Professional Islands, Leaving Them, and Returning To Them

I purchased my store in July 2011. At the time it was a failing tabletop game store. With a little luck and a lot of hard work, we diversified it and turned it into a successful thing. I operated quite happily, but aside from a few excellent blogs I didn’t pursue any professional development or relationships with other retailers. I was on my own little island, doing my thing.

In mid-2015, the loneliness got to me and I started wondering if there was more. I joined the larger retailer social media groups. I friended a boatload of retailers on Facebook. I started attending trade shows. This felt great! I was around my people! Turns out that most of my people were broke, but that’s okay! We could all learn from each other! I was sure that at any moment I’d be introduced to all the folks who were making great livings doing this.

What I discovered as I visited other stores and talked with other retailers was that operating on my professional island was absolutely the best thing I could have done when starting out. The inefficiency of “reinventing the wheel” doesn’t look so dumb when the existing wheels are mostly triangular, seemingly designed to cause maximum resistance to movement and momentum. As we struggled through those formative years, there were a ton of nearly industry-ubiquitous mistakes that I was too ignorant to make. There are entire retail categories and activity classifications that I examined early and dismissed as impractical. Something something, the road less traveled by, and all the difference, etc.

When I started stepping into other game stores and talking to other retailers, many of them expressed shock that I would just ignore some of the things they had been told were essential to the operation of a successful game store. At first this threw me into a crisis of confidence: What if I was completely wrong? I mean, I’m making money, but what if I’m holding myself back from much wider success by not following the examples of others?

As I look back on the last two years of industry engagement, I’m left with what I believe to be the following unhappy truths:

• The tabletop game industry has a retail tier that is small and mostly bad. There are a few standout exceptions that I hate to offend by lumping them in with the others, but in aggregate, the statement stands.
• My tabletop game store, in the sense that my store has a set of categories that qualify as tabletop games that can be considered independently of all other categories, is small and bad. In fact, it’s smaller and more bad than even some of the smallest and baddest non-hybrid tabletop game stores.
• This makes me uniquely unqualified to offer advice to tabletop game retailers, and makes the advice given to me by even the exemplars in the field frustrating at best.
• Whatever success I have as a retailer comes from running three to five mediocre businesses under one roof.
• The success of my hybrid model is an accident of a location that I did not choose, a brand I did not design, and a set of skills that I developed with no knowledge that they’d be useful running this kind of business.
• This means that it is difficult or impossible for many tabletop game store owners to apply my model to their businesses.

Many of the above truths merit blog posts of their own.

Tristan da Cunha, part of the most remote inhabited archipelago in the world. Photo taken from the International Space Station, and in the public domain.

About a month ago, I began the process of moving back to my island. Here’s what it looks like for now:

I’ve left most of the industry retailer groups. I’m still a member and admin of the Hybrid Theory group for retailers running hybrid stores or looking to hybridize by adding Video Games, but I’m less active. All I was doing in the larger groups was fighting with bad retailers. I told myself that I was being a voice of reason for the new retailers who were watching, undecided about whether they should be professionals or not. Ultimately, even if that was true, it didn’t benefit my business, and I don’t believe that it added much more than entertainment value for many of the bystanders.

I’ve been blogging less. I thought that I might quit blogging altogether, but I think instead I will unapologetically shift my focus to things that I find interesting and important. I will continue talking about how bad the tabletop game industry is, because hey, that’s pretty easy and it’s fun to be the heel. I will continue talking about Video Games, because as a category I still believe that it offers a lifeline to a fraction of the non-hybrid tabletop stores and literally nobody else is writing about it. I will continue talking about processes, procedures, and the mindset of running a professional and profitable small business, because talking about those things causes my staff and friends to hold me accountable when I don’t practice what I preach. Just don’t expect me to fix your board game store.

I’ve cancelled any plans I had to attend future trade shows. I’m not averse to attending them, but the shows are all for tabletop retailers and I think that I’m a distraction there: Popular, perhaps, but not useful. If someone pays my way to one and gives me something interesting to do, attending them again isn’t out of the question.

I’ve also cancelled most plans that I had to visit other game stores. I’m still willing to visit your store and help you with anything I’m qualified to help with. Unless you’re my friend, I will probably ask you to pay for my travel expenses or time. If you’re my friend on Facebook, you qualify for the buddy exemption. If I’ve offered to come to your store for free and you’re still interested, reach out to me and I will still make it happen.

In summary, I’m choosing for now to return to my professional island and work quietly there to make a better life. I’m curtailing all professional activities that don’t make use of my core competency of having nothing to lose. Things could change. Nothing is written in stone except for the imperative that I make a good living without going crazy, but I have to remember that enriching the community is not the same as me being enriched. I’m going to be a little more selfish moving forward.