“Every new beginning comes from some other beginnings end.”
– Closing Time, Matchbox 20

LAN Gaming Centers are an amazingly simple idea. Get a space, some computers and X Boxes, then charge people to play games. Unfortunately the reality is much more complex.

One of the first problems with the situation is gamer geeks are the ones who start gaming centers. They see the idea of making money doing something they love: playing video games. But since it’s geeks doing it, not businessmen, way too many things get overlooked. I’ll come back to this in a minute.

Before Gamer Zone there were two other gaming centers (and one that popped up and disappeared during Gamer Zones existence. NEOsystems and Gamer Quest.

I never saw NEOsystems, so I can’t comment on it. Gamer Quest on the other hand I got to see while it was operating and can comment on it a bit.  Only just a bit though – what I saw and what reality was may be two completely different things.  And I’m sure someone somewhere is gonna bitch “Oh, but that’s not how it happened!”  Screw ya, it’s my story, you write your own 20,000 word epic

I had been in Gamer Quest twice. Both times I was in there it had the stench of business death in it. The building it’s self was huge. At one time is was a club, then a restaurant (geek themed – it failed), then it sat empty for quite a while, then it became another club (where there was a multiple homicide), then sat empty again.

I’m a bit superstitious about business. In particular, I have a thing I refer to as “Cursed Building Syndrome.” If a building has had a long standing tenant in it, and it goes outta business, a lot of times you’ll see the next three or four businesses that try to start up there fail within 6 months. I wouldn’t touch a building like that with a 10 foot pole and 6 months of free rent. It’s just not worth it – find someplace that hasn’t had a tenant like that. Look for a building where the last two tenants haven’t failed within the first year.

It’s got a main floor, two recessed sections below, and an upper deck. It’s also got an area for a kitchen. Except there’s no kitchen equipment in it – just… trash. And with all this space they had three XBoxes and 12 computers.

Best part is, they put the computers upstairs, so you don’t even see then when you walk in. Essentially, you walk into a large open area with some homemade tables in it.

So here’s your first business tip: First Impression Is Everything. If people walk in and see an empty business they have completely lost all possible excitement about the business. Now it’s going to be hard to sell them on the idea it’s the place they should be. There’s a lot that could have been done there with what they had (I would have killed for that same space, but at a lower rent level). But they didn’t.

They also spent a small fortune on a dragon sculpture on the outside of the building, and murals painted on the inside. I always scratched my head at that – what they were visually designing was a fantasy setting for a high tech place. That never struck me as a great idea, but hey – it’s not my business. I was only there at the request of a friend to take a look at the place. He was working there, and though I should see it and maybe give some comments.

Oddly enough I was invites to stop by and comment by a friend who worked there. So let’s come up with our first fake gamer name: The Skinny Geek. I had known The Skinny Geek for quite a few years from a gaming group that played together every weekend.

The Skinny Geek wasn’t real good at keeping a job. It’s always blamed on someone else, but the truth is he’s just one of those people who can’t get to work on time and whines about work. To quote another Gamer Zone character, he needed “to learn to be a man about things.”

This job he was passionate about – it was video games. It’s like the dream of gamer geeks everywhere to get paid to play video games. Unfortunately working at a gaming center is WORK. It’s not as intense as many other jobs, but the work is a hell of a lot more important than the games are. And oh dear God you will hear that problem over and over during the story.

Now for the second big business tip: people who own a business need to be passionate about business. Gamers are passionate about games. So when you have a business ran by gamers, they are passionate about games not business. This is a major problem. Battlefield 1942 doesn’t pay bills, but it’s fun. Going out and getting customers pays bills, but isn’t fun.

“Business geeks” is a term I started using to describe folks who are technology enabled (rather than disabled like the previous generation of businessmen), understand (and enjoy) business and it’s intricacies, and think about business the way some people think about video games.  No, I’m not saying they look at business as a game, but instead look at it like you might think of a game of Civilization:  Resource management, force control, appropriate responses to situations, strategic planning, etc.  In fact I’ve gotten to the point I recommend certain games for anyone who’s looking to get into business:  Civilization is great for the reasons I’ve already mentioned.  Warcraft II (and a number of other RTS games) are great for resource management under pressure.  Half Life 2 any many multiplayer FPS games are great for grace under fire.

OK, and it’s just damned fun.  But really – watch sometime.  Most of the best FPS players aren’t the ones who are screaming that they’re gonna kill you.  It’s the ones that calmly say “You’re dead, twit.” after putting a sniper round in your head, or do nothing more than quietly smile.  That last one – that’s me most of the time.  I don’t get pissed at problems most of the time – I try and solve the problem first.  THEN I’ll get pissed that it happened (if I get pissed at all.)  Shit happens.  Take it with as much grace as possible and fix the problem.

