I first considered opening a game store sometime back in 2001 I think. The idea was not received with much support from parents at the time, and I shelved it, spending a little over a decade doing other stuff like a couple retail jobs, a large stretch of unemployment that nearly ended my relationship with Zena(Completely understandably, I was a flake) and a couple abortive attempts at school, during those times the idea of starting a store came across my mind and was dismissed for similar reasons to the initial idea, but then after being fired from my call center job, I decided to bite the bullet and do it, I figured what's the worst that can happen? I end deeply in debt and become no worse off than millions of other people who paid for college degrees and I accrue some good experience. Best case, I get a career that I like and I never have to look for a job again.
So after about two years of school getting management and accounting knowledge, I sorta figured out money, and we opened. Two years later we closed, but we'll get to that sometime. I'll talk about what I learned in the meantime.
The first hurdle was funding, assorted people gave me probably way too much of their own money to make this happen, and I had to apply for loans from my bank, I was surprised to find that it is ridiculously easy to apply for small business loans, requiring vastly less paperwork than student financial aid did, but for various reasons, real money was hard to get, my assistance came in the form of several credit cards, so with a relatively small amount of cash, and a larger, but as it turns out still to small amount of credit, we went looking for a space.
I'd never attempted to find commercial real estate, and my research had only given me a vague idea of what I needed. Many places didn't even return my calls or emails, but finally I found a place willing to take a risk, it was a place that used to be a convenience store until one day, perhaps 5 years ago, the owners took the valuables, locked the door, and left. The first the landlord heard about it was when the rent didn't come in, it was right next door to a restaurant called Husky or Maltese Whatever, and that name would become a minor bane of my existence in the years to come.
Converting the place into a game store was fun, the landlord really did a lot to help us get in, they replaced the AC/Heater, converted the walk in cooler into an office, and tore everything we didn't need out. I hired some friends and we spent about 3 days installing a fairly nice floor that we immediately put some deep gouges in when we dragged the busted hand me down drinks cooler into position.
The floor was interesting, we got this cool basically snap together faux-wood stuff that didn't need glue, but we did need to cut it to fit at the ends, which turned out to be more challenging than expected as none of us had much experience with the saw we had, but my friend Louis stepped up to give it a shot, and after a short learning curve, was doing admirably and we got the work done within the time I needed it done, and without injuring anybody worse than some back pain and a skinned finger or two.
After that and a coat of paint, it was a matter of setting the shelves up and putting the stock on it, oh god the distributors, nice people for the most part, but lordy they did not have any sort of standardized process for signing on with them, or for ordering once you were, I used 4-5 main distributors during the time we were open, their systems ranged from online ordering with various levels of functionality, to a text file sent to me in an email that I had to read through and select the products I wanted, then email or call back with the specifics, to on guy who rolled through town every 1-3 months and you could buy stuff off the back of his truck. For everyone except the last guy, they still required information to be faxed in as well. The dude with the truck just showed up one day.
I'm leaving out ton of details, and am sure I missed some pretty important stuff too, but whatever, I'll get it all down eventually.
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