The Magic (Tradecraft)

Back in my day... we bought booster packs or a starter deck. There was one deck, and you didn't need another one once you had your one. You had started. We had no idea what a booster "box" contained, how many packs or what it cost. Heck, boosters could have came in bags for all we knew. Booster bags.

There was also no World Wide Web, no Ebay and no "net decking" to tell you what to build. There were no well known Magic tournaments either. You played with your friends around a kitchen table, although tables were beginning to show up in game stores too. We lived in caves, subsisting on melted snow, dreaming of a time when we could spend hours a day arguing about nothing on the Internet (in a more pleasing graphic rich format). My lawn was just starting to bloom, so no need to ask folks to get off it. The year was 1994.

I mention this because I sell a ridiculous amount of Magic: The Gathering at my store and I had no idea how I was selling it until I recently ran the numbers. Sure, we sell singles. Even back in my day we would buy some out of the case. I was especially fond of French versions and I recall building a really cool French vampire deck so I could beat up my friends. We had been playing games like Dungeons & Dragons for years, but as young adults, we didn't have the huge blocks of time to devote to that game any longer. Magic filled that gap and kept us together as a group.

 At the store, we've only recently started getting more serious about singles, even selling them online , but I never expected them to be our best seller. My number one selling product in the store is used cards. I'm still trying to wrap my head around that.

Magic boxes are close behind, and if you ignore the few points of online sales of singles, boxes are the actual best seller. Our store strategy has always been to appeal to casual players. But what does it say when singles and box sales outstrip packs and casual products? I'm not sure if it means we've lost our casualness or if casual players are now more inclined to dip into the singles collection or gamble on boxes.

Many, if not most game stores focus on single sales. I reluctantly followed suit, getting nervous every time my staff made a big buy. Then I ran the numbers. A solid turn rate, how many times a year I sell through inventory, is perhaps 4-5 for things like board games and RPGs. I ran the numbers for our singles collection. Then I ran the numbers again. That can't be right. 50. 50 turns a year. That's like taking our entire Magic singles library, and selling them to a dude (or dudette) nearly once a week. In reality there are cards that fly through our collection, selling as soon as they're received, while other cards have never sold at all. Our recent foray into online sales saw those leave us, with a nice sales bump.  But 50 turns... It's why we have backpack dealers and stores buying point of sale machines that handle Magic singles first and everything else second.

If I sound kind of ignorant as a store owner, that's because I've resisted the pull of Magic and especially singles. We are strongly diversified, enough so that Magic could fall off the planet and we would still be here (the game trade might implode though). The mercenary nature of a lot of players has made me reluctant to engage 100% with this subculture, and that's what it is, a full fledged subculture. It's an independent subculture where judges report to the mother ship, not me, and players see Magic product as a commodity, available instantly from the lowest bidder. It's a pretty sandy foundation on which to build a business.

Magic singles are the Bitcoin of the game trade. My landlord will take neither in payment for the rent, yet I'm supposed to believe a surplus of either makes me wealthy. As of a few years ago, I've handed Magic over to my expert employees to manage, following the money rather than my 1994 concept of how things should be. I've been happy with the results as they've doubled our Magic sales from just a few years ago. It's nothing like Magic-centric stores, but it's a wonder to watch.

I've also been happy to see the Magic community come together and support the store. Our expansion project, at least the money to get it started, was done with Magic money. When it was finally built, I approached the community with arms open. This is yours. You built this. As many events as you can maintain, we'll run those events. And they've managed it four nights a week. It has come a long way from those days around the kitchen table with my friends.

Faith in Humanity

Before owning a store, there was such a thing as having "faith in humanity." Most people were generally good and kind and well meaning. Owning a store showed how easy it it was for supposedly good people to become so-called "bad people," to steal and lie when the opportunity presented itself. The line is perilously thin between honest and dishonest. It's not some colossal battle of wills between an angel and devil on each shoulder. It's just opportunity.

If you haven't owned a store, there's no way I'll convince you this is true. There's no way I'll budge your faith. I accept that. If you do own a store, you know what I'm talking about. The familiar knife in the back. The smiling regular who spends a fortune in your store who you still discover steals on the side. The employee you took into your home who robbed you blind. The guy, now this story is totally true, who you catch walking out of your store with two hundred dollar army boxes under each arm, who blames you because his in-store D&D group is now down a player because you banned him.

When owning a store, there is no longer faith in humanity. Faith is belief and you now have demonstrable proof. The vast majority of people will make the wrong choice if given the opportunity. It's about 90%, 10% who will always steal and 80% when given the opportunity. How you engage with this fact determines how you'll view people going forward and whether you'll be happy or not. You will give up your Faith for a philosophy of trust, but verify. It's easy to become bitter when coming to grips with daily betrayal. If you want to own a store, know this loss of faith, this change in philosophy, will be a psychological price far higher than your initial investment.

Is It Beachworthy?

I love my staff and my customers and my hobby, but the beating heart of my business is the processes and procedures that keep it running. The ultimate goal is for me to be able to sit on a beach and have my business run smoothly. The beach is a metaphor, because if you know anything about me, I would go nuts lying on an actual beach.

