How 40K Works (Tradecraft)

From a store stocking perspective, the rapid advance of new products from Games Workshop is untenable. Thankfully, Games Workshop understands its own efficiency requires models to be regularly discontinued, much to the dismay of fans. New products theoretically release at roughly the same pace as we should be discontinuing old product, in a zero sum game. Figuring out what to discontinue is the trick.

Figuring out what to order is also a trick, a combination of skill and intuition. We have weekly releases, combined with a forced blackout pre-order period until the models are already on the train across the country. We generally fly blind, relying on past sales patterns to predict future results. Or we cheat a little and find a way to get informal or even formal pre orders from customers. This results in overstock as a way of life, or lately, ignoring releases if customers are indifferent, or sales patterns show no interest at all (Warcry this week). So how do we decide what in our 40K line stays and what goes once it's here?

Every store stocks differently. Also, every store stocks differently in their stocking lifetime. If you have a store now and you have a rigid idea of how you stock a line, just give it some time. When I first started, I carried a minimum range of GW stock. Three years later, with a huge store, with our local GW store closed and my main competitor retiring, I carried every Games Workshop model produced. A couple years after that I added Forge World from England, marking it up 10%, just to satisfy hungry customers. I was selling resin parts in display cases. At one point a competitor popped up specializing in 40K at a discount, and I pulled way back on my inventory as sales flagged (they're gone now). Lately I'm somewhere in the middle. There is no one answer or strategy. Local supply and demand drive my stocking strategy.

As a stockist store, I carry every required model. Are there ones that perform so poorly I would like to drop them? Sure, I've got five model kits I would like to dump, but I can't (three are Warhammer Underworlds). This is fantastic. It's $135 worth of product, which is a small opportunity cost for the benefits of the various GW programs. This wasn't always the case. 

Sometimes this dead stock number can be thousands of dollars. The stockist benefit to customers is you can always find a core group of models at a store like mine. Does GW define that core well? It can be hit or miss, but it's mostly a hit. Companies can define their core on what they wish to sell, as opposed to what actually sells (Privateer Press). GW, in its current incarnation, is good with defining a strong core. It works for both of us.

All the other stock must serve the local community. This is a hard pill to swallow. I would like all the Orks or Tau on the shelf at all times, but once my customers have had a chance to buy what they need, it's increasingly difficult to stock for the casual who buys from us irregularly. Keeping a "coherent collection" of models of a particular army often falls apart, if you don't have new customers, with new needs, constantly visiting. With events functioning, but the public still wary of gathering, my sales are great, but new customers are harder to acquire. This is a game that for a good percentage of customers, requires new opponents on large tables in public spaces. 

How do we know what 40K stock to drop? This is where sales performance metrics come in. Once a week I'll get a report of inventory that has stopped performing and I have to decide what stays and what goes. This report is overly generous, and if a title shows up, it's truly deceased. Those five core stockist items must stay, obviously, but 20 other items were deemed unworthy this morning, that should have gone. Five of those 20 were added to our online clearance section with some regret. 15 were given a pass, because I deemed them relevant ... for now.

So my store, and likely most stores, are going to have a core collection you can count on, new releases that are still fresh (this trade is "front list driven") and a collection that represents the current needs of their local 40K community. If as a customer, you shop irregularly, or you cross shop, don't be surprised if you find what's available makes no sense. We're using your sales patterns to predict the future, and with unpredictable sales patterns comes a mismatch of inventory to customer needs. I'm not placing blame, but this is what you get and I can't do anything about it. This is all we can do and it's why multiple stores exist, surviving on imperfect information (mine and yours). It's how I pay my mortgage, so certainly don't feel bad for me.

5 Responsibility Holes

 When it comes to remotely managing a business, there are likely some responsibility holes you may have overlooked. These are areas of responsibility that require, you the owner, and only you, to properly manage. We want to eliminate these as much as possible, to maintain independence. Here are a few:

1. Hiring a Manager. If you have staff and you're remote, it likely means there is a middle layer of management. Ideally this person will stay for years and give you plenty of notice before they leave. However, they could notify you of their two weeks notice at any moment or worse, get hit by a bus. You will need to come back from wherever you are to resolve this.

Resolution. Ideally you have someone being groomed as an assistant manager at all times. I say ideally, because it's common not to have anyone in line. Second choice would be someone who could manage operations while you return to hire your next manager. We have a relatively flat organization chart to where almost anyone can do anything, provided they had a little more access.

