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Hi guys,

I am toying (pun intended) with the idea of opening a gaming store just north of Liverpool in the UK. I have the premesis more or less sorted and before I take the details to the a bank I am looking for some feedback from people all over the world as everyones views matter to me. Naturally I am also interested in the thoughts of people in the area too so that I can get an idea of the local community.

The site is very big and on a main road in a fairly affluent area with acces to buses and trains plus right next to the motorway network.

I would be stocking the entire GW range in store and would also look to stock other game systems too. This is where I fall down though as I only play X Wing as well as 40k so am not sure what would be good to stock. So thats my first question. What systems are popular enough that would be worth stocking and what should I avoid as people only buy it online?

I will have a webstore too by the way.

I am going to have about 12-14 full sized tables available for games that will be FREE to game on through the day and would have campaign/league nights on mid week that would cost a few pounds. Would people be interested in paying a couple of quid to play of an evening in a campaign/league?

There will be a hobby area with couches to sit and chat with fellow hobbyists and snacks and drinks will be available. There would also be paint stations for people to use.

I was thinking of having a trade programme available where people can sell their old models for credit in store or a lower amount of cash similar to the way computer game shops work. Would this be of interest?

Finally I would have a huge space available that I can turn into a tornament hall with space for upwards of 50 tables. If I hosted a tournament where you could use non GW minis too do you think people would come and what sort of price wuld you pay to be in such a tournament. Food would be provided so think along the lines of GW Throne of Skulls where it is competetive without being over powered.?

There are obviously other aspects I would run in the business too but cannot list them all here.

Please give me some feedback guys as I really need to know the market for such an idea.

Thanks

Martin

Note to the mods. If this is not the right place please could you move it somewhere more appropriate.

 McManiak wrote:
I would be stocking the entire GW range in store and would also look to stock other game systems too. This is where I fall down though as I only play X Wing as well as 40k so am not sure what would be good to stock. So thats my first question. What systems are popular enough that would be worth stocking and what should I avoid as people only buy it online?

That's really going to be a better question to ask your local gamers. How well a game does in different areas depends hugely on who happens to be playing what. FoW is huge in some areas... and doesn't sell at all in others. Likewise with Warmahordes.

You need to tailor your range to the people who are going to walk in the door.

I am going to have about 12-14 full sized tables available for games that will be FREE to game on through the day and would have campain/league nights on mid week that would cost a few pounds. Would people be interested in paying a couple of quid to play of an evening in a campaign/league?

You'll probably need to be offering something back from the league/campaign whatever to get people to pay for it.

There will be a hobby area with couches to sit and chat with fellow hobbyists and snacks and drinks will be available. There would also be paint stations for people to use.

I would avoid supplying paint unless you can get a supplier to donate it. Otherwise, those paint stations will turn into a huge money-pit very easily.

I was thinking of having a trade programme availablewhere people can sell their old models for credit in store or a lower amount of cash similar to the way computer game shops work. Would this be of interest?

This can work so long as it's managed by someone who is cluey on the value of second-hand minis. It can be trick to get the balance right, but can work well if you can do it.

Finally I would have a huge space available that I can turn into a tornament hall with space for upwards of 50 tables. If I hosted a tournament where you could use non GW minis too do you think people would come and what sort of price wuld you pay to be in such a tournament.

Again, that's going to depend on your local gamers. If the area doesn't have much of a competitive scene, you could be facing a bit of promotion work to get people in the door.

Appropriate entry costs vary, although in general people are happy to pay for perceived value. If you have nice tables with decent terrain, and a good prize pool, people are happy to pay a higher entry fee. If you're playing on bare MDF boards with a scattering of spray-painted foam for terrain and skimping on the prizes... not so much. Again, finding the balance can be tricky, but looking around at other tournaments, checking what they charge and what their entrants get for their money is probably a good place to start.

You really want to carry GW stock as an indy retailer?

I hate to be blunt, but that sounds like a failing venture.

First off, you can't carry the entire range of GW products as a lot of them are now direct only. Is there any GWs near your location? If there is, expect shipping delays, or even not being able to get certain items. Honestly I think anyone looking to go into business, and making GW there primary source of income is nuts. Have you seen how GW treats indy retailers? Read the horror stories. Trends are leading towards GW going direct (or GW retail stores) only.

