Remote Manage: Another Look

After years of running my game store, I now manage it remotely. Here’s what that actually requires—and what I’ve learned along the way.

Process Improvement

For years, I met weekly with my manager to tackle problems big and small—special orders, maintenance issues, even a broken bathroom door. A consistent agenda meant no blind spots.

That discipline built a culture of excellence. We don’t tolerate broken things or process loopholes. While the "broken window theory" may be discredited, I believe problems attract more problems. Apathy grows in environments with broken systems. Small issues signal a bigger decline—something we actively fight. We have a premium store mindset and we better live up to that.

Excellent Management and Staff

My best managers have come from within. That’s because our staff are taught our values from day one. Outside hires? It’s a coin toss—about 50/50. And when those hires fail, it’s often due to value misalignment, not skill.

Good managers are worth more when you’re remote. I compensate mine better than if I were present every day. Why? Because turnover is disruptive, especially when you want the freedom to travel. It’s vastly cheaper to retain great people than to replace them.

IT Infrastructure

I’ve built my system for remote work:

• Fast internet at home and at the store and when I'm remote (with failover backup).

• A robust POS system (Lightspeed) optimized for physical retail, not online sales like Shopify.

• MacBook Pro for longevity—mine last 5–8 years.

• Automated payroll, 401K, workers comp, and utility payments.

• Bills paperless or forwarded to my home. E-banking emphasis, which is a given nowadays.

• When I lived in Mexico for four months, staff scanned and emailed physical mail, usually just a few items a month. Meanwhile, I moved every account possible online.

Distributors are only just now catching up with uploadable orders—something promised back in 2004. But I can do nearly everything from anywhere.

Simplified Processes

There’s always a tension between customer service and process exceptions. Card singles, for example, demand airtight oversight: theft control, inventory limits, strict buying guidelines. We’re not doing singles right now. We will again, but only with strong systems in place.

Same with online shipping. It's an obvious revenue stream, but requires robust oversight. Right now, we’re not ready. Those are low-hanging fruit for our next expansion.

Staying Informed

If you manage remotely, go to at least one trade show a year. I don’t, but I compensate by being plugged into the social media hive mind. I’m constantly watching what other stores are doing. Most of it isn’t relevant. Some of it is gold.

I don’t speak to sales reps anymore. Allocations are the name of the game: Pokémon, Games Workshop, Magic—all allocated. Final Fantasy Magic was an exception, a rare opportunity where my nerve was the only limitation. My store is big enough that allocations are annoying but manageable. Bigger stores feel the pinch significantly more.

Innovation Will Slow

If you want real innovation, you’ll have to show up and do it yourself. That’s the remote owner's dilemma. There’s only so much innovation you can expect others to initiate. That’s why I still have “low-hanging fruit” waiting to be plucked.

You must accept some inefficiency. Your staff won’t have your OCD. Nobody will care as much as you. You have to be okay with that. "This is fine."

Growth Trade-Off

Stores with on-site owners will likely grow twice as fast as mine. Remote ownership means something else matters more to you: family, travel, gaming, your time. That’s fine. But it comes at a cost. You have to be willing to accept that.

Many owners eventually burn out and close shop. Remote management is a solution only if your store is worth the effort. Most stores aren’t.

Stop Trying to Make It Happen

Here’s a piece of advice I recently got: If you’ve tried everything, turned an issue every which way, and still can’t make it work, let it go.

That doesn’t mean you’ll never do it. It just means it’s not time. Don’t force it. Choose what’s working, and move on. Not being able to wrap your head around a problem so you can change it is the answer. The answer is no.

Final Thought

Remote store management is entirely possible, but it requires structure, support, and a willingness to let go. Growth will slow. Some things won’t get done. You will not be the best at anything, at least not for long, and you'll need to be very conscious of when your Unique Value Proposition becomes simply Useful, and your Useful Value Proposition becomes obsolete. For me, the trade-offs are worth it.