2. Security. The day after Christmas, I got a call at 5am from the alarm company. Someone broke into my store. Would I like them to call the police? Duh. I was 400 miles away. My manager didn't answer their phone and I put out an all hands request for anyone to meet the police at the store. Thankfully a junior employee stepped up. What if they didn't? 

Resolution. Ideally the manager would be a secondary or even primary contact with the alarm company and perhaps with property management. Keeping cell phone numbers handy of all your employees as an owner, even though you probably can't imagine ever calling them, could be critical in an emergency. From 400 miles away, I was able to arrange for a board up service to get us through the holiday weekend and eventually new glass. 

3. Final Paycheck. In some states, including mine, an employee is required to get their final paycheck their last day of work. No waiting for direct deposit; pay me now or may me my daily pay for every day you're late What if you, the owner and probably only person authorized to sign checks, is out of town? This happened yesterday.

Resolution. If you know an employee is leaving, proper planning can arrange an electronic rushed payroll on their last day. This doesn't work for someone fired on the spot, who again, needs to be paid right this moment. You could authorize a manager as a check signer. You could provide some check to the manager for this purpose, either blank or signed, or perhaps you could provide a cash reserve with a receipt showing final payment. I don't have a great solution to this. Thanks California.

4. Your Mail. It took me a couple years to start changing addresses so mail was sent to me house instead of the business.  There is still time sensitive mail that's important someone is authorized to open, notably your manager. For example: Letters from your landlord, government correspondence and unemployment audits, and one that haunted me for a week, potential lawsuits that require a quick response. 

Resolution. Teach your manager to triage mail, scan and email important documents, and generally take responsibility for your physical in-box. 

5. Supplier Invoices. During my first long trip of several months, the manager would take in orders, create a spreadsheet of invoices that we shared, and I would pay invoices remotely. Some were inevitably missed. How do you avoid invoice mistakes?

Resolution. Moving entirely away from paper, I now track every order in a POS database with a shipping tracking number. Generally, that tracking number is part of an invoice. When there is no tracking number, it means there is no invoice, and it triggers me to query vendors. Taking complete ownership of orders means fewer steps, fewer mistakes. It's also more work. This is great until a random order shows up with no tracking or invoice, which triggers alarms from staff, at which time an exception occurs, and we resolve it. 

BONUS:

6. Oh F#&* Budget. What happens when you need to fly home to hire a new manager, you have a minor disaster, or Wizards of the Coast decides they don't like your furniture?

Resolution. Money in the bank. Plan to have a few thousand dollars or more to cover your return flight, emergency glass replacement at holiday rates, or other eventualities. Maybe you can even bribe your manager to stay another month. Money will buy your way out of a lot of problems. 

Anyway, those are my big holes after two years of working from home. I plan to take my first long, international trip in 2023 and I am fully aware I may need to take a flight home at any moment. 

Agreeableness and Why We Won't Hire You

I am far enough removed from day to day operations to finally say this without anyone thinking I'm referring to them. The biggest reason a game store doesn't hire you (after repeated attempts), or let you run your volunteer event, is we simply don't want to work with you. 

A great number of our customers, more than the average business I would wager, are people with difficult personalities. They are disagreeable. Some will argue otherwise (they love to argue), but I do believe this trade brings in the more socially awkward and difficult folks. That's fine. We love all the misfit toys, being misfit toys ourselves. 

Game store employees are weird and awkward as well, but they have the added trait of being agreeable. When I hire an employee who is not agreeable, I always regret it. Being agreeable is an important personal trait for retail, just as much as being geeky and knowledgable about games. From Psychology Today:

Agreeableness is a personality trait that can be described as cooperative, polite, kind, and friendly. People high in agreeableness are more trusting, affectionate, altruistic, and generally displaying more prosocial behaviors than others. People high in this prosocial trait are particularly empathetic, showing great concern for the welfare of others, they are the first to help those in need. Agreeableness is one of five dimensions of personality described as the Big Five. The other traits are openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, and neuroticism.

A good percentage of our customers, sometimes our best customers, are not agreeable. Being agreeable ourselves, we do what we can with disagreeable customers. We bend quite a bit in this trade dealing with them and their often difficult behavior. They say an employee doesn't quit their job, they quit their manager. In a hobby game store, if you ask former employees, they'll tell you they really quit the customers.