That sounds like a massive amount of upfront investment and a whole lot of overhead.

Have you broken down what you'd need to take in, in terms of an average daily turnover, in order to meet your fixed costs?

Does that figure seem manageable, or does it sound anus puckeringly, scarily difficult?

Just keep your store area seperate from the gaming area, meaning you come in with your bags and army boxes and move around the cashier desk to the gaming tables. Products on other side.

About an old miniature trade in... No... just have an annual auction a couple of times a year where you take in and list folks old gaming stuff for auction and what they will take minimum for, auction the stuff off for store credit only and not at cost but retail. That way you don't have to keep record of miniatures and models and never fork out cash or store credit for things that won't sell.

No painting stations with paint you supply, have them bring in their own, and brushes. Allow good painters to have workshops.

Have someone there who can demo all games, advertise a particular game in demonstration periodically.

Theft is a big deal for game store owners.

Have enough of the products on hand for those folk who just make spontanious purchases, if you don't have a lot of stock on hand you lose out on smaller purchases every day.

Keep your negative opinions about games to yourself, if someone is buying or talking about something they've bought or collected they want positive not negative aspects and opinions. Someone wants to run a campain weekly or monthly, with a group let them, and ask if new players are allowed. Brings in more folks.

Keep it clean and well lit so parents feel comfortable letting their age appropriate children there to play games and buy things, with daddy's credit card...

Run tournaments, have reasonable tournament prises available, have painting contests, have snacks and drinks available. If there is a sandwich shop next door work out a deal with them if you can to get coupons for folks at your store.

Just some ideas. Best of luck!!!

Thanks guys for the quick response do far.

I would need to put an average of £250 per day through my till via the store, Web and any other means (trade? Drinks and snacks etc) so I think it is do able on that sense.

I'm not sure how the indy stores work in the states but In the uk they are leaning more to supplying via indy stores as they get the profit without the risk or staff cost etc. I can have access to the main 900+ products at good discount and anything that is Web only I get 25% from so still not too bad. I get new release stuff on release day and the only thing I can't do is sell outside the UK.

I really need to know what the local meta is for gaming as mentioned and hopefully people will respond in time to that. The paint stations would only be stations with water and paper towels. Customers would need to bring their own equipment in. Game tables would be well made with a good quality of scenery both GW and other brands. I have 3 high schools that I could enlist to help with the build projects too. Prizes would be anything from store vouchers to trophies and bragging rights.

This is exactly the sort of feedback I want tho guys so please keep it coming. Thanks


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Kelly that's right on the button thanks

Is that £250 profit or turnover?

Turnover wise, ~£7.5k a month isn't too scary, but if we're talking profit, that translates, give or take, to double that in terms of turnover, and if you're thinking in terms of sales at RRP, you need to add another 20% in VAT, so we're now talking a day rate of nearer £700.

Don't want to patronise, perhaps you could outline your knowledge/experience etc so I know where to pitch this stuff.

Per the day rate: I run a small store and games club and have to clear £20/day to cover rent, then add on rates, utilities and wages. Talking RRP sales, it isn't wise to count on more than a 25-30% return in order to cover taxes, VAT etc.

If I were to rely on just RRP games, turnover would need to be around £400. (£30 return per £100, £120/day = £20 rent; £6.50/hour wages (8hr day £48) £20 utiliities / rates; 25% turnover held in abeyance for taxes etc).

If in an accounting period I have excess, then I can expand offerings, product range etc....allows for a little growth....or a little padding if I think a bad period is coming up.

Drinks and snacks vary wildly, so average it out to a max of 20% (gives you a little cushion).

I mitigate these figures with club subs, which go direct to the rest without RRP turnover, meaning that I can reduce that figure.

My space is roughly 700sq ft, and given what you've listed as space, £250 a day through the till seems very small.......

Thanks again guys. I've been self employed for the last 10 years now and have been a consultant/trouble shooter for motor dealers. I basically go in and review, their performance and make changes where needed to increase profit. Whilst this pays exceptional money the work is bevoming more sporadic and is all over the country.

The 250 is turnover and dervives from everything being added annualy covering rent, rates, utilities, insurance, wages for me plus 2 other staff on a part time basis so there will always be 2 on site, stock at 20% above minimum requirements and a loan repayment. All these things come to £90k pa which cruedley diveded by 365 is £250 per day.

