Monday Morning Workflow

Here’s how my Monday morning ordering workflow goes. The first question is always: do I have money to buy anything? If you pay COD, that means real cash waiting in the bank for when the shipment arrives. I buy on terms or by credit card, so I ask a different question: is there room in the budget?

That budget is my Open to Buy (OTB) worksheet. With steady sales and discipline, if I only spend what’s available in OTB, I’ll pay my bills and stay profitable. Spend too much and profit slips. Spend too little and sales drop, which also hurts profit. When I delegated buying for a month while on a trip, my manager struggled to spend the full amount, which surprised me. It’s harder than it looks.

So what do I have to spend today? October is my slowest month, impervious to even the strongest new releases. Publishers seem to mark it off on their calendars. My store, like most, thrives on front-list releases. We can limp along on restocks and evergreen sellers, but we really come alive when there’s new hotness. October’s hotness is back loaded, all coming next week. But for now, I’ll ignore that storm on the horizon.

Looking at the numbers, I have $7,800 to spend today. That splits into restocks and new releases. Restocks are straightforward. I generate purchase orders based on reorder thresholds for each distributor. These thresholds shift constantly as items sell. Some go up, some go down, some disappear entirely. Inventory is a zero-sum game. I can’t add new things unless old things come off the list.

I prune throughout the day, but I also notice oddities when I see them on a PO. “What the heck is that?” Usually something from a first order that never moved. Most restocks are the usual suspects. Quantities might shift, but they’re safe bets.

I start with my CCG supplier at $3,100. They often have the best price on supplies, so I get that in first before higher cost suppliers get a bite. CCGs are my biggest category, so this is my biggest restock. Next comes my primary distributor at $650, but I pre-order everything from them, so that number can jump depending on new releases that ships. Budget-wise it averages out, but I often look overdrawn for a few days.

My secondary supplier is steady at $800. Then come the specialists: Games Workshop at $2,800, which I may get cut in half. If I'm really lucky, I'll get an invoice before it arrives. Then there's Asmodee with a "stub order" of $325 in restocks. I call it that because it's enough to get the ball rolling with new releases added on top of that.

That adds up to $7,625 of my $7,800 budget, assuming Games Workshop ships everything (they won’t), not counting $200–400 in new Asmodee releases, and not knowing what surprises my primary distributor might send. It’s messy. If I paid cash terms, it might even be stressful. My budget is rarely balanced, but it works.

If you call plus or minus $1,500 balanced, I’ve hit that mark four times this month. OTB is mostly a trailing indicator, something you check to understand how you’ve behaved, not predict what you’ll do next. In the past month I’ve been $15,000 over budget. Today, oddly enough, I’m sitting on my biggest surplus in the last 30 days.

Am I done ordering? Not quite. I just got a tracking code from a tertiary distributor, probably a CCG item that wasn’t on the calendar. I also have a $5,000 Asmodee order for Star Wars: Unlimited and League of Legends that might ship early. I'm told the League of Legends will ship in waves; I wanted a lot more. If it does ship, I’ll be $5,000 over budget for a week, until it sells out next Friday. That’s how it goes.

There’s nothing fancy about how I order. Most veteran store owners are doing the same thing this morning, some with a quarter of my resources, some with four times as much. The smart play is consistency. Have a system. Follow your best practices. Order often with the right depth. That takes experience, and it’s one of the last things I’d ever hand off.

Am I good at it? Buying assumes a few things. Do I know my customers’ tastes? Do I understand sales velocity? Do I know how well my staff can move product beyond stocking the shelf? Do I have an exit strategy when something needs to be clearanced? I could be better at all of it, especially if I spent more time hand selling or keeping up on product knowledge. I tend to err on the side of FOMO, over-ordering to make sure I never disappoint customers. That keeps them happy, even if it makes my OTB twitch. I can live with that.

Edit: Forgot my $2,125 new release order from Games Workshop. Looks like we're over budget again.

Warding the Game Store

I once asked a shaman if working at a game store could attract spiritual problems. The answer was, “Yes, but not necessarily.” I was reminded of this interaction today while a customer was attempting to cast a spell in the back. We discussed it amongst the staff. Maybe we should have wards like one would have in a spiritual ceremony? Well, in practice, we already have them.

A game store draws all kinds of people, many of them deeply attuned to their imagination. They come here after long days in the mundane world and slip easily into the act of transformation. Maybe they’re wizards, warriors, or something stranger, exhaling the energy they’ve carried from the outside. It’s always surprising to see what people choose to become when they’re given permission to imagine. Some need to blow off steam with power fantasies but others are fulfilling deep seated needs missing in their lives. Not everyone is going up levels.