Something else to consider is perhaps 70% of our customers are male, and women consistently score higher in agreeableness than men. We have more men on staff than women, but this does mean that the average customer is probably not what we would look for in an employee, statistically.

"What about neurodiversity?" you might ask. People don't submit job applications like character sheets, so we generally don't know if someone is on the spectrum or otherwise neuro divergent. We can only go with our social interactions with them, and as everyone has to do every job, we envision them in customer service, often dealing with difficult customers. 

I want to be clear that some customers I really like. The thing I miss most about daily operations is the customers. There are a good number of customers I consider friends. Would I game with them? That's my barometer of friendship. Probably a dozen at least. I miss them dearly. 

There are other customers that are prickly, but I enjoy the sparring, the back and forth give and take. I wouldn't game with them, but I would gofundme a fifty for their cancer treatment. I appreciate their existence beyond monetary gain. There are some customers whom I feel I've barely survived their presence, that I've earned their business through painful social interaction. When I worked in the store, some of these customers would only want to talk to me. We had an understanding. Being an agreeable introvert, this is exhausting. Again, I still miss them. However, I wouldn't hire them.

I'll also mention that I personally like customers and even employees, that my manager at any given time, definitely does not appreciate. I see one side of people. Being a male store owner, I tend not to see unpleasant sexist or class based interactions. I have close friends who some staff feel look down on them, while seeing me as an owner, worthy of respect. That's troubling and I try to confront that. I am not the arbiter of cool, but as an employer, I can choose who I will work with. It's a small group of agreeable people.

I don't always hire agreeable people, but when they're not agreeable, they have a strong skillset I need. That's my advice to you, disagreeable one. Find a field that values you well beyond this one personality trait. I came from IT, a field populated quite often with disagreeable people. It was some good training for owning a game store.

New Adventures

It is time I've made some changes. Since July, 2007, I've been writing blog posts about gaming and the game trade. It started as a place to share thoughts, but it turned into a book and so much more. 

 I have learned a tremendous amount through the give and take this dialogue has provided. Certainly I am not the best game store owner, but I'm probably the best person to report on the topic. I want to continue that in a new way. 

For four years, we've been planning a return to Mexico. We spent several months on the road through Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras in 2018 and we've been yearning to return. I'm on day 1,022 of online Spanish lessons. This will be a five year mission to explore Mexico. To seek a new life in a new civilization. 

For me this is remote work, managing the store while on the road. This is going to be exciting! It would take very little for me to have to drop everything and fly home. The plan has a lot of inherent failure points, the biggest being "rigs" big enough to live in are also too big for a lot of Mexico. It's going to be tight! 

This might be a fiasco and if you join me, you'll have a front row seat, including the challenges of true remote business management, where you can't drive 30 minutes to your business to fix a problem. 

The schedule is six months on the road, six months off, so there will be fun travel interspersed with damage control, if any, back home. Where in Mexico? All of it. We have 152 Pueblos Magicos sites we want to visit plus some bonus UNESCO world heritage destinations. I imagine we'll also take suggestions. 

I want to use something like Patreon for subscribers. I'll continue to write regularly for Patreon members, and occasionally still post publicly, so I don't disappear completely, but I'm kinda done with this. Using a somewhat private platform will allow for a lot more detail of the "challenges" of day to day management. 

There will be photos and video, and a Youtube channel would be a natural place to deposit older content after Patreon members get it first. There are thoughts that a book might be be derived from this, although it may not be game trade specific. I could imagine ancient culture interspersed with "store on fire" stories. 

Although money will be tight, I'm not doing it for the money. I'm naturally going to write anyway, either for the book or for Patreons. It's what I do. My financial "offset" for this trip is about $1,000 a month, meaning that's what it costs me to maintain my life back home AND travel. I'm not going to get that in subscriber fees, but it would be nice to offset costs while creating content. It would be even better to use subscriber money to do cooler things or buy things like camera gear or a desperately needed new laptop. 

Thanks for reading this far! Please post your thoughts. I'm not one for "begging" for money, and I haven't set anything up at all. I have no experience in the subscriber model, other than what we did with Kickstarter. If you have suggestions, please leave them in the comments. My Facebook page Owlbear Adventures documents some of the technical elements of the trip since April of last year. We leave the first half of 2023.

Hiring and Neurodiversity

If I were to go back in time and do one thing differently when it comes to hiring, I would assume that one in ten people have some form of learning disability. That is the statistic. It's an area that's often overlooked, lumped into overall employee performance. It's often invisible, unaddressed and thus undisclosed.