It would not pay me a fortune at this level but my qualty of life with regards to my happiness and being able to see my partner and daughter would increase, plus if the business was successful then I obviously reap further rewards.

I imagine 70-80% of my sales would come from the webstore and have not costed any tournament profit as I really do not know how well that would work.

I agree with a comment above of having the stock in the shop and that is why I would want yhe extended GW range so that impulse buys and mummy/daddy credit card sales are more likely. We've all done it were the new box comes out and we buy extra stuff because it's there.

I would also be stocking Battlefoam which has a large return plus I imagine some of the other systems have a similar level of discount too.

I can hire out the hall for other things such as conferences etc as it really is big (300sq meteres) and one thing I struggled to find in the north west was an airbrushing class. There doesn't seem to be any that are specific to miniature painting so I could run some of those and a high percentage of people will buy equipment at the end of the course.

Naturaloy I would have a stock of hobby accessories ranging from various paints and brushes to tools, greenstuff and plasticraft for help with scenery, bases and conversions.

This is all good guys keep it coming please.

Over here in the U.S. Magic the Gathering and other forms of cardboard crack are pretty huge. The other surprisingly popular best seller at a few of my FLGS are high quality chess sets as apparently outside of mail order they're almost impossible to find locally.

I think your numbers are optimistic. You mention going to a bank, banks are extremely reluctant to lend to niche businesses currently.

Hobby stores for the want of a better term look really appealing to run if you are into gaming and want to turn a hobby into a livelihood. But the reality is so different. So many stores fail for all sorts of reasons, underestimation of costs involved is one of the major ones.

It sounds like a great adventure!
I'd look to investing in some anti-theft measures for your stall first up, or get good insurance for shrinkage. When I was a youngin a group of my dodgier mates would shoplift their flg store blind. Was pretty shocking in hindsight.
Also on a side note, if you could open up a web store with an Aussie shop front you could make a mint grey exporting GW mini's to Australia, even including shipping you could find some massive sales over here, it'd just have to fly under the GW radar.
Otherwise, it sounds like a brilliant idea. Good luck!

As for what to stock; I'd try and get at least starter sets for the most common dozen or so games, and ideally burst one of each open to use for demos. That should at least allow you to gauge what's going to be popular whilst boosting sales/games/loyalty.

Buying used stuff is a gamble, but maybe you could get away with a commission system where you have a display of used stuff that the seller still owns, and when it's sold you give them credit to 80% of the sale value. It's lower risk for you and should still be good for the seller/customer.

A few things;

-Are there any already established LGS in the area? If there are, you'll be in direct competition with them.

-Free tables to use doesn't sound right. They are a big reason people go to the gaming store, and not asking for money to use the facilities seems silly to me. A pay-to-play and/or membership would be better.

-As for the game systems, at my LGS, 40k, x-wing, WarmaHordes and magic seem to be the most popular.

-I dont think you need to be specific about using non-GW models in tournaments. I can understand why GW say to only use GW models, but that obligation doesn't really extend to you. Just go with the rule that you have to be able to tell what it is, and wargear/weaponry must be wysiwyg.

-Have you thought about the cost / time involved with a web store? I made a website once, it was a royal PITA. I dont know the going rate of web site creation, but I imagine it to be a fair amount. You're also going to want someone to manage it.

I wish you luck with this!

I’m not a business owner, so don’t know the hidden costs. But you need to find them before going forward. You seem to have the obvious ones covered, but it’s the ones you don’t see that get you.

You are using 365 for calculating your daily costs, you planning on being open holidays?

You have wages for staff added in. Are there any HR overhead things (health insurance, retirement, etc) that you need to add in? Are you going to need to hire a lawyer and/or accountant? Are you and your family protected financially if this goes under?

Do you have maintenance and upkeep budgeted? There is going to be wear and tear, accidental breakage, supplies.

Reward/loyalty program?

Use store credit as payouts for tournaments. My FLGS had $5 tournaments every other week, top three get credit back, how much depends on the number of players.

Card games.