Every time dice hit the table, players cross a threshold between the ordinary and the mythic. Traditional cultures warded such thresholds, doorways, crossroads, and hearths, not always from fear of what's outside, but from respect for the unseen currents that pass through them when they're at their most vulnerable. In a sense, we provide that doorway. We provide permission. We provide a safe space. Our store is a liminal space where people step out of the everyday and into something older and deeper. Warding, in that context, isn’t about magic. It’s about letting people know they’re safe to open up, to play, to create. 

Warding as Permission and Protection

A ward isn’t a wall. It’s a sign of belonging. It says, this is a space where you are allowed to be yourself. In a psychological sense, it’s permission to let your guard down. In a game store, that might look like a pride flag in the window, a posted code of conduct, or a dragon head on the wall. This place is safe. You are amongst the tribe. We protect our people and slay the beasts Out There. These are modern wards, symbols that say your imagination is safe here.

They also mark a boundary. Psychological safety is the foundation of imaginative work. Without it, creativity becomes guarded and brittle. If you’ve ever had a roommate or partner walk in while you’re role-playing, you know how quickly the energy can drain from the room. When that happens, it's really hard to get back. When you post a code of conduct, keep the store clean, and treat people well, you’re doing more than running a business. You’re keeping the ward strong.

The Nexus and the Noise

An open, imaginative environment doesn’t just invite creativity; it attracts chaos. Trickster energy, you could call it. Sometimes it’s harmless, sometimes it’s not. You see it in people who arrive carrying too much, the ones who blur the line between fantasy and delusion. You see it in the erratic energy of certain customers, or just the sense that we've got "psychic residue" left behind after too many stories have been told in the same place. Get out those Clorox wipes.

Any place that deals in imagination becomes a magnet for the unpredictable. The solution isn’t to block it or fight it, but to hold space for it, to shape the current through rhythm and attention.

That’s where ritual comes in. Regular cleaning, lighting, music, and a consistent schedule are quiet forms of energetic hygiene. You don’t need sage or ceremony, but you do need intention. This has always been my instinct at the store. Order isn’t optional. Lose it, and the place starts to come apart. I’ve seen it happen, especially during chaotic events like Yu-Gi-Oh nights, when the energy simply refuses to stay contained. It's so disruptive employees enter a state of distress that's not normally part of our calm, ritualized day.

Practical Wards

You don’t need much to ward a game store.

Threshold markers: A symbol at the door, art, motto, or flag, announcing that this is a place of imagination and respect. A pride flag is both an invitation and a shield, a sign that everyone is welcome and the intolerant are not.

Ritual order: Opening and closing routines stabilize energy as much as they maintain the business. Cleaning becomes a ritual act. When someone skips it, the imbalance is felt immediately. Letting the bathroom go uncleaned or a stain linger is a kind of desecration in a place meant to nurture creativity. Staff know this, they feel it. They naturally avoid the disruption. It's for them as much as the customers.

Sound and scent: Ambient music, clean air, maybe the faint smell of dragon soap or print ink. In older times, people believed foul smells carried disease; they weren’t entirely wrong. Scents shape mood and memory. I grew up with cookware stores that sold games, and the smell of those places still feels like home, maybe not my home, but the home I chose.

Community norms: The code of conduct isn’t just a formality. It’s the living boundary of the ward. Inclusivity isn’t a policy; it’s an active practice, a continual fostering of safety and weeding out of intolerance so imagination can thrive without fear.

Finally

A store like this is a living space, a container for imaginative work and a meeting point of countless stories. Treat it with sacred attention. Warding isn’t superstition; it’s stewardship. If you keep rhythm, care, and intention, the space holds strong.

I feel we "mythologize" our stores, tell narratives that make sense of it all. Deep within that narrative is the acknowledgement that what we do is special, even if we're not sure why. You run a nexus. Give it form. Let it breathe. Keep it balanced. Perhaps you already do this and now understand your work has greater significance.

My Twenty-Dollar Assistant (AI in the workplace)

A year ago, I started thinking seriously about hiring what would essentially be a personal assistant. Someone in the buying department who could handle the growing pile of e-commerce work I was generating. There was how I was doing it and how I wanted to do it, and the gap between those two required more labor than I was willing to give.

For years I managed buying between customers at the counter, turning what should be one of the most important parts of owning a store into a nuisance task. I wouldn’t expand buying because I didn’t have the time. Looking back, that was probably one of my bigger mistakes. Now it's my primary job.