Under the ADA, employees have the right to choose whether to disclose their disability. I can't accommodate them without disclosure. However, I can create a safe environment, explicitly making it clear we're open to such diversity. Letting your employees know you are open to accommodation, and open to diversity in general, are factors in their decision to disclose.

Even if they don't disclose, we can avoid some biases. I am very much aware of how seemingly simple cognitive tasks for us neurotypicals have inherent bias. It's something to keep in the back of your head when figuring out how to create work. You might find sorting Magic cards mindless grunt work, but a dyslexic employee might find it torture. Don't assume everyone will experience this like you. Don't assume every job can only be done one way.

My blunt instrument hiring modality has been a very cruel, old fashioned view of alpha employees and their lessers. Having a child with learning disabilities, AND having very capable, essential staff with learning disabilities, discovered only after many years, has made me painfully aware of my error in understanding. I would be discounting some very capable, creative people, if I kept my outdated understanding.

As small business owners, we generally feel that we're too small for specialization and thus we don't want to think about accommodation. It's a kind of don't ask, don't tell. I think we're missing out on a lot of very good people who just happen to process the world differently. To be an owner you need to be good at everything (or hire for your shortcomings), but I think it's wrong to expect that from every employee. Also look for areas in which they shine brighter than the average employee. My son has difficulty reading, but he has an iron clad memory and a college level vocabulary.

I have nine people on staff now, which statistically means one probably has a learning disability. Like all staff before them, it is pretty well hidden, since we don't make any effort to discuss learning disabilities with new hires or staff members. Let your employees and potential new hires know you are accepting of diversity of all sorts, including cognitive differences. My bet is like being open with other sorts of diversity, you'll unlock a lot of human potential.

Anyway, I'm no expert on this topic, just a business owner and father.

Economics of Leisure

I am having a heck of a time shopping for a travel trailer. This is a post about the insanity of that market and the economics involved. I find it fascinating how incredibly screwed up it is, and the danger for me, like with starting a game store, is attempting to crack the code, rather than standing back. A wise person would take a step back. A gamer might try to beat the system.

COVID forced people to seek safe travel locally, and there's hardly a better self contained, safer and cheaper travel option than buying an RV (assuming you use it). Air fares are up 50% in the last year and people are commonly coming back with COVID. Sales of RVs have skyrocketed. They were high before COVID and now they're out of the park.

Buying an RV in normal times is a bit like buying a car. Nobody pays full price. In fact, discounts are even deeper than passenger vehicles. You can normally expect a 30% discount off MSRP. I know some retailers get irritated with me when I talk about haggling for a new vehicle. It seems hypocritical to insist on holding the line and then go off and haggle for a car. However, that's the way of these markets and if you personally want to give a dealer an extra 30%, feel free.  

There are no 30% discounts on RVs right now. In fact, there are mark ups over MSRP in many places (like California), much like with passenger vehicles. The demand far outstrips supply. My first special order for a trailer was for a model that is built two months out of the year. Normally this isn't a problem and they sit on lots for many months. After the manufacturer increased the price by 17%, I dropped my order. I was already stretching and this priced me out of the market for that brand. What I realized after the fact was not only wouldn't I get that trailer, but I would now be competing for a place in line, if I wanted to try somewhere else. Allocations were accounted for and the option disappeared. I dropped that brand, at least as a new option.

My second order had me buying a used RV from a dealer in Arizona. In this case, after taking my deposit and providing me financing (a credit hit) they were unwilling to wait for me to have it inspected. There were people in line and if I couldn't show up within five days (a two day drive away), they would sell it to the next person in line (that was a week ago and it's still listed for sale). Companies will show you their true stripes when they make mistakes, but they'll also show them when they don't need you as a customer.

My third order was for a new, mass market trailer, built continuously in two factories. In this case, I was able to get a 10% discount, but no promise on the eventual pricing. They asked for a huge deposit for a trailer with a theoretical price point. They wouldn't even send me a sell sheet. I accepted. That's how unpredictable prices are and nobody in this space is willing to guarantee anything. If you don't buy it, someone else will.

There is a bit of a race here. Material prices continue to skyrocket with supply shortages, meaning waiting for a trailer means it's going to be more expensive over time. Interest rates are also on the rise and every month I wait to buy a financed trailer, the more expensive it becomes. I'm diverting more money to a down payment, kind of grateful I have more time to save, but my down payment may be offset by higher rates. The wise who can wait understand this can't last forever. Do you buy at the peak or do you wait potentially years for the fall?

