Remotely Managing Your Brick-and-Mortar Hobby Game Store: A 5-Step Guid

Step 1: Have your business model down.

You should know what your store is about and be able to feed it continually. The danger is always a shifting business model, which is practically guaranteed, so change will always be on your mind.

Step 2: Have your policies and procedures settled.

Policies are how you handle day-to-day operations, and they tend to only emerge over time. A living document of P&P that staff can add to and subtract from is critical. Obsolete policies are a telltale sign of an absentee manager, like ghosts going through the motions of their past life.

Step 3: Have well-compensated, trusted staff.

You can't go anywhere while your staff remain untrained, and you can't stay gone long if they're always looking for a new job. Being away requires better compensation, more leeway with expenses, and generally lots of carrots and few sticks.

Step 4: Have a clearly profitable store.

I've been on a trip where we simply ran out of money and I was a day late on payroll. A healthy cash buffer and backup funds aren't strictly necessary, but they remove the stress considerably.

Step 5: Find the pulse and stay engaged.

For me this means being the buyer, but that's probably not required for everyone. Buying is how I sense change in the business, so it's a natural fit. You could delegate buying entirely and just watch the finances. The level of engagement is a sliding scale, from vacation coverage to partial retirement to having more or less handed the store over.

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A remotely managed store is rarely a dynamic, industry-leading one. The arc tends to run from Unique Value Proposition to Useful Value Proposition to quietly questioning its value entirely. That's why remote management works best when paired with active business development goals: larger locations, expanded product lines, event growth. For me right now that means saving for an expansion while growing inventory, something I can do easily from afar. Staying away doesn't have to mean standing still.

Nobody in the trade really likes to talk about this. It's not glamorous, and stepping away doesn't exactly signal high standards. But if the recent boom in hobby game retail has any longevity, remote management will become far more common.