Friendly Local Game Store: A Five-Year Path to a Middle-Class Income by Ray Gary L

Author:Ray, Gary L. [Ray, Gary L.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Gameplaywright
Published: 2018-04-30T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 5:

Financing Your Dream

Me, I’m dishonest, and a dishonest man you can always trust to be dishonest. Honestly it’s the honest ones you want to watch out for, because you can never predict when they’re going to do something incredibly stupid.

—Captain Jack Sparrow

I had just finished presenting my business model to a prospective landlord. He had learned about the exciting world of hobby gaming and how I was ready to take it on based on extensive research, a solid business plan, and a professionally commissioned feasibility study that indicated how this very spot would be ideal for my plans. “Yes,” he said, “but I don’t think this will work. You don’t have any money.”

What the landlord didn’t know is I had just transferred $100,000 to a new bank account that wasn’t part of his requested information. With a hundred grand in the bank, he was more than happy to let me sign a lease. Years later, his broker visited me in my much larger new location and confided that they never thought I would last that first year.

The truth they were getting at is that if you lack experience, you need far more money. If you lack experience, you literally pay for it as you learn. And I had a lot of learning to do.

But how do you get the cash? This is an area were I’m almost embarrassed to admit I’ve gained a lot of experience over the years. I’ve had home equity lines of credit, private investors, micro-lenders, crowdfunding revenues, and personal lenders.

(There is a factor that can substitute in for both money and experience, if you lack both. That factor is time . There are many veteran retailers who started their businesses with very little cash and very little experience. They had to build their stores slowly, constantly reinvesting very meager profits back into the business. Such owners might spend seven, ten, or even twenty years getting to a financially successful point that could have been possible in five years if they were properly capitalized. It’s equally possible to discover that you can never achieve your goals with a tragically undercapitalized business, as I learned with my early magazine-publishing business. For now, let’s assume you want to succeed in a reasonable amount of time.)

Ideally, as you get things off the ground, you have already worked for years in the game trade, working your way up from bathroom-mopper to a strong management position (where you’re still probably cleaning the bathrooms). You’ve saved the $141,000 you determined you need. Maybe along the way you learned enough about the trade, took plenty of community college courses on small business, and figured out how to do start your store with a lower amount, maybe $90,000, instead. Having already saved up cash would be the ideal circumstance, and since we don’t have loan payments in our calculations, it’s the only method that truly works with the model as you sketched it out in earlier chapters. But alas, not everyone has five to six figures of cash in the couch cushions.

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