I do owe my readership an apology. I have been extremely sparse about new blog articles. Some of my deadbeatery is excusable -- I do have a wedding coming up this fall, after all -- but part of the reason I haven't been writing is a deliberate decision that is tied to business prerogatives. And not to be too meta, but that itself seemed like a pretty decent idea for an article!
In an absolutely great interview session with finance YouTuber Graham Stephan, automotive YouTuber Doug DeMuro explained that he keeps a grueling schedule of content production despite already earning plenty of money, because he doesn't know when it's all going to end, so he feels motivated to max out the earning capacity of this window of opportunity while it stands open. That is to say, the boomlet of social media whereby a YouTube channel is, for this moment in time, a lucrative option. Indeed, an extremely lucrative one if you managed to get situated right. But it can't last.
Doug is absolutely on point with this. Windows of earning opportunity are often a combination of preparedness, awareness, discipline, ruthlessness, and luck. They can close without warning or remorse. YouTube seems like an earnable conduit right now, but what happens when it's not. It can absolutely happen. For example, already Facebook provides far worse advert metrics than Instagram for the same content DSG puts out, for the reason of I have no damned idea. It just does. (Paid advertising campaigns on either platform feed through to readers on both.) What happens when YooToob becomes "lame" and the earnings center-of-gravity for videos is on Twitch or (sigh) TikTok (in which case I'll be missing it because f**k that noise).
The situation for Desert Sky Games is a little bit broader and more general. With the exception of a couple of blips now and then on the schedule (Innistrad Crimson Vow and Pokemon Fusion Strike, more or less), we have been on an absolute earnings tear since spring 2021. I have barely taken any days off through this entire duration, not to mention during which we had a fire, a store move, and almost complete turnover of staff. The bottom line is that most business is booming and on any given day or week I don't want to miss the chance to capture peak earnings, so I spend an inordinate amount of time doing "store stuff." Pokemon is off its 2021 peak, but is still much hotter than the doldrums of 2017-2018. Magic is a torrent of product that we can almost, kind of, keep up with. Video games have been on absolute tilt ever since March 2020 and who even knows when that will slow down. I've been pricing systems at above the pricecharting rate and they still sell as fast as I can prep them and get them staged. Meanwhile on the buy side I've been turned down offering 75% of pricecharting in cash for Nintendo hardware, usually a severe overpay, and right now it's not enough.
Meanwhile, owing to the pandemic and the nursing shortage, Hannah, who is a registered nurse working overnights at a local hospital, has had the opportunity to bank massive bonuses taking extra shifts, and for that matter is in a profession that keeps getting market increases for her regular wage, so even though the work is pretty strenuous, she doesn't want to miss a peak earnings window either. There are stretches of days where we complain that we miss each other. It's a hell of a grind. But wow, we feel pretty good about the bankroll we've been building.
There is roughly a two-week cadence to our work right now where Hannah and I spend mutual work days working, then we have one weekend with the kids where our non-work time is spent with them, then there is a day or two of relative downtime that we spend with each other (and also do household stuff, which is mostly the lowest priority) and then during the second weekend when we don't have the kids, we both work again straight through. Essentially, any night when she's at the hospital, I put in extra hours after closing in the dark store, because my tiredness is offset by the ease of productivity in the peace and quiet. I'm not inclined to just go home and stare at the cat, as cute as Store Kat may be.
This is also part of why DSG isn't a WPN Premium store yet. Every time I send a new video, they send back a punchlist of what should be minor projects, but I just can't justify spending time on any of them when working on the store's existing deliverables earns me way more money and incurs less transitional friction. Writing, which in the abstract I always want to be doing, is similarly outranked by monetizables.
The foregoing makes me sound like quite the money-grubbing greed merchant, but what I'm doing is really a far more conventional diligence. The reality is that small business retail in the comic and hobby game industry isn't a career with a clearly shaped future. We know sunsets are ahead for each of the three main things DSG does (video games, Magic, and Pokemon) but when those sunsets are going to hit, industry-wide, is a moving target we can only speculate. And I think general tabletop is far worse off. If you forced me to pick a year, right now, without any caveats, when the business model that DSG is running will become untenable? For a variety of reasons, I'd pick 2028. (Six years ahead, as of this writing.) And I'm concerned I've placed that date too far ahead. But let's just say 2028 for the sake of thought exercise.
Now think about your own career. If a little bird told you, credibly, that you'd be fired six years from this very day, and nothing you could do would prevent it, and moreover your industry wouldn't be a viable income source anymore and you'd end up having to move on to some sort of adjacent work, and you can't yet know exactly what work that would be, and you were being offered unlimited overtime at double, maybe triple wage here and now today, what would you do? I imagine you'd make hay while the sun shined, right? You'd pick up every shift you could. You'd cancel vacations, you'd put hobbies on ice, you'd quit the neighborhood bowling team, you'd stop going to church, maybe. After all, God helps those who help themselves. And you'd do ten years worth of work in five, and probably spend that last year winding down and organizing your transition out. And you'd be financially well situated when the clock struck midnight, and that's exactly what I want for me and Hannah and ultimately for the kids.
I decided decades ago that if I ever had the chance to compress a career like this, I'd do it. "If you could work your ever-living ass off for ten years but then retire, would you?" Absolutely the f**k yes. In fact after a break during the early months of retirement, I'd surely find my way back to productive endeavors, not the least of which would probably be writing. But just because I was willing to run that grind didn't guarantee that I'd get an opportunity to actually try. I had preparedness, awareness, discipline, and ruthlessness, and now the video game and Pokemon booms and Magic's high-voltage itinerary are the luck that the recipe called for. My championship window is open. It's right there. I have to take it. And that means, unfortunately, instead of reading interesting industry repartée here on The Backstage Pass, I'm afraid most weeks for at least the rest of 2022, you'll just have to enjoy the silence. :)
Since my blog articles intentionally use song titles now, I would be remiss if I did not link a great rendition of same. I've never been a Depeche Mode listener. I can appreciate them on a technical level but their performances just do nothing for me, for whatever reason. But compositionally they did a solid with Enjoy the Silence, and I can't pick between two splendid covers of the song, the first by piano prodigy Tori Amos and the second by goth-metal groundbreakers Lacuna Coil. Words can be so very unnecessary, but I give them more credit than only to harm.