And yes, I’m a Business Geek.  I love all the little details of business, and am a gamer.  I won’t call myself a PERFECT business geek (otherwise I wouldn’t be writing the story of a business failure

Unfortunately, Gamer Quest didn’t have any Business Geeks on board.  I was really wishing it would all come together though – it would have been nice to see The Skinny Geek keep a job that made him that happy.

They did, however, have The Backer.  The Backer is an interesting guy – he’s an old school Entrepreneur.  He had previously had successful businesses.  In fact, very successful businesses.  He also lived through a savings and loan failure – and as you can guess, he was one of the guys who took it in the shorts because of it.

The LAN Gaming Center idea was very powerful to him – he saw great potential in the concept.   I’m not clear on all of the details, but somehow the other geeks and The Backer got together and created Gamer Quest.  Problem is… there was too large of a gap between the two groups.  The Backer didn’t have a firm understanding of the subject matter (video games), and the geeks didn’t have a firm enough understanding of business.  There was no common language between the two groups to work from.

It flopped.  

I have a belief.  If you consider yourself and entrepreneur, and you’ve never had a business fail, you didn’t take enough risks.  I of course tell myself that partially as a consolation since I have had a massive failure.  But I really do believe it.  And I figure if the geek side of things ever try to do a business again, they will have learned a lot from Gamer Quest closing – an expensive set of lessons, but lessons that are hard to come by.  And I hope they do try something again.  There’s nothing quite as great as the feeling of accomplishment when things are going right in a business.  The pride, the joy, the fulfillment.  I recommend everyone have at least one business success in life

“Jack… tell me a story.”

“Fuck you.”

“Oh, that’s one of my favorites!”

– Eddy Murphy & Nick Nolte, 48 Hours

I’ve given just a bit of background on the local Wichita LAN Gaming Center business field before jumping into the beginning of Gamer Zone.  It is somewhat important to the Story of Gamer Zone.  Also important is some background on the storyteller.   That would be me, of course.

I’m a gamer, a geek, and a business guy.  These days, it’s in the opposite order – business comes before any of the rest.

I started programming when I was… dear god, like 12 years old.  Wrote some video games on my own back then on the Commodore 64, but never released anything.  I was always passionate about games and technology, and someday wanted to write my own as a real programmer.

Out of High School I took a year off from school, and programmed a credit card system for a local computer company.  I taught computer science to kids at a computer camp in the summers.  Eventually I did go back to school, majoring in Archaeology (or at I tried to – part of the payment of the camp was in college credits.  Which meant that WSU insisted that I was a Computer Science major for some reason, the exact degree I was trying to avoid.  I wanted a more well rounded approach to life.)

While in college I got a job working for an electrical company doing CAD work, computer programming, and industrial automation.  It gave me some unique opportunities, and I dropped out of college without a degree (dumb ass I am, I never even considered the idea that I should have gotten my associates degree in something so I could put my credits on hold when I quit.)  I walked the Great Wall of China.  I saw Hong Kong.  I survived 40 below in an Ontario winter (40 below F or C?  Doesn’t matter, it’s the same damned thing.)  I deciphered an obscure American English dialect while trying to work in North Carolina.  In all fairness, the job let me see a lot of the United States and parts of the world.

But, slowly, the company started to crumble.  Somewhere before it’s collapse (or at least, the death of the Engineering department – the rest of the company went on), I started writing video games as a side line.  Just small puzzle games, but, I was making money doing it.  I got married (to a wonderful gal who loved video games too, and supported my work on developing them) and traveling the US and abroad was a lot less interesting.

When I was laid off, I started doing contract work for various Industrial Automation customers, and continued doing video game development.  Industrial Automation paid the bills sporadically, and the video games was a slow trickle of income.  The Red Head (my wife) worked too, so between the two of us, was made out OK.  There were struggles, but, the game development was slowly looking up.

I self published 7 games online, and did contract work on another 3 or 4 (only two of which managed to get published.)  Three of my own games were supposed to see real world publication, but never did (the contracts were signed, and a month before they were supposed to hit the shelves.  And of course there was nothing in the contract about them owing me money if they backed out

My biggest accomplishment in the video game development field was being a speaker at Indie Games Con ’02 with David “RM” Michael (a fun, sarcastic guy).  Then a speaker again in ’03, and ’04.  I spoke not on writing video games, but on the business of being an independent game developer and surviving (IE, guys who write games using the money out of their own budgets, rather than having a publisher pay for the game up front.)  It opened some interesting doors, was a hell of a lot of fun, and I got to deal with press and marketing.  

At that point I’m by no means a major success.   But I see how business works, where my own shortcomings are, what I need to improve upon, etc., etc., etc.  Enough that I’ve got a damned good grasp of business, and a deep love of business – one that rivals my love of video games.

