I recently wrote here about my impending divorce from Stephanie, and that process has been consuming an outsized portion of my at-home time, particularly getting in extra reps with the kids. I wanted to pay extra attention to them while they were still permanently living with me, since that era was about to end and even partial custody is never the same. There was something of an emotional payload. I don't discuss that sort of thing here on the weblog, but that kind of mental processing really does take all the punch right out of me in terms of mustering up enthusiasm for the business.
As such, Desert Sky Games has mostly plodded along these last few months, and especially the last few weeks. Thankfully, my teams can largely manage the movement of TCG merch quite competently without me standing over them, and TCGs and video games are now the only supercategories left. I have relegated the remainder of our RPG stock to a perpetually-discounted rack just to serve our nearby regulars, and board game stock is already reduced to titles with video-game-related IP, such as Fallout and Boss Monster. So that's a thing that got done. The "hyperfocus" plan is well underway. As I've alluded to in past articles here, it will become correct for business for me to split TCGs from video games and probably divide DSG into two separate stores. There is no need for me to attempt to do that under what remains of our current lease, so I'm not going to, but the future writing is on the wall.
As I write this article, the divorce wheels are in motion and finally Stephanie has leased her own place and moved out of our house, where I remain. The housing market is so insane right now that we can't help but sell; it's going to afford us a complete debt wipe plus living expenses for a long time to come, and that's the kind of thing that can really help combat the coping stress from a life change like this.
I will be living in the house while we sell it, and I couldn't help but be struck by the emptiness of it after the move-out. Because of school logistics, we're primarily housing the children with Steph. I will get plenty of custody time, but "main home" is with Mom, for them. For the weekend of the move, my parents blessedly offered to take them up north to their cabin and let the kids spend the weekend playing in the forest and not watching all their stuff get hauled out of the only home they've ever known, and when they got back, their bedrooms and such were "ready" for them at Steph's apartment. We hope that softened the blow a little bit for the kiddos, and I do get them next weekend already so they're going to be back with me five days after the drop-off, which is good. Kids get used to routines and that's exactly what we plan to give them.
So over the weekend my girlfriend Hannah joined me and we went about the business of resetting the house for sale staging. The market is so hot we barely have to do anything more than an as-is sale, but on the advice of our Realtor, we're putting in some targeted cleaning and polishing to emphasize open space and light and make the place desirable. But it's so empty to me. Moreover, it's going to be empty again, and my ultimate destination new home will be empty, so I get to do this all over anywhere between now and the end of the year or so, once the house sells. Then, I figure to rent for a year or two and then re-buy into the house market. I am gambling that house prices will have settled back down and it will make sense to buy. If I'm wrong, oh well, that's the risk I take.
How do I take this experience and glean value from it for the business?
Well, as I mentioned above, the store lease is in the backswing now and we now get to start planning ahead to our next move. After the difficulties from our 2017 move and spending the better part of 2018 paying for it, I need another move like I need a hole in my head, but the business reality is that I am personally risk-averse and I have a fiduciary duty to the DSG investors and we are going to make the play that reduces our vulnerability to future pandemics and other macroeconomic disasters as much as possible. We realize that black swan events are bad as a basis for policy, but when you have tectonic plates shifting within the industry anyway (MTG Arena, crowdfunding's ascendancy in general tabletop, Amazon as a general rule, increasing minimum wages, comic distribution chaos, and so on), a black swan mitigation strategy can be something that dovetails into a general push toward ruggedness.
I've joked that I'm all-in on the 1000-square-foot shoebox now, but that really is too small, and a COVID vaccine will exist at some point and I'll still want to host meaningful numbers of players for nightly tournaments. We assuredly do not need 6400 square feet of glory and the biggest independent game store location in the entire metro. So the next facility will be somewhere in between. I really wish the original Gilbert location landlords had played ball with us on our lease renewal rate, rather than holding to the higher price, because that location was a bit on the small side for the post-COVID world, but a lot closer to where we want to be than the current size, and it sits half-empty to this day. Our current landlord is fairly accommodating about suite modifications, so for all we know we might be able to stay put and just reduce footage. Or else that becomes the point at which we separate the TCG store from the video game store and move forward under two different banners with two different (smaller) doorways. This whole scenario is not something to be solved now, but it's on the 2021-2022 itinerary.
If I can arrange that sweet-spot next lease, whichever of the above permutations occurs, I'll ink up and the team will get to reboot DSG once again into an empty building, and convert it by means of labor and materials from a vanilla shell into a Friendly Local Game Store that the community can enjoy and embrace as its own. The great thing about a tabula rasa facility is that it can become so much more.
Between multiple home moves and store moves, by the time we get to around 2023, I will hope to be situated for at least half a decade in whatever buildings I've managed to occupy. Let us hope that the hobby game industry is behaving favorably by then, so that I may.
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