Thursday, February 23, 2017

Growth and Books and Miniature Games

I'm on vacation, so of course I'm writing a blog post. Here are a few updates on what's going on:

Post Construction Growth
We spent $133K to build our two story game center with the hopes this would increase sales, grow the business, and solidify Black Diamond Games as a regional gaming hub. The ROI on this project meant we needed modest growth of around 5% to cover our costs within a five year window, our loan period. That didn't seem like a big ask. When I approached lenders, this 5% number is what I pitched, and since cash flow could already cover our loan payments, risk was minimized.

What we've had since construction completed is a sales increase of around 16% (February has been phenomenal, by the way). That's pretty good, considering our average growth was around 10%. That extra 6% is right on target for our ROI.

Expanding the game center has allowed us to run many more events, thanks to a legion of volunteers and our employee organizers. Magic went from one night a week to five nights a week. Board game nights are now twice a week with lots of activity. New events are being added all the time and existing events are growing, with some nights already packed like before.

We're poor, having paid off over $20K of cost overruns in December, but we're healthy and looking forward to the next challenge.


Writing the Book
I've got a publisher for the book I discussed writing. The book will have a dual focus. One aspect of the book will be a how-to of opening a profitable, hobby game store making a reasonable amount of money -- my way, as you've read about it here. The second focus of the book is a running commentary on all the mistakes, problems and surprises of starting and running my own store over the past 13 years. I made a ton of mistakes, almost lost my marriage and my house, and in the end survived, even managing to leverage an international bank over a barrel to get my way. Business taught me that.

There is a "do what I say" aspect to the book, combined with a "not as I do" element. The goal is to write a book my peers would want to read while also writing a book a prospective business owner would find useful. I personally can't read a business start up book. The letters don't even register as words any more and my brain shuts down.  Usually these two types of books are two very different things, but we'll try to combine them. Together they may even form a cohesive whole that's of interest beyond the game trade.


Miniature Games
We came to the difficult realization last year that we're not a miniatures store. We dropped Privateer Press (mostly) and stopped bringing in the miniatures game flavor of the month that inevitably brought heartache and a clearance sale. But have we really stopped selling miniatures?

Talking with other store owners, their concept of miniature games is a much expanded category. My category is narrow, comprising of unpainted models with rulesets. That leaves out a lot of pre-painted miniature games, not to mention things like Reaper Bones and D&D/Pathfinder miniatures.  I ran the reports and here's a pie chart, because everyone loves pie:



So when I look at this, I see what I see in every other game category. A strong market leader (40K) with half the pie, a strong secondary game encroaching on a quarter of sales (X-Wing) and everybody else. So maybe we are still a miniatures store.

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