Oh, and for the record… if the idea of writing video games sounds like a hell of a lot of fun… well, it is.  But just like a LAN Gaming Center is fun, but a lot of work, writing video games is fun, but a lot of work.  I’d love to recommend independent game development to everyone, but the reality is it’s kind of a sucky field to try and live in – it’s not impossible to be a self employed independent game developer, but it’s hard.  (That’s a whole different set of stories

Never mistake me for an expert in business.  I’m not.  For every thing I’ve learned, there’s 20 things I haven’t learned.  On the other hand, that’s also usually one of the hallmarks of someone who knows quite a bit – people who know nothing can’t imagine the amount they don’t know.  Those who know a lot can point out the boundaries of the vast territories they don’t know.  The subject is no longer and undiscovered country, it’s just not a completely explored country.  Any advice you see in here is free advice.  Take it as free advice from someone who did it for two years, and continues to be a Business Geek to this day.  If you want me to analyze your business plan, tell you if it improves on what we did, etc., sure – you can hire me as an contractor.  Otherwise, just the read the damned story and glean what you can from it

And you’ll discover two things things that aren’t a common mix personality wise while reading this story.  I’ve got a big ego, but at the same time, I’ve got no issues saying “I fucked up” and accepting responsibility for my failings.  Trust me – you’ll see more than one fuck up on my part during the course of this story

Now that I’ve kind of set the stage, it’s time to start telling the story of Gamer Zone it’s self.  This, my friends, is where the real fun begins

Gamer Zone was not my idea.  Good God it was not my idea.  In fact, Gamer Zone was as far from my plans as you could get.  My wife at the time and I discussed some concepts for a restaurant that also was a gaming center, and went as far as planning it out.  We looked at properties, business models, etc.  But Gamer Zone?  Nope, not us.

The Skinny Geek showed up one day with some interesting news.  He was going to be hooking up with The Backer to salvage what was left of Gamer Quest and try again.

One of the misconceptions here is that Gamer Zone was basically Gamer Quest 2.  Not really.  There was very little in common.  Just some equipment that was salvaged from the old place.  That’s about it.

The Backer had gotten an offer for some space from a coin-op vendor who owned a piece of property.  At Harry and Broadway.  Now, for those reading who aren’t from Wichita, Kansas, Harry and Broadway is a borderline slum.  It’s not so bad that you have to worry about being robbed on a daily basis, but it’s also not a place with lots of money laying around in people’s pockets.  Disposable income in that area is rare.  Everything is run down – the only new thing in the area is a Walgreens, and about a mile away a Walmart.  Otherwise, everything around there just looks old and decrepit.

But it was cheap, and small.  Two things that were a plus.  Expenses were going to be much lower – a large building like Gamer Quest had required quite a bit of money to heat and cool, more money to furnish, and LOTS more money on rent.

On one side of the new Gamer Zone location was a junk shop.  We’ll refer to them as Junkies.  On the other side of Gamer Zone was the Methadone Treatment Clinic.  No, I’m not shitting you – there was a drug treatment center right beside someplace that kids were going to be playing video games.  I mean… you would just THINK this would cause some sort of problem.   Drug addicts… kids… drug addicts… kids.  The big surprise is during the whole time Gamer Zone was there, there was never a problem from them.  They were nice people, and the way the business operated, it rarely conflicted with the schedule of Gamer Zone.

The Skinny Geek invited me down to see the place with an agenda – my job would be PR guy.  I met with The Backer, and chatted with the two of them a while.  He explained the plan:  the goal isn’t to open a gaming center.  The goal is to start a Gaming Center Chain.  Thus the name was eventually expanded slightly to Gamer Zone Centers, plural, with the goal of multiple locations (the name change wasn’t used much in marketing, where it normally appeared as Gamer Zone, or GZ with the kick ass stylized logo that was designed by The Dude In The Hat, who appears latter in the story.)

I have a problem.  I can’t stand and watch people work really, especially if it’s not being done in a way I feel is right.  At first I stayed out of helping set up things.  But the deadline was getting closer for opening the store, so, I slowly got involved.  I built a counter.  Helped set up the tables and computers.  Just… stuff.  Eventually The Skinny Geek and I painted the building.

This, by the way, was the second thing that went right.  The first thing that went right was a small location with small overhead.  Always a great choice for starting out.  The second thing was painting the building green.  Usually referred to as Gamer Zone Green – we used green and black in our marketing materials and in the theme of our interior.  It was actually the color of green used on the original XBox logo, which made sense.  This made the building BOLD and identifiable.

How identifiable?  Well, if you mentioned Gamer Zone, people had no clue what it was.  If you mentioned the green building at Harry and Broadway, everyone knew where you were talking about.  It was tacky and gaudy, but man did was it some of the best advertising 6 gallons of cheap green paint could buy!

Signage was a bit of an issue – there was a sign created for it, and some banners.  The logo for the sign was… unimaginative.  It was a combination of Gamer in blockish lettering, and Zone done with Twilight Zone lettering.  It was a mutt of a logo.  But it worked, and we ran with it for a while.