I'm not a business owner and YMMV depending on regional differences. In my years of hobbying... here's what I've learned from some of the owners of the local FLGS:

1. Card games do not provide much profit. They provide cash flow and traffic. This is good AND bad. It is good in that it generates word of mouth for your store and snack sales. It is bad in that card game CAN potentially crowd out other customers and card gamers are the worst of the internet bargain hunters. Card gamers are also very entrenched in their game and are unlikely to branch into your other stock.

2. Boardgames are gaining traction as they are becoming more acceptable main-stream entertainment and can attract a lot of foot traffic. Pricing at or near RRP can still work due to convenience. Choosing which items to stock is a bit of a challenge however.

3. Cleanliness is huge. The store will turn away random passers by if it is messy and/or dirty. Also, huge hordes of gamers in the store space can be intimidating to random foot traffic. All the more reasons to keep the gamer section away from the merch.

4. None of my local FLGS are able to survive off miniatures alone. They all require MTG (and other card games), Board Games and/or comics/anime to generate additional profit. Of course, YMMV.

Just a bit of feedback, as everything else I would have said would be covered.

Instead of a straight discount to members or shoppers, a couple of LGS's around here used to have a buy 3 get one free or buy 4 get one free. I would dump a LOT of cash into those stores. Another has a straight 15% off for members to the local club.

I love the idea of paying a few bucks to be in a campaign for an evening. If my LGS's did this, I'd probably go every time. This would be a great starting point to get people into playing Kill Teams (for 40K beginners), Malifaux, saga, X-Wing, Dust, Dreadball, Deadzone, Song of Blade and Heroes...there is a lot you could do.

Keep it clean, pay attention to your customers. There was an LGS here that wasn't so clean and organized, and you'd walk in and they'd be playing video games or on the computer the whole time. While I don't really want to be followed around and bullied into buing thins, I do like the social interaction.

I wish you the best of luck!

For popular games systems look to the local clubs, these will be indicative of the local community, so for example here, outside of anything GW (including old specialist games - don't forget these as leagues can still draw people into your store), it's Warmachine, Flames of War, Dystopian Wars, X-Wing, Infinity and Bushido. Many of the popular boardgames like Zombiecide and Relic get some play too.

Historical Gamers should be considered also. Now they wont be interested in FoW so much but if you have 20mm WW2 or one of the many Napoleonic scales catered for you might get a clique going. These chaps tend to be older gamers but older tends to mean £s so worth considering.

On the subject of clubs I would suggest ingratiating yourself with as many as possible. Club discount and hosting or sponsoring events will work to increase your popularity/footfall. Our club has 3 or 4 retailers that offer this for us and one that has an order thread on the club forum that is very popular. It makes the clubmen very loyal to these retailers.

You could of course start a club there or host an existing one.

Finally beer or at least refreshments. A bar will turn over a massive amount when associated with even small crowds. True the hassle of a drinks licence on top of your other concerns may be a bit daunting but the margin on a coke pump alone can be nearly 1000%. Add beer and crisps and you have happy gamers, which should = sales.

This is brilliant thanks guys. Exactly the sort of thing i'm after.

A few answers.

I would expect 70%+ of my trade would g through my webstore so will have to have a a website made for me. I dont think you can survive without the basics of webpage, facebook and twitter nowadays. I would mainly manage that side of things.

I don,t think charging for tables would help me as I would surley create more revenue by letting people play for free and letting them buy new products and consumables.

I have taken account of fees for accountants, legals and maintenence in the budget plan Nev but thanks for pointing them out.

I have approached a few local game clubs and am awaiting their response. That will help with the games to stock hopefully.

I would love to be able to sell beer but as mentioned the licence for something like that is difficult to come by plus there would be some parents who would be put off letting their kids go into somewhere that people are drinking.

I intend to start a club plus offer discounts to existing clubs and the chance for them to host bigger apoc games and events at the store in the event hall.

I would love to be able to sell outside of the UK but the risk is too great if I got caught so wouldn't i'm afraid.

Never considered card games but will defo look into them now as a traffic generator.

Cleanliness is something I agree with you all about. I intend to be as spotless as possble and staff will always be well presented and friendly NOT pushy. With a little guidance this hobby sells itself and the other gamers generally sell better than staff anyway.

