Wednesday, June 25, 2025

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.

Monday, June 23, 2025

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

Wednesday, June 18, 2025

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.



Tuesday, June 3, 2025

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.