On the inside, everything was painted black.  I mean, everything.  Except the cheap tables.

The place was broken down into three rooms – the east room held the computers, and was something like 12 feet wide by 30 foot long.  The West room held two 60″ TV’s with XBoxes & Playstation 2′s on them, both of which had a couch in front of them.  The West room was exactly the same size as the East room, and usually was referred to as the Console room.  There was a front door to the street in.  Unfortunately there was no street parking anywhere near by.  The front door was useless for the most part.  Both rooms also had giant bay windows.  The problem is, we needed to keep the place dark inside, so, some really really odd material was found that would cover the windows (this was some seriously odd stuff – black, but kind of like outdoor carpet.)  

When they first started, the sign hadn’t been hung – that came a bit later.  Instead, they opted for having someone paint the signs in the window.  Which for some damned reason took forever to get done.  Better yet, it looked like crap when it was done.  Something is better than nothing in this case.

Since street access wasn’t much of an option for an entrance, there was a small room at the end that was shared between the two rooms that lead to a rear entrance and parking lot.  I’m probably describing it badly, but trust me, it wasn’t a great setup.  From the counter you could see… nothing.  You couldn’t view either room from there, so you had no idea what was going on in the place.  And if you were in one of those rooms, you couldn’t see the counter.  All things considered, it was the worst possible layout for a gaming center, but it was about all you could do with it.  The upside was the moment someone stepped through the door the first thing they saw was whoever was working the counter (I would have preferred if they saw computers first, or maybe big screens, but someone greeting you at the door isn’t a bad thing.)

So I helped the crew get things hooked up, set up, painted, etc.  I wasn’t doing it because it was my business, I was doing it to try and help The Skinny Geek get things rolling as fast as possible.  I wasn’t getting paid for it, but, I’m not shy about trying to help out a friend.  Plus it’s nice to get up from my computer and do something active.  

The computers were… they were a thing to behold.  Really, they were awesome looking.  Black Chenboro Bomb cases with clear plastic sides, lots of neon and LED lighting inside.  Those were impressive.  Unfortunately, the rest of the room they were in wasn’t impressive – some of the tables were tabletops sat on cinder blocks with some chairs that had been scrounged up from somewhere.  The other tables were nice chrome wire rack setups (which looked nice, but had crap for functionality and ergonomics.)

The whole place was networked together, and put on a DSL line.  DSL.  In a bad neighborhood of town.  Crappy service was always part of the package there.  With poor bandwidth, there wasn’t much you could online – after about the forth online player, there was going to be problems.

Now I’ve told you the good and the bad, and it might seem like the bad outweighed the good.  It did.  The price was right though – the place opened with a minimum of expense, which was important.  The Backer was still hurt from his last experience, and had some things in the works to try and fix the cash problem.

The only thing left was a crew to man the place.

A public business is nothing without employees.  Energetic, quick thinking, friendly employees can make the difference between success and failure many times.  And let me tell you, if I couldn’t have chosen a better crew myself.

Ok, I’m lying. A LOT.  I wouldn’t have chosen a single employee that worked there when it first started.  Not a single one would have passed an interview with me.  Of course, I’m also one of those people who would only hire someone who fit the job, not someone who would grow into the job.

I’ll give you the quick rundown…

The Skinny Geek.  You’ve already met him in the previous installments, but, he’s been a bit of a slacker most of his life.  Now with Gamer Zone, he’s got a new energy – he’s no longer an employee somewhere, he’s an owner, and initially that made a huge difference on his energy and enthusiasm.

Patch.  He’ll end up being the most short lived of the employees.  He’s… well, he’s just not right.  He’s one of those people I feel I have to wash my hands after shaking his hands.  Not because there’s grease on his hands, there’s something slimy about him.  You probably won’t hear anything about him in the story – he ended up being gone rather quickly (though for the life of me I can’t remember why.)

EmoGeek.  He was an interesting guy.  He had some serious issues, but was a sincerely nice guy who tried most of the time.  But his addiction level for video games often got in the way of work.  That’s a problem in this particular field, of course.

Balding Geek.  Unlike Patch and EmoGeek, he wasn’t useless.  However, he was anti-establishment, and tended to have issues with doing what he wanted to do rather than what should have been done.  When I was in the place, he’d do his work.  What he probably didn’t realize was just how many people told on him (same goes for every employee really.)  (And for the record, I’m balding too – he’s just balding at a much younger age than I am.)

The Backer is not an employee, nor would he have taken the counter.  He’s older, too far outside of the culture that was being served, and while he’s a people person he doesn’t do well with kids and teens (I had received some interesting comments ranging from “that guy it creepy” to “what’s he doing here?” to “he talks too much”)  His gift is in sales really – the ability to talk someone into, well… anything really.  He’s not just good at it, he’s great.  He could sell a $500,000 car to a little old lady to drive only to church on Sundays, and she’d think she got a great deal on it.  I’m not kidding at all when I say the guy has a gift.

