired outcomes.
“With our Survey to Mastery approach, a four-hour workshop provides a solid survey understanding of business finance,” Eliza says. “If there’s more time available, participants can explore increasingly advanced topics during the initial workshop. Or organizations can return later to build on that foundation, developing mastery over time through repeated learning and real-world application.”
Building a better business simulation
Andromeda’s flexible approach has evolved over more than three decades of experimentation, simplification, shrinking learning schedules, and changing client and learner needs. But it began with a simple observation: People understand their own jobs, but rarely see how their decisions connect to the success of the business.
Robin and Eliza saw that people often didn’t recognize the business consequences of everyday decisions. Traditional finance workshops weren’t helping people make those connections. So they designed a different approach — a simulation where the game board represented not just the company, but that company’s financial statements. It was a three-dimensional landscape of the income statement and balance sheet, and it allowed participants to see the financial impact of their decisions in real time.
In the beginning, Robin headed up classroom facilitation and primarily taught business finance workshops. Eliza would often observe these workshops from the back of the room — listening, thinking and taking notes.
“I trained as an engineer originally, and everything’s about process for me,” she says. “Simulations are a process, learning is a process, and that’s how I think about things. I am not very good at standing up in front of people and talking. I am pretty good at watching how people learn, and I’m really good at seeing where problems arise, where people aren’t really getting it, where they’re stuck.”
Robin adds: “When I was running workshops, we went around the world for our clients and our distribution network. We ran long ones, short ones, and they gave Eliza and me the opportunity to see what learning was and wasn’t happening and where we needed to make changes.”
Over time, clients began asking for something different than what they were receiving in the existing business finance workshops. Two early clients, in particular, helped shape what would become Income|Outcome.
One of the clients was AT&T, which had a site with 5,000 employees in Andover, Massachusetts. They wanted simulations where people were competing in teams, engaged and having fun. But the existing simulations that fulfilled those requirements tended to reward participants for developing a new product, selling it into a new country or making high-level strategic decisions, which wasn’t appropriate for the Andover site.
“Nobody at that site had that level of authority; they simply had to manage their costs, or they were facing being shut down and having production moved elsewhere,” Robin says. “So they wanted a game where they could compete to win but on factors that they themselves could manage rather than factors that were irrelevant to their job functions. Instead of product mix and geographic markets, we had them compete on costs and efficiencies.”
The second major influence was Michelin North America, which was undergoing a significant cultural transformation. Historically, business decisions had been driven primarily from Groupe Michelin in France, but Michelin North America was being asked to operate with greater independence and accountability.
The organization initially considered sourcing three separate simulations, which had been developed in three different countries and had different sets of dynamics for front-line employees, middle managers and senior managers. Andromeda proposed something radically different: a single simulation framework that could be adapted to match the level of decision-making authority participants had in the real world.
“The front-line employees would be competing on managing cost and cash flow and inventories in a shorter program,” Robin says. “With a longer program, you can let people set prices and expand capacity and market more actively. And for senior managers, they will be the ones who’ll be allowed to develop a new product and sell it into a new country. It would use the same game board visualization of business, but the rules would be tailored differently to allow learning to happen appropriately for the teams that were actually in the room at the same time.”
In effect, he says, both AT&T and Michelin were looking for the same thing: function-specific competition in a classroom simulation. And the impact both experienced was significant.
Michelin North America moved from losing half a billion dollars annually to becoming profitable within three years, Robin says. The organization licensed multiple versions of the simulation and rolled it out to thousands of employees globally. And today, Michelin still uses the simulation as part of its development efforts.
The partnership with Michelin drove a shift in Andromeda’s focus from “finance for non-finance managers” toward greater overall financial and business understanding. And over the decades, Andromeda saw the expectations and realities around training continue to evolve — one of the biggest being organizations’ demand for shorter learning experiences, which fueled Andromeda’s aforementioned Survey to Mastery approach.
Robin says they also streamlined their longer strategic simulations.
“We eliminated the repetitive work and kept the elements of surprise,” he explains. “That allowed us to save hours of time and still engage the highest-level thinkers.”
And after a few early attempts, what was once offered solely as an in-classroom workshop is now available online, as well.
“We started moving toward e-learning in 1998,” Eliza says. “We didn’t love it, so we dropped it. And then we tried again in about 2008 and didn’t love the results, so we dropped it again. In 2026 we’ve fully built out multiple variants of the online version where people are laughing and engaging with each other, and you can see the light bulbs going on.”
Today, Andromeda has built a global delivery model that combines a dedicated core team with an international network of experienced facilitators, partners and licensed organizations. This flexible structure enables the company to bring consistent, high-impact business acumen learning experiences to organizations around the world while drawing on local expertise and market knowledge.