Thoughts on Expansion

 What Comes Next: Six Paths for the Store

I’ve got two years left on my lease, and I’m beginning discussions with property management about the future. My challenges with expansion are the same ones many established stores face.

One Store or Two?

Opening a second store is tempting. It solves the problem of expanding without tampering with a successful formula. But it introduces new problems—management complexity, operational drag, and the unknown. I tell people I only know how to start a store wrong. Could I do it right this time? Sure, in the sense of “do as I say, not as I did.” But do I have the interest and energy to launch something truly new in the same space? Not really.

The Case for Bigger

A larger store has always been my ideal. Bigger stores leverage systems: policies, procedures, staff expertise. I can keep everything in one store in my head. Two stores? They give me literal bad dreams. But a larger single location? That’s manageable at almost any size.

Still, expansion is risky. I run a profitable business. I’m heading toward retirement. Why would I jeopardize that with a high-stakes expansion? I’m not going back to IT after 20 years out of the game. I can’t live on a “game trade adjacent” salary.

I’m wearing golden handcuffs—both the paycheck and the business model. My salary can’t be replicated. My current space includes a self-financed mezzanine that effectively saves us $3,300 a month in rent. If you had a stock portfolio paying $3,300/month in dividends, you’d think twice about touching it.

Still, the need is real: we don’t need more game space. We need more retail.

Scenario 1: Elevation and Separation

We could turn our downstairs event space into retail. Our upstairs space would remain game space, and we’d expand into a third unit for events. But the catch is we’d need to install an elevator. The unique setup makes this possible—but not cheap or easy. We could do this now.

Scenario 2: Wait Out a Neighbor

One neighboring tenant isn’t going anywhere—too much invested in their buildout. But the other’s lease is up in 2029 and may be negotiable. If so, we’d add 3,000 square feet of retail space, with rent increasing by about $12,000 a month.

The goal? Use the next two years to build sales and optimize inventory, testing whether our current customer base can support that much additional space. Can a suburban game store double its retail footprint and remain viable? I need some time to find out and 2029 might be too tight.

Scenario 3: Moving

I have a spreadsheet for moving to a larger space. Originally, it was a “sometime in 2033” idea. But with a 25% sales increase this year, that move feels closer. I’m 57. I imagine one major move before retiring sometime after 70. By then, I project the store to be doing over $5 million annually. I’d rather not move, but long-term survival may demand it.

Scenario 4: Buying a Building

Buying sounds like the smart move. But have you looked at commercial property lately? In my city, there are two available: one in the middle of nowhere for $2.6 million, and one prime location for $4.5 million. They're both between 7,500 and 8,500 square feet. A 10% down payment means needing $260,000 to $450,000 upfront. The first is plausible, just barely. The second is fantasy. And that's the entire market right now. Owning a building seems like a great retirement asset, if you can buy one.

Scenario 5: Stay and Optimize

Use every inch of vertical space. Dramatically increase inventory. Ride the sales trajectory until growth forces us to move. It’s a rational plan. But something in me resists. It feels like saying “enough.” It assumes growth has limits. Maybe that’s true. But maybe it’s just fear in disguise.

Scenario 6: Sell

I have a number. What’s yours? Not necessarily a dollar amount, but a concept—maybe five times net? A year of gross? Everyone in this business should have a number. And with each year that passes, mine becomes more interesting. Maybe I'll head a company that buys up successful game stores. Wouldn't that be a surprising scenario.

Six Months of Facebook Posts

 Worth posting, more or less... 

I post most things on Facebook because that's where the eyeballs are, and I'll get interaction, which is how I learn nowadays. This is around 25 pages in a Word document. Formatting it using ChatGPT was way more work than I expected, but it's readable.

Facebook Page:

https://www.facebook.com/garyraybdg1

Why Do You Need to Be Great at This?

One time in grad school, I gave a ride to a Korean Buddhist monk. He was older than me, soft-spoken but perceptive, and asked if I planned to become a professor. I told him no. I had considered it. At the time, I was fascinated by Central Asian Buddhism, a field that demanded fluency in Chinese, Tibetan, and Uyghur. And because nearly all the scholars working in that space were Japanese, it also meant mastering my academic nemesis: Nihongo.