And of course, there’s me.  You’ve already gotten your introduction to me two sections back.

The Backer and The Skinny Geek are owners at the beginning.  I was offered a piece of the action from the beginning just to handle the PR / Marketing part of things.

The employee roster changes over time, but not with nearly the churn rate that I would have expected given that it paid minimum wage.   This job isn’t your normal job – it’s a passion.  A love of video games that’s evolved into a service oriented job.  It’s pretty cool really.

The original launch date put it right around July 4, 2004.  Good God that seems like a very long time ago already!

We didn’t launch on our planned date – instead, we did something incredibly smart (this, of course, isn’t a common thing  Instead of exposing our fresh network setup, hardware, layout, etc. to new customers, we hosted a birthday party with like 14 screaming, hyperactive kids and a couple of adults.

Only two things went wrong:

1) Lighting in the place wasn’t particularly good.  Simply put, there was too much lighting.  The walls were painted light absorbing black, but, the overhead florescent lights we had (standard 4 foot 4 tube drop ceiling lights) were WAY too much.  This caused a lot of glare on the computer screens, and the 60″ big screens were absolutely horrendous.

2)  We had odd failures in some of the games.  You’d get 4 or 5 kids trying to launch a game online, and the game would complain of various licensing issues.  Remember, we had the hardware from another gaming center, and the software too.  Well, guess what?  It’s not licensed properly.  Ooops.  That was going to have to be resolved.

Otherwise, all was well.  We basically gave ourselves a week to clean things up a little further, and get it rockin’ and ready for action.

Along with the hardware and software, we happened to have the old server from the previous place.  This had the effect of giving us the complete customer list from Gamer Quest.  Which was really pretty depressingly small.  But we made use of it – the first mailer went out introducing Gamer Zone within the first week and it’s opening.

We also changed the lighting a bit – some nicer lighting over the service counter was added (they were fake torches), and lots of lighting was removed from the console room and the computer room.  This helped – no more glare on the screens.

Along with the Cafe software server that ran the place, we also added a computer to the service counter for whoever is working behind the counter to play games too.

As one would imagine, the first week SUCKED.  Like, really badly.  You could definitely get some gaming time in without much interruption.  We did get some of the Gamer Quest people to show up though, including The Plumber.

The Plumber is an asshole and a griefer.  If there’s a way to get under someone’s skin, he’ll find it and exploit it.  I’m not nearly as much of a griefer as he is (I’m more reserved for the most part, but I have my moments I can make people turn colors and show veins popping out of their foreheads), but we got along pretty well.  Two years after the death of Gamer Zone, we still hang around each other.

I mention The Plumber not just because he’s a friend and a Gamer Zone customer, but because he gives you a better idea what to imagine when entering Gamer Zone back then.  A LAN gaming center, you probably think of a bunch of 14 and 15 year old pasty white kids.  Sometimes you’re right, sometimes your wrong.  You can’t apply the stereotypes to Gamer Zone customers easily – often, it just doesn’t fit.  The Plumber is 6′ 4″, married, three kids (two when Gamer Zone opened), muscular, and well… about any attribute you don’t apply to most gamer stereotypes.  Except for the mouth.  That’s one mouthy son of a bitch, just like a lot of smack talkin’ gamers.

The Backer had a problem – he was tapped.  He put everything he could into getting us paint, equipment, etc.  There was nothing left.  Now, I’m not working the counter, but there are four other guys who are, who all expect that stuff.  You know – money.

So an arrangement was made – they’d work the counter, hours would be tracked, and when there was money available, they’d finally get paid.  That’s not the worlds best arrangement, but let’s face it – at the time everyone was excited.  They got to be paid to play games.

In the early days there really wasn’t that much in the way of rules for the employees to follow.  Empty the trash, count down the register, and greet people.  The only really had to listen to two people – The Skinny Geek, and me.

When I was brought on, I warned The Skinny Geek – “Dude, you know me.  If you get me involved, I’m large and in charge.  That’s just me, and you know it well enough by now.”  And it’s pretty true – the people I tend to develop the closest friendships with usually have strong personalities, because well… I just kind of blow right over most people.  I’m a ring leader, not a follower.  If I’ve got strong personalities around me, I get to choose which role to take.  The Skinny Geek didn’t have a strong personality (though The Backer did), so I knew what would happen.  He explained it’s his show, but in the back of my mind I knew what was gonna happen.  It’s the WHY that I didn’t know yet.

About two weeks into things, the first fumble occurs.  I’m talking to The Skinny Geek, and inquiring how business is going.  So far, so bad.  We’re not pulling in enough customers to really net much yet.  In a way, that’s to be expected.  The problem is, we don’t have any fall back cash.