Visual finance, flexibility and real-word results
Andromeda’s founders have a clear understanding of what sets their organization apart, and this starts with the simplicity and visual clarity of their simulation.
“Most business simulations are built around an operational flow,” Robin says. “We built ours where you can see the operational flow, but you can also see the actual income statement and balance sheet of the company at any point. Once people have absorbed the learning and the understanding of the dynamics and interactions, they can translate that to their real-world companies.”
That same visual approach extends beyond the classroom through Andromeda’s Visual Finance app. Available to both students and the broader public, the app models publicly traded companies using the same visual structure as the classroom simulation. It automatically calculates financial ratios, tracks the results over multiple years, provides definitions and lets users compare competitors. For private companies, users can enter their own financial data to analyze organizations and apply the same visual analysis.
Another of Andromeda’s key differentiators is the premium it places on tailoring learning and the simulation to its various audiences.
“We have the simulations working. Now what else can we do with them? How can we use the visualization and the Visual Finance app more appropriately to carry on the learning after?”
Robin Helweg-Larsen
“From the beginning, we didn’t think one size fit all,” Eliza says. “Different roles need different learning, and different time allocations dictate what you can teach. So we designed for both of those things.”
This resulted in a flexible simulation that can be geared up or down so the game reflects the level of decision-making people have in the real world.
“You can have front-line operators worrying about efficiency and cost and senior people worrying about the strategic issues but still use the same simulation,” Robin says.
Andromeda also continues expanding its industry-specific simulation models.
“There’s always new models to be built,” Robin says. “All companies have income statements and balance sheets, but they don’t have the same components of what’s important in them. So you have to make slight adjustments.”
Some companies use EBITDA rather than EBIT, he elaborates, or the cost of poor quality might be an important business dynamic, or it may be useful to model different customers with different needs.
“For Saudi Electricity Company, we give options for generating electricity from different fuels and renewables, all with different cost structures,” Robin says. “For an IT company, we have a version with no inventories, and capacity is constrained by the number of employees, not the amount of equipment. For hospitals, it’s bedspace, staff and specialists.”
But what Eliza and Robin hold near and dear is what happens after the workshops conclude: The ultimate measure of success is not whether participants can define financial terminology; it’s whether they think differently going forward. And the stories that stand out most to the founders are often deeply personal.
Eliza recalls a participant in Texas who had repeatedly failed to secure a second mortgage needed to pay for a child’s medical care. After attending a workshop, the participant organized his financial records the way teams did during the simulation and confidently explained his borrowing eligibility to a bank.
“He walked into the bank and said, ‘Here’s my financial information. I’m eligible to borrow this much,’” Eliza recalls. “And they gave it to him.”
Another story involved a Michelin employee who had spent years unsuccessfully trying to explain an operational improvement idea. After attending the simulation, he finally gained the financial language to communicate the business case. Within days, a waste stream that had previously cost the company money to dispose of became a new source of revenue.
“He could see it before, but he couldn’t express it,” Robin explains. “Once he went through the workshop, he could.”
Beyond the classroom, into the future
As Andromeda enters its fourth decade, a big question for Robin and Eliza is: How are we going to leverage the learning going forward?
“We have the simulations working,” Robin says. “Now what else can we do with them? How can we use the visualization and the Visual Finance app more appropriately to carry on the learning after?”
One initiative is the company’s “ROI Challenge” — a continue-the-learning resource designed to help learners identify, articulate and quantify business improvement opportunities. The handbook breaks ROI thinking into simple, approachable examples and exercises that encourage learners to estimate opportunities and communicate ideas confidently.
The biggest ongoing goal, however, is continuing to turn finance into common language — because Andromeda is not simply teaching accounting principles or financial terminology; it is helping organizations create a shared understanding of how their business works.
For Eliza and Robin, the real power of financial literacy lies in enabling people to communicate, collaborate and contribute more effectively. With global companies, the speed and accuracy of communication is a major competitive differentiator.
“If you don’t have the language, it doesn’t matter,” Eliza says. “It’s about people doing things better or differently because they have a common language and common understanding.”
That philosophy continues to shape every aspect of Andromeda’s work. Its simulations are designed to make finance visible, approachable and relevant. They are built around the idea that employees at every level can make better decisions when they understand how business functions as an interconnected system.
Andromeda’s founders still light up when they describe participants leaning over game boards, debating decisions, challenging one another and suddenly recognizing how all the pieces fit together. For a company built on the idea that business understanding should be visual, collaborative and empowering, those moments remain the clearest measure of success.