I first started using AI to build a new D&D campaign. Combined with a wiki, it was intoxicating. I had continents mapped, pantheons defined, and NPC relationships modeled to the point I could feel how they’d interact by modeling dialogue based on backgrounds, often generated with the help of AI.

In three months I created enough material to last twenty years of gaming. I am not exagerating. Maybe because it was so top heavy, I lost the thread after only six months at the table. We’re now playing a more stripped down Old-School Essentials campaign, still using AI and a wiki, but with a lighter touch and fewer unnecessary details.

I used AI artwork to populate a thousand wiki entries for personal use. The one time I used an AI image for a store post, it got fantastic engagement along with a wave of outrage for “embracing the evils of AI.” I should mention that over the past year I’ve paid real artists to create professional-level D&D maps and regularly pay a graphic designer contractor for the store. I suppose what I’m saying is there’s a time and a place for AI art.

It wasn’t an obvious leap to apply AI to the business. The topic was already getting ethically messy, and it didn’t fit most situations anyway. AI isn’t a genie or a fairy godmother. It’s that personal assistant I was looking for, but not a great one.

Because of all the hype, people expect miracles. What I’ve found is it’s more like having a high school intern. They can take assignments, often save hours of work, but just as often return with the wrong results. You have to explain what went wrong, and they’ll give some excuse about how the assignment was hard. But I pay twenty bucks a month, so you get what you pay for.

In the aggregate, it makes sense if you already know enough to check the answers. You need to be informed enough to spot errors before acting on them. My fear in the outside world is that's likely to go disastrously wrong. Imagine the average person, and then remember half of the world is less smart than them. AI especially suffers from confirmation bias, where you often get the results you want to have, rather than the correct answer.

Yesterday was a good example. I asked AI to cross reference my upcoming trip itinerary with local holidays. It ran through lunar calendars, checked Cambodian observances, and triumphantly announced there would be a festival the same day we’d be at Angkor Wat. Perfect. I started planning around it, but something felt off. I had it recheck its work, and sure enough, it was off by a month. “A common mistake,” it admitted. AI wants to make me happy, so much so it will throw me the holiday party it knows I want, even if it's the wrong date.

For now, AI is great at crunching purchase orders, formatting text, and organizing thoughts. It’s still that high school intern, helpful, fast, and sometimes wrong. Will it get better? Probably. But for now, I remind myself that for twenty dollars a month, I’ve delayed the need for a twenty dollar an hour employee another year.

---

Here’s a concise summary of how you’ve used ChatGPT for business so far, based on your conversations:

🏪 Business Operations & Strategy

You’ve used ChatGPT as a management assistant for Black Diamond Games, focusing on:

Inventory and purchasing analysis: creating and cleaning up purchase orders, comparing supplier prices (ACD, Alliance, Magex), calculating GMROI, elasticity, and margin targets.

Payroll and finance: building tables for payroll, inflation adjustments, wage tracking, and workers’ comp rules for S-Corp owners.

Accounting troubleshooting: fixing QuickBooks verification errors, planning a migration from QuickBooks for Mac to Online, and summarizing differences between plan tiers (Simple Start, Essentials, Plus).

Insurance and compliance: researching key person insurance payouts, and confirming state requirements (e.g., California minimum wage, workers’ comp exemptions).

💸 Product & Marketing Content

You’ve had me draft clean, SEO-friendly product descriptions for your online store using these principles:

No sales hype or fourth-wall breaks.

Include award links or official quickstarts when relevant.

Avoid disclaimers or cross-product references.
You also have me format these descriptions so they’re scraping-friendly for ecommerce uploads.

📦 Retail Data & Tools

You frequently use me to:

Build CSV or spreadsheet exports (POs, invoices, payroll, pricing updates).

Generate business metrics like ROI, stock ratios, or price-sensitivity calculations.

Write summaries of distributor trends, e.g., supply shortages (DragonShield Night Blue) or CCG allocation analysis.

🧠 Writing & Publishing

I’ve helped polish essays, blog posts, and book-length material in your “Friendly Local Game Store” voice — for example:

Opinion essays

Appendix N literary analyses for your personal page.


🧩 Game Design & Worldbuilding

For your Old-School Essentials campaign and published materials:

I generate encounter summaries, XP values, NPC tables, and stronghold cost breakdowns.

I format OSE-style character and item blocks.

I expand on Stonehell, Ember Bastion, and Ashkarin Concorde lore for campaigns.

🧰 Systems & Workflow

You’ve used ChatGPT as a workflow hub, integrating:

Google Sheets and CSV exports for business data.

Calendar and trip planning for long-term store and family projects.

Detailed structured outputs (tables, invoices, formatted PDFs, and campaign maps).