My fascination was sincere, but my aptitude for languages lagged behind my curiosity. In hindsight, I suspect I was drawn to the field because the path was so impossibly difficult. There’s a kind of romance in chasing something you know you’ll never catch. I told him, “No. I’m not great at languages, and if I were to be a professor, I’d want to be a great one, not just another mediocre academic.”

He listened, paused, and then, in broken English, asked me a question that pierced straight through my carefully assembled logic:

“Why do you need to be great at this?”

My brain sputtered.

There are parts of ourselves we knowingly try to improve—our weaknesses, our habits, our interpersonal skills. But then there are the unexamined convictions buried in our operating system, deep beliefs that we mistake for truths. For me, the need to be great at something wasn’t just a goal. It was a foundational belief, an assumed necessity. Even though I was only 23 and demonstrably not great at anything, this belief shaped how I saw my potential and self-worth.

The monk's question was a kind of koan—a riddle not meant to be answered directly, but to be lived with, puzzled over, and slowly absorbed. “Why do you need to be great at this?” wasn’t just a passing curiosity. It was a gift, one that would take decades to unpack.

At first, it hit me like a challenge. But over time, I realized it wasn’t a test—it was an invitation to freedom. The belief that I had to be great was, in fact, a source of suffering. It was preventing me from engaging with the things I loved unless I could already excel at them. What if my curiosity and my modest talents, applied with diligence, were enough? What if good could be good enough?

That koan stayed with me.

I eventually finished my graduate work. My honors thesis included a zany chapter analyzing Buddhist enlightenment theories through the lens of Ries and Trout’s Immutable Laws of Marketing. It was filler, really—more playful than academic—but it slipped through. Turns out Buddhist studies professors have a surprisingly sharp sense of humor.

One of those "immutable laws" said that if you can’t be number one in a category, create a smaller niche where you can be. If you can’t be the top shoemaker, be the best running shoemaker. If you can’t be the best car company, be the best sports car company. Find a segment you can own. Even if that means being “the best dad on the block,” you’ve staked out your ground.

This marketing maxim harmonized with the monk’s question. It gave me a conceptual framework to accept the idea of not needing to be great in the abstract. I didn’t need to dominate the whole mountain—just find a trail I could enjoy climbing.

Over the years, I’ve continued to deconstruct this need for greatness. I grew up in a supportive household. My siblings were gifted, driven, successful. My parents’ story was one of bootstrapping from hardship to comfort. The idea of being “great” was never forced on me, but it was implied. It hovered in the background like a destiny waiting to be fulfilled. And it always felt expected.

But what about happiness?

As I tell my son: My job is to raise you so you're moral and self-supporting. Happiness is your job. It’s not guaranteed, and I can’t tell you how to get there. I can only point out the connection: moral behavior and self-reliance often lead to conditions where happiness can arise. Being great? That’s incidental. It may show up as a byproduct of living well, or not at all. Either is fine.

If greatness arrives, wonderful. If not, also fine. Happiness, too, is impermanent—welcome it when it visits, but don’t expect it to stay. And whatever it is, I can’t give it to my son, and it’s not the end goal of a spiritual path.

“Why do you need to be great at this?” remains my koan. I still nibble at the edges, still catch myself wrestling with that impulse. I enjoy defining greatness in others. But needing to be great? I’ve mostly let that go. It only took about 35 years of quiet reflection and stubborn internal debate.

These days, I carry a new koan:

“Does this bring me freedom?”

That’s the better question now. It’s what I use to guide decisions, big and small. One of my favorite corollaries is: “Debt is the promise of future work.” It’s a reminder that every obligation takes a piece of freedom with it, and that freedom—not greatness—may be the better compass.

Talking to Myself

 AI: Hey Gary, sounds like things are going well. You mentioned being up 20% last month and 25% year-to-date—that’s some serious growth. Are you feeling optimistic?

