Getting Edumacated (10 Years Later)

A decade ago I wrote a post recommending college courses for anyone who wanted a more formal education for the game trade. I say this as a guy with a scant business education at best, my bachelor's and master's are in far less worldly pursuits, but you don't need a business degree to spot the skill sets that keep a store alive. The courses were simply a convenient place to go get those skills.

Ten years on, I care even less about how you pick these skills up. There are a dozen ways now: YouTube, online certificates, a business owner willing to talk your ear off. What matters is that you actually get them, in some useful fashion, before the market teaches you the expensive way. That's how I learned.

What's different this time is personal. I have a son working in the business who's expressed interest in learning this stuff, whether through community college or somewhere else. For him, in-person classes work best. He may never chase a formal degree, and honestly that's more a personal decision than a job requirement around here. But who knows what happens once he gets a few of these under his belt. So I went back to the Diablo Valley College catalog to see what a year of coursework looks like today.

Turns out, a lot has changed. I feel the 2016 courses were a bit behind the times, while the 2026 courses seem right on the money. That said, I'm probably a little behind the times. There are also a lot more courses that seem tantalizing today, and my one year of courses could easily balloon to two. 

Then (2016)

My original list ran 28 units, about a year of credits:

• BUS-018 Microsoft Excel for Windows (3)
• BUS-027 Small Business Management (3)
• BUS-096 Time Management and Goal Setting (0.5)
• BUS-294 Business Law (3)
• BUSAC-181 Applied Accounting (3)
• BUSAC-185 QuickBooks Accounting for Business I (1.5)
• BUSMG-167 Writing and Presenting a Business Plan (0.5)
• BUSMG-168 Customer Service (0.5)
• BUSMK-255 Advertising (3)
• CIS-108 Introduction to WordPress (2)
• CIS-130 Adobe Photoshop Elements (2)
• ECON-221 Introduction to Microeconomic Principles (3)
• MANGT-050 Introduction to Supervision (3)

It was heavy on do-it-yourself web and design, WordPress and Photoshop. You still couldn't go wrong with this education today.

What I'd take in 2026

31.5 credits — Foundation 12, Money 7.5, People 3, Selling 9.

If I were building the year over from scratch, I'd organize it by the skills instead of the catalog. Here's where I'd point my son.

Foundation. BUS-109 Introduction to Business, BUS-250 Business Communications, BUS-294 Business Law, and BUSMG-120 Introduction to Management Studies. 

I took a community college business law class in high school and it formed my foundational understanding of how businesses operate.

Money. BUSAC-181 Applied Accounting and BUSAC-185 QuickBooks I, enough to read your own statements and keep your own books. Then BUS-161 Personal Financial Management, the course that speaks to my old sermon about 40% of owners retiring with nothing.

I took a year of accounting in high school mostly to satisfy a math requirement, but it was also foundational. It allowed me to drop into a Quickbooks ledger like it was nothing special. Quickbooks I is enough to get the fundamentals down, since I probably use 10% of that program (there is a Quickbooks II if you really dig it). Part of my educational goals for others is that you should finish knowing more than me.

People. BUSMG-121 Supervision is the place to start. There are additional HR management courses that make sense if this topic excites (not me, thanks). 

Selling. This is where things change the most. BUS-210 Introduction to E-Commerce, BUSMK-256 Marketing, and BUSMK-259 Digital Marketing Fundamentals. Advertising (BUSMK-255).

That's the core. Line it up against 2016 and the difference are obvious. A decade ago, half my year went to being my own webmaster and ad man: WordPress, Photoshop, and a handful of half-unit skills courses that have since been folded into meatier ones. The 2026 version hands that time to selling everywhere at once, e-commerce, digital marketing, and social media, plus the people side I skipped entirely the first go-round. Business law and a little accounting haven't moved. What changed is that the focus is no longer brick and mortar.

There's another year of courses I think are applicable. See me after class, once you've got these down.