With regards to commission work I am unsure what the going rate is in the UK. I would be willing to do pretty much anything from just paint to building and conversions and would definatley be happy to ship outsidde the UK for this service as it is not selling boxed minis. How much do you guys charge/pay and what are the pitfalls.

My standard I believe is above tabletop but not golden demon winning by a long way.

 McManiak wrote:


I would love to be able to sell beer but as mentioned the licence for something like that is difficult to come by plus there would be some parents who would be put off letting their kids go into somewhere that people are drinking.

I'd suggest this is a bad idea anyway, people tend to sometimes get emotional around there gaming anyway, allowing alcohol into the equation is a powder keg IMO.

If, however, you like the idea of an "adult" gaming session, a licence allowing people to bring their own alcohol to consume on premises is much easier to obtain, make it one night of the week, clearly advertised as 18+ only, starting and finishing a little later perhaps! to allow for people who work etc. Use the drink not as a means of making money, but to drive footfall. Besides, slightly pissed people probably won't make the most sensible buying decisions!

I would love to be able to sell outside of the UK but the risk is too great if I got caught so wouldn't i'm afraid.

If you establish the store as a Ltd company, then sell to an individual person (yourself or a family member) and that person them sells the product online to people outside the UK, it would be near impossible to a).detect and b) prove.

Just sayin.

Never considered card games but will defo look into them now as a traffic generator.

This statement concerns me a bit. It suggests that you're thinking about the business from the point of view of what you, as a wargamer, play and enjoy.

Really, CCGs, LCGs and board games should be top of the list. It isn't for nothing that many FLGSs fail, because people who are passionate about something often lack the objectivity necessary to run a business based on that thing.

Be aware, in fact, be paranoid, that this is you. Above all things, be aware that just because you think something is cool, it doesn't mean that it will sell.

 keezus wrote:
1. Card games do not provide much profit. They provide cash flow and traffic. This is good AND bad. It is good in that it generates word of mouth for your store and snack sales. It is bad in that card game CAN potentially crowd out other customers and card gamers are the worst of the internet bargain hunters. Card gamers are also very entrenched in their game and are unlikely to branch into your other stock.

I think the people you are talking to might be doing it wrong. All the stores I know of have Magic and Yugioh as their top sellers. And since everything comes from the same few distributors, the margin is the same as any other product in the store. Here are some ways of making it work:

Draft events: they directly sell products and once you get an established player base, you can reliably sell boxes of cards on a good night.

Standard events: constructed creates the buzz and hunt for singles. When you get someone starting to think a bit competitively you can sell them entire boxes of boosters as a preorder.

Get volunteers: ask WotC about rules advisors and judges in your area and for help in starting up organized play. Don't rely on flaky volunteers though. Magic is more than capable of attracting dedicated ones. One local store ended up having the guy running their Friday Night Magic not show up two weeks in a row with no notice. This can cost you serious money as you get a reputation for events not happening and people stop coming and go elsewhere and buy elsewhere.

Singles: you need to know the game to pull this off. I would still recommend only dealing in rares and not commons and uncommons. For the uncommons and commons, I'd recommend a flat price approach. And never buy them from customers. You'll find people will leave them behind after drafts so you can just gather them up and put them in a box with a sign that says "commons 10 cents each" or whatever (I don't know the going rate in GBP).

Niche products: From the Vault, Commander, Conspiracy, Modern Event Decks, Modern Masters, are almost always limited run products that sell out quickly. Take your full allocation of these, sell what you can on pre-order, keep the rest on the shelves for a month or two and then eBay them at auction with no minimum.

Don't spend time or money on low money interactions. This is a reason you don't track and inventory commons. You will get people coming in wanting to buy a dollar or two of cards but wanting to chat with you for 45 minutes about their deck. If you're the type of person who can smile and nod and make the occasional sound while you do something productive, great. Otherwise you'll have to figure out how to not waste time on these people. However, don't burn bridges here as the 15 year old who only has a few dollars to spend might get a part time job and in a couple years be one of the guys who preorders an entire booster box every release.

4. None of my local FLGS are able to survive off miniatures alone. They all require MTG (and other card games), Board Games and/or comics/anime to generate additional profit. Of course, YMMV.

I know there are stores that can survive on miniatures only, but they tend to have an online component as well. And that can take time to develop and is very, very cut throat when it comes to competition.