Normally, when you start a business, you’ve got a plan.  I’ve written more than one business plan by the time I got involved with Gamer Zone, and I’m a bit taken back by the fact that there was no business plan.  No financial plan.  No marketing plan.  Everything is just “Wing It.”  In fact, that’s what the company should have been called:  ”Wing It”, because that’s what we did a whole hell of a lot of.

We should have had enough money for marketing.  I’m useless at this point – all I can do is issue a couple of press releases, and get some stuff online.  There’s no money for marketing, so there’s no real need for a PR guy.  But I suppose I can forgive that – the plan would be for marketing to be paid out of a percentage of the take for the month.

What I have a harder time forgiving is not having 6 months worth of cash to start.  This is one of my usual business suggestions:  have 6 months of cash to fall on.  Your first couple of months are going to suck, and then you should start slowly turning the corner.  6 months of cash slowly starts to stretch out because of increased business.  Eventually you hit the break even point.

There wasn’t 6 months of cash in the bank.  Fuck, there wasn’t a BANK.  Seriously – there wasn’t even a bank account for the company.  That’s how “Wing It” it was at first.

The Cafe software tracked how much money you took in for the day.  Inaccurately quite often.  It didn’t differentiate between products, it didn’t track console time well, it… well, it was a misconfigured piece of shit really.  But it’s what we had to work with.

I started looking through what we had brought in.  Not much.  We’re talking averages in the $20 / day range.  Ouch.  As I start asking questions, I realize The Skinny Geek can’t answer them – he’s not really tracking the finances – he just looks at the totals for the day and counts down the register.

It’s a little down the road that I give this speech, but, I’ll go ahead and give it here.  There are two things a business owner should know about the finances.  The Hard Numbers, and The Deck Plate Feel.

The Hard Numbers means looking at the accounting and knowing exactly where every last dime is.  That seems like a really trivial thing, but you’d be surprised how many people I’ve talked to don’t really have a grasp of where their expenses in business actually lie.  Accounting should be done daily, almost realtime.  Additionally, should should also know what’s coming up for expenses.  There should be a plan to meet these expenses.  Knowing how the Hard Numbers match the plan tells you if you’re going to run short of cash before meeting expenses.

The Deck Plate Feel is what I deem a sort of sixth sense about business.  At one point, I could walk into Gamer Zone and know without looking at the Hard Numbers where we were at for the day, and be pretty accurate about it.  It’s a combination of having seen the Hard Numbers so often, and correlating that with the traffic flow and little hints like how full the trash cans were.  ”Deck Plate Feel” comes from Star Trek – Scotty gives Geordie a speech about how he could tell how well the ship was running just by the feel of the vibrations of the warp engines through the deck plates.

The Hard Numbers are the most important.  But Deck Plate Feel is handy when having a conversation – you’ve already got in your head a feel for where the company is at, so you know if you can afford a new projector bulb, for instance.

I started making noises at The Skinny Geek about numbers.  I’m trying to let him figure things out on his own really – I don’t want to drag him around and treat him like a moron.  People often learn better when you show them the problem and give ‘em a hint then let them figure it out on their own.  The Skinny Geek isn’t stupid, but he was a business virgin.

The fumble here isn’t that The Skinny Geek wasn’t keeping up with accounting or strategic planning.  This one I’m going to attribute to a lack of experience on the part of The Skinny Geek, and a lack of understanding on the part of The Backer.  The Backer has done business long enough to know how things work.  You keep accounting, you plan for things.  Even if you are going to Wing It, you’ve still got to plan at least a bit.  He made the assumption that The Skinny Geek would know and understand the same thing.  So he put faith in him to get it done, and he didn’t.

The Backer was also tied up with wars on other fronts – he was dealing with too many things at one time.  That left only one person really seeing where things were falling down, and The Skinny Geek wasn’t really getting the hint.

Time for slightly more drastic measures.

Now there’s no more oak oppression,
For they passed a noble law,
And the trees are all kept equal
By hatchet, axe, and saw.

– Rush, The Trees

Before I move on to the next section of business changes that occurred early on, I’d like to tell something interesting about the environment of Gamer Zone.

Gamer Zone customers were an interesting breed.  When the place opened, it was $5.00 / hour to play if you had a membership (another $15 for a 3 month, $20 for a 6 month, or $30 for a year membership), and $6.00 / hour to play if you didn’t  It was expensive really, and resulted in a sort of “exclusive club” sort of membership – only people who really wanted to play games in a social setting stayed around for very long.  Fortunately we eventually got wise and changed the pricing so it was less exclusive.  But it’s not yet time in the story for that, it will come around later (along with some interesting business observations because of it.)

Racism is still pretty common to this day.  Slowly society cares less and less about skin color or background, but we’ve got a damned long ways to go before the United States is completely color blind.  It’s just one of those things.  Sure, there’s legislation to attempt to produce a less racially aware environment in our society, but let’s face it – the change has to come from the people, not by laws.