Gary:
Yeah, overall it’s been a strong year. We’re firing on all cylinders. That said, I’m seeing growing issues with product availability. A wide variety of board and card games are just missing. Not from lack of demand—but from lack of supply.

AI:
Interesting. Is that mostly China-based stuff, or broader than that?

Gary:
It’s both China and Europe. And I didn’t invest in the European products when this started. I had to make a choice and leaned into games from China when the tariff hit 145%. I didn’t do that expecting sales—I did it to hedge against unavailability.

AI:
So it was a supply continuity move, not a demand one. Have those hedged games started selling faster now that availability’s drying up?

Gary:
Not yet. I think they’re still in the pipeline—on store shelves, in warehouses. But once that inventory is gone, I expect a sharp spike in demand. It could also be that we’re seeing a broader consumer slowdown and my sales are outperforming what’s happening elsewhere.

AI:
Right, your “normal” might be stronger than the rest of the market, so you’re not seeing the same signs. Have you seen any distributor signals that a major wave of product shortages is coming?

Gary:
Distributor communication is usually vague, so not much there. But availability is murky enough that I suspect it’s post–Lunar New Year disruption and shipping shortfalls. Products just aren’t showing up.

AI:
That lines up. A lot of freight lanes were disrupted, and smaller publishers probably didn’t have the cash to rebook space. Are you seeing this reflected in pre-orders or early solicitations?

AI:
Not directly. What I am seeing is a lot of Q1 board game clearance, and a larger-than-usual glut from that post-holiday period. It feels like board game demand pulled back earlier this year and we're still dealing with the overhang.

AI:
That could definitely be the case. If that dip started in January, and you're seeing it now as empty shelves + clearance, you’re probably looking at a lagging demand signal. Are you still seeing strong sell-through in other categories?

Gary:
CCGs are still the engine, especially sets like Pokemon: Destined Rivals and Magic: Final Fantasy. Those are "high" normal releases for us, but I can’t adjust my orders close to release, so I’m locked in. That’s where the bulk of our budget went. If there was a real slowdown, my Open to Buy would show a surplus—and it hasn’t.

AI:
So the budget’s fully utilized, but inventory is disappearing in some areas and still healthy in others. That suggests the system is stressed, not necessarily demand. Any worries about where that money gets reallocated?

Gary:
That’s the issue. My Open to Buy doesn’t discriminate by category, so if board games vanish and RPGs are available, money shifts there. But that’s not a 1:1 demand swap. The RPG audience can’t absorb 50% more product. We risk over-investing in available categories that aren’t necessarily the strongest performers.

AI:
That’s a subtle but dangerous trend. If inventory starts chasing availability instead of demand, it creates imbalance that could hurt you in Q3 and Q4. Have you started capping some categories?

Gary:
Not formally, but I’m watching it. I'm cautious about restocking low-velocity categories too aggressively just because they’re in stock.

AI:
Good call. Have you adjusted prices much this year?

Gary:
We’ve mostly passed on increases. Where we’re already above MSRP—like with paints or sleeves—we’ve absorbed some of it. But overall, the expectation is to raise prices where it makes sense. It hasn’t been a big change yet, though.

AI:
That’s a smart balance. Hold the line where customer sensitivity is high, pass it through elsewhere. Have distributors changed anything about allocations or terms?

Gary:
Not really. They're just out of a lot of stuff. I threw what money I could at high-risk inventory, but now the second- and third-tier products are gone too.

AI:
Let’s talk publishers for a second. You mentioned some scary numbers—25% may go out of business, and half may shift to DTC?

Gary:
Yeah. The industry survey results were grim. A lot of publishers won’t survive the tariffs, at least when they were surveyed at the 145% level, and those that do might bypass distribution entirely. And there’s no domestic production solution waiting in the wings—nothing scalable. We’re probably looking at a permanent reduction in the number of SKUs available to hobby retail.

AI:
That’s seismic. You’re not just managing inventory anymore—you’re managing the slow collapse of part of the supply chain.

