Tuesday, March 27, 2012

Gaps and Bridges

Business has still been pretty steady.
We ended up not having an official "Grand Open", (yet).
Why?
Lots of reasons.

First of all, I still don't have enough consoles or monitors to host an efficient tournaments in that regard of my store. Magic is still too much focus.
Secondly, if I did, I doubt my wiring could handle more than three 360's at one time. A circuit blows everytime I have all the lights on, my computer and a turn a vacuum on. I'm just not equipped to do anything about it.

Finally, my building just isn't big enough. As it is, my weekends are pretty packed wall to wall already. I don't think having a Grand Open would have been healthy for my PR.
So now I'm working on fixing up the downstairs to expand. Problem is low ceilings, so you can't do too much. Also, you can hear people walking around upstairs ridiculously bad. Part of me wants to see if my landlords would be willing to work out a deal where I get the building connected to mine and use them both.

I've also started a system that allows trustworthy volunteers to run the store when I am not present. They get compensated and when I can afford to hire, these people will be the first people in line to get paid. It's been a huge lift off my shoulders having volunteers who are willing to contribute their time to making the store successful.
I've recently bumped into one big obstacle: Crowd control. My crowd is finally getting more diverse. In the beginning, it was mainly my friends and kids from high school. So that was an easy gap for me to bridge. Everyone was able to connect.

Now that more people are becoming aware of my store, my store attracts a lot more of a diverse crowd, for better or worse. This includes ALL kinds of people. Young kids, old men, college girls, you name it. Throwing all these different personalities is like throwing a bunch of chemicals into a bottle and shaking it. You don't know what's gonna happen, but more times than not, it's going to explode. Now, I have people who's voices naturally rise, and kids who try to run around on their Heelys in my store. It's not a good mix. I need to spread it out more but I need to have a better system for condensing it too. The downstairs is a project all its own.
Simply... too many variables to account for.

Financially, we're doing well enough to pay the bills. But without having an official distributor, we're just "Getting By". We have the ability to do so much more. Having a distributor would capitalize my gross profit margin. But that's substantially easier said than done.