Never tell me the odds!
I want to give everybody an update on the business, but I couldn't quite decide what I wanted to say.
Sure I could just say that we closed the loan on Tuesday and have been placing orders since then. Next week will be a lot of setting up, as will the week after that. These things are time consuming you see.
I could leave it at that, but there was more that I wanted to say than just the bare bones update, I didn't realize this until after watching The Empire Strikes Back. A real shock huh? Whenever I've got something to say I tie it into Star Wars.
"This one a long time have I watched. All his life has he looked away... to the future, to the horizon. Never his mind on where he was. Hmm? What he was doing. Hmph. Adventure. Heh! Excitement. Heh! A Jedi craves not these things." -Yoda
As most of you know, I started working on this business a long time ago. I think I've wanted to do this for longer than I can remember, but the first seeds were sown when I worked with Gregg at EB and we became friends, I introduced him to the idea of being my partner and we've been working on it ever since. That was 4 years ago. That whole time I've been talking about what I would do later on, how things would be eventually. Always looking to the future, so much so that I'm sure many people doubted that I'd ever actually go through with it. But now I find that there's very little looking forward, and a whole lot of keeping my mind on where I am, what I'm doing.
So here we are, spending days ordering actual inventory, with real money. We have actual dates for deliveries. Tomorrow we'll be spending most of the day in the store, and starting next week, we'll be spending every day there. I must admit, this is a strange sensation, knowing that we're no longer dealing in possibilities, having lived so long worrying about what would happen at some unknown date and time in the future. Whether I was ever really aware of what we were attempting, I'm feeling the pressure now. It can be a bit scary. But not the crippling kind of fear, but rather the motivating kind of scary that gets your adrenaline pumping. We're spending some serious cash here in the hopes that we can turn it into even more money. That's a pretty big gamble. It can be surprisingly daunting ticking off boxes in an excel spreadsheet wondering, "Is this going to sell? Will people want this? Are we ordering too many Spider-man toys?"
And the problems, oh the problems. Problems you couldn't even imagine. Everybody tells me to make sure I do this and that, but nobody told me that one day we'd walk in and find our brand new carpet completely flooded by some mysterious water source. Yeah, that happened. But we're rolling with it. We're finding that our opening stock may seem a bit weak, that our video game distributor does not currently carry the newest Pokemon(?!), that Dell couldn't process our debit card because, oops! it never actually got activated. Or that the cabinets we wanted would have to be shipped from halfway across the country, taking nearly a month to show up and cost twice as much to ship. It isn't anything we can't handle, this is fun, this is real, this is now. We're no longer day dreaming about what it'll be like, because "it" is here.
So stay tuned, we'll let everybody know when we'll be open, and keep your eyes peeled for our soon to be updated myspace page! Oh, and sorry for the length of this post, but Star Wars'll do that to me.
Sure I could just say that we closed the loan on Tuesday and have been placing orders since then. Next week will be a lot of setting up, as will the week after that. These things are time consuming you see.
I could leave it at that, but there was more that I wanted to say than just the bare bones update, I didn't realize this until after watching The Empire Strikes Back. A real shock huh? Whenever I've got something to say I tie it into Star Wars.
"This one a long time have I watched. All his life has he looked away... to the future, to the horizon. Never his mind on where he was. Hmm? What he was doing. Hmph. Adventure. Heh! Excitement. Heh! A Jedi craves not these things." -Yoda
As most of you know, I started working on this business a long time ago. I think I've wanted to do this for longer than I can remember, but the first seeds were sown when I worked with Gregg at EB and we became friends, I introduced him to the idea of being my partner and we've been working on it ever since. That was 4 years ago. That whole time I've been talking about what I would do later on, how things would be eventually. Always looking to the future, so much so that I'm sure many people doubted that I'd ever actually go through with it. But now I find that there's very little looking forward, and a whole lot of keeping my mind on where I am, what I'm doing.
So here we are, spending days ordering actual inventory, with real money. We have actual dates for deliveries. Tomorrow we'll be spending most of the day in the store, and starting next week, we'll be spending every day there. I must admit, this is a strange sensation, knowing that we're no longer dealing in possibilities, having lived so long worrying about what would happen at some unknown date and time in the future. Whether I was ever really aware of what we were attempting, I'm feeling the pressure now. It can be a bit scary. But not the crippling kind of fear, but rather the motivating kind of scary that gets your adrenaline pumping. We're spending some serious cash here in the hopes that we can turn it into even more money. That's a pretty big gamble. It can be surprisingly daunting ticking off boxes in an excel spreadsheet wondering, "Is this going to sell? Will people want this? Are we ordering too many Spider-man toys?"
And the problems, oh the problems. Problems you couldn't even imagine. Everybody tells me to make sure I do this and that, but nobody told me that one day we'd walk in and find our brand new carpet completely flooded by some mysterious water source. Yeah, that happened. But we're rolling with it. We're finding that our opening stock may seem a bit weak, that our video game distributor does not currently carry the newest Pokemon(?!), that Dell couldn't process our debit card because, oops! it never actually got activated. Or that the cabinets we wanted would have to be shipped from halfway across the country, taking nearly a month to show up and cost twice as much to ship. It isn't anything we can't handle, this is fun, this is real, this is now. We're no longer day dreaming about what it'll be like, because "it" is here.
So stay tuned, we'll let everybody know when we'll be open, and keep your eyes peeled for our soon to be updated myspace page! Oh, and sorry for the length of this post, but Star Wars'll do that to me.