Gary:
Exactly. And there's no elegant way to solve it. If publishers disappear or bypass us, the game changes. Even if demand holds, we won’t have product to meet it.

AI:
Sounds like this is the summer to tread carefully. 

Pro Active Price Increases

 Consumers see retailers raising prices ahead of tariffs as something unethical. It seems to depend on whether they like your store. If the retailer is dealing with other issues, such as Target, the criticism tends to be much harsher.

However, If I had to absorb the full cost of expected tariff increases up front, it would put me out of business. The added costs are about twice my annual profits. Prices need to go up on existing inventory before you restock your shelves.

When I hear about an upcoming price increase, it is essential that I adjust my prices before I sell out of the current stock and have to restock at higher costs. If I can do this for about half my inventory, I estimate I can neutralize the initial cost impact of the tariffs. If I wait and take a "power to the people" approach, my business will not survive.

There is a downside, of course. Higher prices lead to lower sales. As we have discussed before, a ten percent price increase typically results in a twelve percent drop in sales. Larger increases are even worse, which means many products may need to be cut entirely.

To give a specific example, I sell Pathfinder, a roleplaying game published by Paizo and manufactured in China. If those imports continue, I expect to see a fifty-eight percent price increase and a sixty-nine percent decline in demand. That would be enough to make the product unsustainable in my store. In a case like that, I may keep prices the same but stop reordering altogether. Paizo is currently one of my top 20 publishers, so I'm hoping they move production.

Right now, I am stocking up as if it were the holiday season. We have just come off a post-election sales boom, likely fueled by just such an uncertainty. Trust the "wisdom of crowds" I guess. Among my investors, there is ongoing debate about whether to hold back spending or go all in on products most likely to be affected.

My approach is somewhere in the middle. I do not have enough capital to buy with the holidays in mind, but I do have enough to build a small cushion. That might help me weather a short-term disruption. I would not be surprised to see a surge in national wholesale spending in the second quarter as others try to get ahead of these changes. If you don't have the cash, spending close attention to price increases and long term viability of product lines, should be enough to survive unscathed.

Whatever your strategy, you need to be pro active with these price increases. Your customers may appreciate you being the last person standing at the low price, but you're probably not going to have enough money to survive.

Trump Tariffs and the Flight to Quality

My first impression is that the new tariffs will increase my store’s cost of goods by around 23 percent, most of which will be passed on to consumers. I already had the spreadsheet made.

There will be a big attempt to pivot away from problematic products. This 23 percent amounts to hundreds of thousands of dollars in what amounts to a tax, just pushed down the chain to the end user.

Here’s what I expect to happen:

• Some games will become clearly untenable because they’re simply too expensive to carry. An $80 Catan? Sure, we'll keep carrying it, but we won’t be selling nearly as many.

• Other games may seem viable at first, but as customer behavior shifts, we’ll end up stuck with them. That means we need to be more cautious. This always happens during a recession, and...

• There will likely be a recession.

• Inflation is likely to spike.

• Unemployment could double, over 7%. That’s what economists are predicting.

We’ll probably see a “flight to quality,” where people adjust their spending habits. Big purchases like cars and vacations might get postponed. But hobby games? People will still buy them—even more so, even at 23 percent higher prices. Hopefully from me still.

This will definitely change our product mix. Board games and non–Games Workshop miniature lines could start to disappear from our shelves.

If I had to guess, I’d go through our best-selling board games, cut projected sales in half, and keep only the ones that still meet our metrics. I think about 20 percent of our current lineup will make the cut. We carry a lot of marginal board games. We carry a lot of marginal everything.

It’s possible we no longer carry marginal things—anything I wouldn't order by the case. That’s not good news for the game trade.

We’ll probably survive. We might even prosper. We’re selling life preservers on the Titanic. Great! Until your socks get wet.

This is not madness. It’s simply a regressive tax that helps fund tax cuts for the wealthy. There was nothing wrong with the previous economic order. Nobody was getting taken advantage of. Manufacturing isn’t going to change locations. The job market won’t fundamentally shift. We certainly won’t be hiring for a while.