If you would have asked me before Gamer Zone, I would have said all of our customers would have been young white guys.  Very early on, I was proven wrong.  One of our early groups were The Hispanics (I’ll admit it – I couldn’t come up with a more creative name.)  As you might expect, they were a group of Hispanics – four of them most of the time, and they would come in about once a week and play for a couple of hours.  When they first started, they exclusively played Halo 1.

The Rednecks were the white boy equivalent, always playing Halo 1, and usually there were four to five of them.  The Rednecks were a bit rowdy compared to the fairly quite and respectful Hispanic group.

The way the XBox setup worked was nice – these were 60″ screens, and four people could play per XBox, so it was the equivalent of each person having their own 30″ TV screen to play on.  Both of the 60″ big screens were back to back, with a couch and a cool ass table in front of it (seriously – one of the coolest things we had in the early days were these really unique looking Coca-Cola custom built tables.)  The XBoxes were networked, so in theory people couple play four on four games.  Except it never really happened – when we started, people kinda kept to themselves when playing on the Xboxes.

One day I’m at the counter with The SkinnyGeek, and from the counter you can see into the Console Room.  I notice the Rednecks are are in the couch, all leaned in close having a whispered conversation.  The one at the end leans all the way out on the couch, looking  at the couch containing the Hispanics.  Then he quickly leans back into the huddle, and the continue to whisper.

I can’t say I expected trouble or anything, but, something was up.  I kept watching, but was doing while focusing on other things.  Whatever was going on, I needed to know what was up, but didn’t want to stop it unless it turned into something bad.

Soon, the guy on the end of the couch gets up and walks out of the Console Room, walk into the room with the counter, then into the PC Room, which has a door that leads back into the Console Room.  I can see him in the background – he leeeeeaaannns into the doorway, not making any noise, getting a good look at the Hispanics and their big screen.

He walks back quickly and hops on the couch, and they all huddle again.  Then he leans out again, and says “Hey guys.  You want to play against each other?”

That was the closest we ever got to a situation that was tense because of potential racism problems.  

Three or four weeks later, 5 Rednecks showed up, and only 3 Hispanics.  So they did the obvious thing – one of the Rednecks joined the Hispanics to create a balanced team.

There may have been background grumbling of a racial nature, but I never heard them.  Race just wasn’t an issue – people were black, white, asian, hispanic, whatever.  But first and foremost when they walked through the doors of Gamer Zone, they were Gamers.  We ended up with policies about quite a lot of things, but, it occurs to me looking back we never put any policy down about racism.  It hadn’t occurred to us – it was that little of a problem.

Don’t get me wrong – you’d hear yells of “What up niggah!” from time to time.  Oddly enough, that was from The Counter Strikers – who were a group of Asians that came in for just one thing.  And that was just through the headsets at players on the other end.

Sexism was a different story, and it manifested it’s self at two different levels.  However, it’s not time in the story for that – first we’d have to have some girls in the place before it becomes an issue.

I’ll never say that games are a unifying force against racism.  But I will say it does seem to have a mellowing effect on it.

Gamer Zone tools along for about two months.  We’ve started getting a very small customer base, and a bit of feel for what we’re doing.

However, we’ve got problems.  I assume (and correctly) that we’re not making enough money to cover our expenses.  We got some free rent time, but, we’re running out: rent will have to be paid soon.  Electric and water will have to be paid.  The people working the counter…

Well, the SkinnyGeek didn’t really come up with and execute a good plan for paying employees.  Hell, at this point they might as well have been called volunteers – what he did is start writing down their hours, and basically giving them a promise that they’d get paid when we have money.

I said before it was time for drastic measures, and it was.  But that doesn’t mean it happened all at once – this became a change over that really phased in over the course of a month or just a bit more.

I sat down with The SkinnyGeek and went over bills.  Where are we, what were we going to be owing, etc.  It looked pretty grim when written down on paper (and, just to make things more confusing, eventually we discover that one of the bills isn’t even being sent to Gamer Zone.  The Backer had turned on the water to the place, and hadn’t even though about the fact that we weren’t getting the bill.  Oops.)

A rough breakdown of expenses:

$900 / mo. rent

$250 / mo. electric

$30 / mo. water

$30 / mo. gas (we had gas heat, which means electric went down in the winter, but gas went up)

$100 / mo. for restocking of goods like sodas that we sold at the counter

$100 / mo. for Internet service

——–

$1410 / mo. in non-labor related expenses.

Really, all things considered most businesses would love to have that sort of level of expenses.  Rent was cheap, especially considering it was two storefront bays and a back room.  The rest of the expenses weren’t bad.  Now for the killer.  We started out being open (and this is from memory, so don’t take this as an absolute truth) from 2 PM to Midnight, I think.  Assuming $6.25 / hour for all employees including the SkinnyGeek (he was higher paid originally), that totaled $1750 in labor related expenses.  So, $3160 in expenses to keep the doors open.