There are other headwinds. The price of fuel is ridiculous. My gas truck will get 9 MPG towing a trailer, which the diesel truck folks would laugh at, if they weren't fearful of diesel and DEF shortages. RV park fees are also going up in price, while a lot of BLM land is closing to camping. Wal Marts and other free overnight spots are closing as well. There are too many nomads. 

There's a rise in services like Boondockers Welcome, where you can camp on private land, for an annual fee. The market provides. With all these costs and complications, it is possible you could buy an RV, only for it become a fancy lawn ornament. Also, good luck finding affordable RV storage. Most of my travel will be in Mexico with state controlled fuel prices (but rampant COVID).

There is fear of a travel trailer value collapse. A travel trailer loses 30% of its value the first year. Unless it happens to gain value in our upside down world. People are selling used trailers at their original MSRP of a year or two ago. The second trailer I attempted to buy has a new MSRP of $65K, while it was selling new for $45K about 18 months ago.  I was willing to pay that $45K, if I could find one. There were two in the nation, so I couldn't. But what happens when the market cools?

If you buy a new trailer at full price and it loses 30% of its value the first year, and the new market is back to selling trailers at a 30% discount, well you're seriously upside down, if you want to sell it. What keeps people on track buying a trailer, knowing this, is FOMO. Fear of missing out is real when this is your retirement plan. Now might be your only time. A lot of used trailers for sale are from people who waited too long, usually with a sick or deceased spouse. A lot of these have never been used, sold with knick knacks and new bedding, waiting to leave the driveway on their maiden voyages. A lot of RV buyers, like myself, are under the retirement age and we could theoretically wait, if we were wise. Like buying a boat or a time share, trailer buyers are clearly not paragons of financial wisdom.

2022 (2023?) Keystone Cougar 26RBS I have on order, if I ever get it. My third trailer order.

Someone Stole $10,000

Yesterday someone stole $10,000 from my store bank account. I noticed early in the morning that it happened overnight. I spent the day figuring out the details, closing and re-opening new accounts, and to some extend contacting vendors. It occurred to me this could be a real disaster if I were on an extended trip.

I won't have online access to my accounts for several more days. Until then, items will bounce off the old account and the bank will call me each morning to verify the days transactions. As my bank manager pointed out, I have a strong cash position, which will help. Imagine losing all your money and not being able to process transactions.  It took an hour sitting with the bank manager to close and re-open the various accounts, but there will be many hours of work to follow.

What Happened?

To be clear, it was not an employee. I think it was professional criminals. Whomever did this had my banking information and was able to log into my online banking or otherwise see my account online. Nobody but me has this. I am assuming my account password was hacked. 

How do I know this? Test transactions from another bank preceded the withdrawal the day before. This is when an institution sends a couple small withdrawals from your account and then sends a total of that amount back as a deposit. If you didn't do this, it's a warning you're about to be in trouble. Contact your bank immediately. You had to be able to see these micro transactions on my account to be verify them with the other institution, and since it happened within a day, it meant they had online banking access, and not a paper copy of my bank statement.

That other institution where the money was sent was Capital One. I happen to have a Capital One credit card, so I called them as a customer and learned more than you probably would otherwise. My money was being transferred to a business checking account that had been opened ten years previously, probably some abandoned account. The name on that account was not mine. When I asked for more information, that's when they informed me I had reached the end of our conversation. How did they know I wasn't trying to hack that account?

Capital One sent me back to my bank, who had me fill out a Written Statement of Unauthorized Debit. All of this, the withdrawal, phone calls, and reporting to my bank, happened within a couple hours on the same day. This morning I noticed the $10,000 withdrawal was temporarily removed while they investigated. I am probably fine. If $10,000 had been shipped to some offshore Nigerian account or business, I assume it would be gone. American bank to American bank? They don't put up with shenanigans.

When my online banking is re-established, I'll have to set up everything again. It turns out of the 50 or so online payees, only 14 need to be re-added.  There's an element of clean up.  

What Could I Have Done Different?

Account information was breached somewhere, but it's clear to me this couldn't have happened without online banking access. Make sure your passwords are extra secure. At this stage, if you can remember a password, it's probably not good enough. Nobody else had access to my account, which was everyones first question. I do not think this was an employee or a vendor, because of the online banking element.