The Expense Post

The Expense Post (Or: Why I Stopped Posting My Numbers)

I was at a game convention yesterday, hanging out with industry friends, talking store numbers. One of them said, "You used to post your actual numbers, but it looks like you stopped. Is that because you're making too much money?"

It took about a nanosecond to say yes. I hadn't put it in those words before, but I knew it immediately. It's not that I'm wildly successful. It's that I'm successful enough that I'd prefer the business to keep running over having people come at me to take it away. For many years, either outcome would have been fine. Burn it down or turn a profit, whatever. Now? I'd prefer what it provides me and my family. 

Rather than talk revenue, I want to walk through some of my expense categories, because people are wildly off base when they try to imagine what running a store costs. You can do your own math to understand my income, if that's your goal. 

A customer recently asked if my rent is like a mortgage payment. Sure, if you have a multi-million dollar house. My rent is over $10,000 a month. This is normal.

I used to talk about three buckets: rent, payroll, and other. Three roughly equal buckets after your cost of goods. It's a restaurant industry model, so don't blame me. At one point my buckets were equal, which is why the framework resonated and I kept using it. Now those buckets are a bit absurd.

Bucket One: Payroll — $375,000 (61% of post-COGS expenses)

This is where the money goes. My payroll is lean, and if there's any guilt associated with running this business, it comes from worrying I don't have enough staff, or that I'm not compensating them enough, or that I'll wake up one day to a revolt because I sleepwalked through something important.

That $375K includes my salary of $80K, which is what's reasonable for someone in my position in this industry and is only part of my total compensation. Payroll is where you find your poverty, either by over-investing or under-investing. You need adequate staff, well compensated and well managed, or your sales simply won't reach their potential. I don't think we've reached our potential yet, but I really hate laying people off, so I'm cautious.

Bucket Two: Rent — $135,000

Much smaller than the compensation bucket, and thankfully it grows at roughly inflation while wages grow at a completely different rate. Rent doesn't include any repairs or maintenance inside the building or insuring what's inside. Door breaks, toilet leaks, AC units fail, that's on me.

When I look at expansion, I try to calculate how much additional revenue I'd need to cover new rent, the utilities it requires, the staff time it consumes. I am just as in the dark on that math as a new store owner. I am speculating on my sales expectations. There's no spreadsheet that makes it obvious. We have 4,300 square feet now, which includes our 1,000 rent free mezzanine level. I would like another 3,000. We are full. We will continue to add product for three more years or until my staff cry uncle.

Bucket Three: Other — $100,000

This is the catch-all, and it adds up faster than you'd expect.

• Utilities: $35,000. Escalating, always. Electricity is insane, averaging about $800/month and peaking at $1,500 in the summer. Trash is $650/month.
• Office and operational expenses: $16,000. Every consumable thing. Toilet paper, product labels, you can imagine.
• Insurance: $15,000. I have more policies than I can keep track of: liability, property, workers comp, key person, and since the business owns my truck, auto insurance too.
• Advertising: $11,000. I say I don't advertise, and yet here we are. It's now mostly convention related.
• Miscellaneous: $18,000. Outside services, meals, permits, taxes, bank fees, lodging, parking. The long tail of running a business.

One thing not in this list: credit card processing fees, which are probably $60,000-70,000 a year if I tracked them properly. I don't, because it's just money I never see. It doesn't feel like an expense so much as a haircut on every transaction.

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What I've learned from watching these buckets over the years is that some are more elastic than others. Expenses that once felt impossible to cover, like rent, recede into the background as you grow. Expenses like wages are permanent friction, always present, always pressing.

At one point I tracked every office supply purchase and wrote a blog post about it. Now that $1,400 a month is just a fact of life I don't think about. Meals are a morale expense that I think have gotten out of hand; I let it slide, even as my accountant scolds me for spending more than I should. You might assume your sales eventually outrun your expenses, and that's partly true. But my profitability over the last ten years has hovered around 6%. The last five years, with what I'd call blockbuster sales, pushed that to 7%.

You can perform your way out of the tent. But you'll always be a clown.

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.