But we’re actually running in a hole already – The SkinnyGeek was paying himself enough to get to and from work basically at this point, and very very little to the folks who worked there.  So we had, at a guess (the true accounting figures are long since missing, so much of this is rebuilt from a possibly faulty memory) probably $3000 already setting on the books that we owed.

The Backer was tapped, as I already mentioned.  At this point, well… there’s only two people who have any money.  Me, and The Redhead.

The Redhead was my wife at the time.  Beautiful, smart, and fun.  I was spending more and more time at Gamer Zone, and well, slowly she started spending time there too.  It wasn’t like she approached me with the idea of joining the team, or that I asked her.  It just became a natural evolution sort of thing.  She had plenty of other things going on – school and work – so she wasn’t there all of the time or anything, but she had a certain eye for things.  She picked up on details a lot of the rest of us missed.  At this point, she’s just beginning to become part of the team.

Patch left right around this time, if I remember correctly.  He as the first employee to leave.  The reason is obvious – if you’re not getting paid to do a job, it’s just a hobby, not a job.  Oddly enough, he didn’t just leave the team.  He was the only person to ever leave the team and just blow the place off.  

The reason for that is simple – so far, we don’t have something we’ve got deep pride in.  Right now, to the employees, it’s just a really cool job.  To the owners, it’s a growing set of headaches.

Ownership is also a problem.  There was no bank account.  So I fixed that – I created a Gamer Zone bank account in my name at my bank.  I was promised a piece of the action, but there’s nothing down on paper.  There is no corporation.  There’s not even a real agreement of who gets what.  It’s just sort of… there.

When I opened the bank account, I put it in my name, and put The SkinnyGeek and The Redhead on the account as signers.  Gamer Zone was a DBA at this point.  In essence, by setting up a bank account, I stole complete ownership of the company.  No kidding.  Since there wasn’t any paper to go by any disputes of ownership could have gotten really ugly.  But my name was on it – anyone would have been hard pressed to take it away from me.  

It’s not like I set out to steal it or something.  It was just a matter of getting business taken care of.  The SkinnyGeek became in charge of dropping off the deposits at night, which meant we suddenly had a tracking of income and outgoing, at least from bank statements.

Since we were so far in the hole, something had to happen there too.  The SkinnyGeek and I basically put the rest of the staff on minimum hours (which translates into “as close to zero as possible”), and we split the shifts between us.

At the time I was doing contract work through Midnight Ryder Technologies.  Gamer Zone wasn’t particularly busy so I had plenty of time to do work behind the counter.  It also started giving me some quality time with the Cafe software.

The Cafe software should have been the center of the business.  In theory it tracked the usage of all machines in the building, how much time was on the account of each member, provide stats for things like food sales, expenses, profit, etc.

It didn’t.

Heck, it barely kept accurate records of the member’s time on their pre-paid accounts.  Now, this software was configured exactly like it was when Gamer Quest owned the hardware.  Apparently someone never bothered to really figure the software out and set it up right.  I learned a lot about how it worked, and set out to fix it’s piss poor configuration problems.  

That only got us part of the way to where we needed to be.  We had information on how much in the way of soft drinks we sold -vs- the amount of time we sold to members.  The memberships started tracking a little truer time wise after some tweaking.  But it didn’t do anything for keeping track of expenses like rent or employee expenses.

I’m kind of old school.  While I like the new fangled things like Quicken, I still prefer a nice spreadsheet layout.  Somehow in my mind I manage to visualize the flow of transactions better that way.  Heck, my current accounting software is great because that’s how it works.  

So I started by setting up a spreadsheet in Open Office, and teaching The SkinnyGeek how to use it properly to track deposits.  Sure, it’s a simple thing, but it’s got to start somewhere.  Over time the spreadsheet evolved.  The Redhead added good budgeting to the setup so we could in theory budget for months in advance.

Now comes my fatal mistake.  If you wanted to spot the moment where Gamer Zone started dying, I’d say it was the day the place opened.  But if you asked me the spot where I fucked myself, this was it.  The Redhead and I put some of our own money in the account to make sure bills would get covered.

The reason I say it was a mistake is now I’m invested.  I’ve not just got time and energy in it.  Those I could have ignored and walked away a lot easier.  But the minute I gambled money on a concept, I’m now driven.  And of course, it gets easy to put more money in each time, thinking you’re protecting your investment you’ve already made.  

It’s silly.  It’s an ugly cycle.  If you look at it from the outside looking in, it’s stupid.  But when it’s your money you’ve invested, you’ll quickly discover the illogical ability to throw $10.00 into something after you’ve thrown $2.00 in.  There’s a reason that old saying “In for a Penny, in for a Pound” exists.

But this also really closes Chapter 1, and begins the next Chapter of The Gamer Zone Story.