The beach represents my ability to run a second business, to go on vacation, to retire, to increase my operational prowess without being laden down by poor processes and procedures. It's being able to do all processes of my business at a time of my choosing and have smooth running procedures back home that don't create exceptions in the system.

The value of my business, it's worth to other people, will fundamentally be about its beachworthiness. If the business only operates with me in it, like so many game stores, the value of the business is what you could get in a weekend fire sale. If it requires me to periodically fight fires or uncover a missing invoice because they're hidden in a box, the value of my business is severely diminished. If it's profitable while I'm on the beach, we go from fire sale to a business valuation that looks like a healthy retirement portfolio.

Getting my business beachworthy, unfortunately, requires my business partners, notably distributors and publishers, to have beachworthy processes and procedures. As my business grows, I tend to discard partners who are not beachworthy, or elements of their business that are not compatible with my very basic goals of reclining on a beach. So let's take a look at where my partners tend to fall short:

Invoicing. Is your invoicing, your fundamental process for getting paid, consistent with industry standards or are you behind or ahead of the curve? Both being behind, such as randomly tossing invoices in boxes, or being ahead, such as electronic invoices only, are painful exceptions for your beachworthy partners. 

Ask your finance people if they believe customers are paying on time and I'll bet you they'll say no. So maybe try an experiment. Maybe put your invoices in a flap outside of the first box. If you do that already, perhaps print invoices on pink paper so it stands out. If you're invoices are electronic only, compare your dating to before you became so sophisticated and see if perhaps you should go back. Can a minimum wage game store employee with six weeks of training spot and process your invoices or are they getting lost?

Sales. How does your customer, sitting on the beach, learn about new products to buy from you? Are you still sending paper? Did you get a request to forward that to the beach or is it sitting in a stack of old Uline catalogs? Are you relying on calling beachgoers to speak with them about things? Have you noticed how they avoid your calls? 

Beachworthy businesses have no time for these interruptions. Whatever it is they're doing, they're doing at their own pace, at their own chosen time. Find consistent ways to inform them of new releases. Follow up on the hits that are important for them to know, as a value add, rather than bombarding them with paid marketing messages from companies they have no interest in. 

Pre orders should be funneled to a website where that information is visible, changeable (to a particular date) with clear indications of shipment times. If you don't have this, the beachworthy business will be forced to move to someone who does. The more beachworthy, the more likelihood of switching. Beachworthy businesses have all the money, by the way.

Clear Processes. Beachworthy businesses have staff with assigned tasks. One of the biggest mistakes of a game supplier is expecting crossover. They envision the game store as a one person operation, rather than a bundle of processes and procedures spread across a large staff. If the person running events is asked to place orders, or the order person is asked to perform event related activities, you've crossed the streams of the beachworthy business and it's likely what you're asking won't reliably happen in that business. Know what you're asking and who you need to handle the task. 

Finally, be aware of who is beachworthy and who is not and find ways to add value to their businesses while they are on the beach. A strong partner will remind the beach goer of events, products, and even upcoming seasonal issues. They might be more flexible when the customer is close to the free freight requirements. This might sound like doing their job for them, but it's easy to lose focus when you're not physically present in your stores every day. There is likely a program worth developing for such stores, which are also likely to be your biggest accounts.

This may sound like special favors for big accounts, but all stores can become more beachworthy with better processes and procedures from distributors and publishers. Beachworthy is another word for valuable, after all, and removing your exceptions and idiosyncrasies from their operation directly contributes to that value.

Good Luck and Tight Lines

There's not enough capital.

Publishers underprint their products. They would like to print more, but they have limited resources and for the mid level publishers, perhaps too large a portfolio.

Like tired fish swimming up a narrow stream, there can only be so much product in the distribution channel. The channel itself is a bottleneck that restricts available fish. As fish enter the distribution stream, I need to decide on my catch of the day. How deeply do I want salmon? Will my supply of carp last through it's inevitable demand?

I could curse the river, and it's narrowness and how it tends to twist and turn giving advantage to some fish over others. If it were only wider, I curse. And maybe deeper. But the real problem is my own. Despite the shortcomings of the stream, the number of fish far outstrips my meager ability to catch what I need. If I only had another line, perhaps I could satisfy all the demand. My problem is I am also undercapitalized, so I have to pick winners and losers among an embarrassment of riches, and hope for the best.

The customer in my shop care nothing about concepts like capitalization, they just want their fish. Some even want exotic saltwater fish that don't enter the stream, but occasionally I'll be tricky and find a way to get those as well, direct from the deep sea fisherman. The most loyal customers will buy from me, if I have the fish they want, but will declare they're heading out to sea to find a catch of their own, if I can't provide.

I sadly nod and wish them well on their journeys. "Good luck and tight lines," I tell them. I want them to be satisfied with their catch, but I know eventually, if I send them out to sea enough times, they'll get a taste of that salt air and they'll stop buying fish from me. The secret to my trade is turning people into occasional fish buyers faster than I turn them into fishermen.