And the contractors are moving quickly, as far as contractors go! Yet I'm here bouncing up and down, looking in on the store every morning and night, tracking every inch of progress and planning for how soon I can start the ball rolling on the next deliverables.
For example, I have a fairly significant amount of material stowed at Tempe, at Gilbert, and in my garage at home, that simply needs to be staged so we can get to using it later. But that all can't be moved to Chandler until the floor is done, and the floor is pending completion of drywall, which is pending completion of other construction elements that are higher-priority. We're basically getting a great deal on the buildout, and that means that as anxious as I am, I put a sock in it and let the builders do their thing and do my best to stay out from underfoot.
My commercial-grade disc resurfacer should arrive later this week, so I can finally dive into the several hundred game discs that could be in stock this very moment if they weren't scratched up. The unit is even compatible with Gamecube minidiscs, blu-ray discs, and double-layered discs. I'm reasonably excited to get it on deck. Where will I set it up? Lord, who knows. There isn't any room in the store to put anything right now. There will be, once I move some things to Chandler. But that's pending the floor, which is pending the other construction, and so on...
We're overdue for some floor expansion for event seating, because Friday Night Magics and even some of the normal weeknights have seen every table full. I can make that room once I dispatch furniture that isn't going to have a connected event on the calendar until after the move. I can do that once the floor is ready, and you know where we go from here.
Card operations are the least changed. They don't take a ton of room right now relative to the sales they generate, so I'm going to do the rest of the work "around" the staff's continued administration of that retail activity. Miniatures is much more cumbersome but we have nothing happening on deck except product throughput until the move, so at least it will be as compressed as it can be. Comics? We have a lot of work to do with those at Chandler.
This is going to be the most cost-efficient move ever achieved. From completion of base construction, after which we can work while the low-voltage guys and the HVAC guys do their thing, I am going to be smurfing van-loads of material from all of the existing business component locations to the Chandler suite. Day by day, a few times each day if needed, I'm just going lug what needs lugging. Doesn't get any less expensive than that. Maybe I'll even sweat off a few pounds.
Once the alarm has conveyed, we'll get the new safe bolted to the floor and start moving valuables over. Around that time is when I actually get a moving truck and take the oversized gear from Gilbert at least; there will likely be a day of closure while we move "the head of the robot" without detaching it from its power supply. The oversized stuff from Tempe that isn't staying in Tempe can come in the same truck rental. It's fortunate that Gilbert has a whole pile of cash register terminals up and running, because I can just split them up and have them working in both locations at the same time. That overlap is going to end up being one of the saving graces. My own workstation will shift over right about then.
Without completely bombing out payroll, there's going to be at some point a mass conveyance of main work over to Chandler, including online shipping operations, while some hardy souls stand vigil at Gilbert over the remainder of our business there until we close the site. The rest of the crew will then cease work at Gilbert and begin assembly of Chandler in situ, while we're already soft-opened for business. The fortunate thing is that we have all the space in the world to work with, and that helps mitigate the labor load. Stuff can just wait backstage while a crew member stages the public space elements fixture by fixture. Worst case scenario, a customer wants a product that isn't merchandised yet, our point-of-sale software should tell us that we have it, and we fetch from whichever stack or rack of boxes it's sitting in. I don't see that happening much, though. Everything has a price tag on it and it will all ring up in the system, so even if we have to just have tables full of merch until they're situated on fixtures, people can still shop the goods. Which I guess means it won't sit backstage. You can see the quandaries I'm up against... I could start sorting this all out, but can't move just yet.
I'm relishing every opportunity to complete any prep that conveys over to Chandler. I finished building some video game product gondolas that are going to be taken over exactly as they are. That's time spent now and saved later. I've made huge progress on the numeric-index video game stock that puts the games back out where they can be shopped, an overdue change from having them all behind the counter. Couldn't do that until I worked on the racks. Couldn't do the racks until I was able to clear a few things from Gilbert to my garage. It's like Tetris being played on three screens at once. But we're getting there. The video game stock project is gonna take a lot longer and won't even be fully complete when we move, but once finished it will be an amazingly shoppable layout that we saw fully in action at Wii Play Games in Las Vegas and knew we had to mimic here.
Other prep that is going to stay with us includes updating the branding and graphics, a process I've been working on myself now that we have our logo fixed. Still have the playmats, sleeves, and so forth to order; new employee uniform shirts, window vinyls, general signage, and this ties into advertising, which we're going to be doing a lot more of once the move is done. I've stalwartly refused to spend more than a modicum to get people to visit DSG Gilbert, because I'm just going to have to redirect them. But once the grill is all fired up, metaphorically, on Ray Road, I want everyone and their brother to know to come play games with us.
This new location has been in the works for literally over a year and I wish we could have moved over sooner, but that's water under the bridge now. We had an ownership composition change last summer, and another at the top of the year, that both led the company to a better position than it had. Given that and improving process and execution since then, it's just as well we are moving now, because we are doing a better job of it. But let me tell you, the day it's over and we're up and going full blast with our long-term home, it's going to be celebration time for the DSG organization. We're going to be relieved and recuperating and happy. And then, with the 2017 holiday shopping season on deck, the next level of real work will begin!
No comments:
Post a Comment