Communicate Often & VerboselyĬommunication is key to every aspect of life: marriage, children, business, international politics. Compatible personalities and work styles are important too, but if your goals are radically different, you must structure the business and your expectations in order to take that into account. This will avoid unpleasant surprises when one partner wants to quit because he has a wife and a baby and needs a better job so that he can take care of them. Make sure in 2 years, 5 years, 10 years, you know where the other wants to be. Double Check You and Your Partner’s Goals AlignĪt the very beginning, make sure you and your partners want to end up in similar places. Ideally, start getting paid before you sign up for recurring bills. There is probably a cheaper and better way to get to the same goal without locking yourself into a monthly bill. If you don’t have the revenue to pay the overhead, reevaluate why you need it whatever it is in the first place.
Each month, you have to make the payment or your business goes under. And you don’t have to take a second job or that crazy client you know is a bad idea. The nice thing about having low expenses, whether personal or business, is that if you have a bad month, it doesn’t destroy you. All that cash should be funneled straight into the business instead. Eating out, expensive cars, fancy this and that. Going to the point above, cut out all the waste from your budget. I ended up taking a second job, on top of running the store, in order to make ends meet. If everything goes slower than you anticipate, or you seriously misjudge the market, you won’t get paid for a while. Seriously, figure out you monthly expenses and how you are going to pay them. On a similar note, I think Start and Platform have realized a similar lesson because both seem to be deriving the a good chunk of their income from larger companies: Iron Yard and Maker Square at Start, and Uber at Platform. Our eventual solution was selling candy and snacks. No one wants to pay to sit and play Magic, but if they aren’t buying products, the store is losing money. The biggest problem with a comic and games store is monetizing a space for games. Thinking back on it, while having to use the CC terminal might have been slightly more time consuming, the expense of buying a system to integrate it into the computer was probably a waste. This technology is old hat now, but at the time, everyone else had a separate credit card terminal.
We were one of the first small shops in Lake Jackson to have an integrated computer point of sale system and credit card reader. Don’t Waste Cash on Shiny, Cutting Edge Toys And Games Workshop products which we stopped really carrying in favor of Privateer Press’ Warmachine. Comic books and Horror Clix come to mind. Since we were buying physical products for resale, we had little room for error if we bought something no one wanted to buy. Unfortunately, those mistakes can be costly and if you have no financial cushion, they can be fatal for the business. It is hard to know exactly what do to, and sometimes you have to spend money to experiment in order to find the right path forward for your business. Have More Than Double the Capital You Think You Need This is why I am a lawyer in Houston, not Angleton or Lake Jackson. Our mistake was failing to measure how big the market actually was. Our rational was we could dominate the Lake Jackson market and did not need to compete with Houston. No matter how hard I tried, there were only so many consumers of Magic Cards, Yu-Gi-Oh, comic books, Warhammer and so on. While we did a good job finding customers in the beginning (we stole all the Magic the Gathering players from a competitor who we all disliked), ultimately our location in Lake Jackson was our undoing. In no particular order, some of the things I learned: 10. We lost a fair amount of money, but the silver lining is the mistakes I made then I have not made again. We opened four months after I graduated college and stayed that way for another 18, until the stress of running a business that was just breaking even (without salaries) overcame me, and I decided to shut it down. It seems a lifetime ago, but once, many years ago, a friend and I owned a comic & games store in Lake Jackson, Texas, called Angry Gorilla Comics & Games, Inc.
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