What a stakeholder is: any group with a stake in what the business does

1. Having an interest means a decision by the business changes something that group cares about, such as its wages, its prices, its profit or the traffic on its street.
2. Edexcel names eight stakeholder groups, and they divide into two sets by where each group sits.
   1. Internal: shareholders, employees and managers, who put money, labour or decisions into the business itself.
   2. External: customers, suppliers, the local community, pressure groups and the government, who meet the business as buyers, sellers, neighbours, campaigners or regulators.
3. Every business has stakeholders whether it plans for them or not, from a market stall with one wholesaler and thirty regulars to Tesco with millions of shareholders and shoppers.

The internal stakeholders: what owners, staff and managers want

1. An internal stakeholder's objective follows from what they put into the business and what they stand to lose.
   1. Shareholders (owners): a return on the money they invested, taken as a share of the profit and as a rising share value, plus a say through their vote in how the business is run, because they carry the loss if it fails.
   2. Employees: secure jobs, fair pay, safe working conditions and training that leads to promotion, because one employer supplies their whole household income.
   3. Managers: the business to hit its sales and cost targets, since their salary, bonus and job depend on those figures, along with the budget and the staff needed to reach them.
2. Owners and managers are the same people in a sole trader, but in a large company the owners hire managers to run it, so the two objectives are held by two different sets of people.

The external stakeholders: what customers, suppliers, neighbours, campaigners and the state want

1. An external stakeholder's objective follows from the one relationship it has with the business.
   1. Customers: good quality at a fair price, a choice of products, and service they can rely on such as accurate delivery dates and an easy refund, because it is their own money being spent.
   2. Suppliers: regular repeat orders and payment in full on the agreed date, because their own cash flow has to cover their wages and rent whether the customer pays or not.
   3. The local community: jobs for local people and money spent in local shops, with as little noise, heavy traffic and pollution as possible, because residents live beside the site every day.
   4. Pressure groups: a change in how the business behaves on one specific issue, such as plastic packaging, animal welfare or the pay and conditions of the workers who make its products.
   5. The government: businesses that pay their corporation tax and VAT to HMRC, obey employment and consumer law, employ people and add to the growth of the economy.
2. Greggs shows how far apart these can sit: its customers want a hot roll for a low price, its suppliers want that order repeated every week, and the council wants the shop to control litter on the high street.

One person can sit in more than one group

1. Stakeholder groups are roles, not separate people, so the same person can hold two or three of them at once.
2. A woman who works at the Tesco store, owns Tesco shares through a pension and lives on the road behind it is a stakeholder three times over.
   1. Her objectives do not all agree: as an employee she wants a pay rise, as a shareholder she wants profit protected so dividends keep coming, and as a resident she wants the night deliveries stopped.
3. So identify the role someone is acting in before you state their objective, because the answer changes depending on which hat they are wearing.