Azreal, that is EXACTLY what I needed to be told. I have no concept of the depth of the card games so will need to gen up and then some. Thankyou for pointing this massive point out to me.

With regards to opening times I was thinking of opening midday till 6/7 midweek but as you have suggested then I would be having 2 or 3 nights where it would be club/campaign nights for adults who work of a day.

I may also run 1 night a week for only school ages so they are not intimidated by the exoerienced older guys..

 azreal13 wrote:
This statement concerns me a bit. It suggests that you're thinking about the business from the point of view of what you, as a wargamer, play and enjoy.

Yep. I know the UK and Canada can be quite different, but Hasbro did report that their areas of Magic's greatest growth were Asia and Europe, so missing out on card sales could be quite a blow. And traditional distributors won't have the same barriers to ordering one thing here and one thing there that GW does. So it's easy to just bring in one booster box and one display case of starters for a card game and start running organized MTG events there.

Also, be wary of what GW trade sales tells you about how thing work selling GW. They may tell you that their average independent sells X per year and it's great, but the average current stockist won't include those who tried and failed, so it selects out the worst performers. And then you have stores with a massive online presence that are going to skew the average up. The point of GW trade sales is to get the maximum amount of money out of you.

For games to stock you need magic the gathering and run events for it. Also stock warmachine and hoards. Consider small stock of flames of war and infinity for testing the waters.

Figure out what destributers you will use. You can order collectables and rphs threw them too.


Selling just wargames will not work in the long run.

McManiak wrote:I would love to be able to sell beer but as mentioned the licence for something like that is difficult to come by plus there would be some parents who would be put off letting their kids go into somewhere that people are drinking.

I've seen places that have an ajoining Pub portion of the store, which is clearly delineated from the rest of the premises. Beer does not cross this line.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 frozenwastes wrote:
I think the people you are talking to might be doing it wrong. All the stores I know of have Magic and Yugioh as their top sellers. And since everything comes from the same few distributors, the margin is the same as any other product in the store. Here are some ways of making it work:

Top sellers yes. You'll go through a crap ton of cases. Margin on boxes / cases is generally poor. Sets are hit and miss. Inistrad sold like hotcakes. Journey to Nyx is so terrible it can't even be given away. Niche items are hit and miss and can't be relied upon to be consistent revenue generation. For example: Commander MK1 was a hot seller. Commander MK2 was a dud. As primary generator of profit, basing the entire business around card players is hard because they are a fickle bunch. Events will be poorly attended unless there is lucrative prize support. Even with rich prize support, all it takes is an underattended event to put you in the red. Downsizing the prize support if your event is underattended will generate poor word of mouth. Focusing too heavily on the competitive CCG scene is a losing proposition. About eBaying the leftovers - Not sure what the metric is on recovery of capital on this either... with no min-bid... not sure if it balances out in the black.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Lockark wrote:
For games to stock you need magic the gathering and run events for it. Also stock warmachine and hoards. Consider small stock of flames of war and infinity for testing the waters.

I don't know how it is in Europe, but Wizards of the Coast (Hasbro) has different tiers of MTG Store Ranks... At the initial entry levels, you get little support from them (and comparatively rubbish allocation of product) at the lowest levels, so events is a must. You may have to supplement your product buys with product from other distributors... (which sucks, as your margin shrinks), but having no stock doesn't help the business either.

Okay. Interesting proposition that I can offer advice on. My buddy and were all set to do exactly what you are suggesting in Liverpool last year but cancelled it all before we began.

We had done what you had: costed everything out and worked out we COULD make money after about 18months of good business. We had a venue that was pricey and it sounds like the space you will need for 12-14 tables and a shop area, chill out space etc... Would be quite expensive. Maybe you have found the location we couldn't?

We worked out food and drink would be a big seller and money maker with a very good profit margin. Sales would need to come from other models and not GW. You don't get the best discount rate from GW until you have been a supplier of their stock for about 4 years. Plus you cannot cherry pick and have to buy up The Hobbit stock which is dead money. Plus you have to display it all as per instructions...

Be we did note that card games would be the main lifeblood of business.

We had costed the price of decedent tables and how much we would need upfront to spend to get stock in, build terrain etc etc...

We set ourselves up as a Ltd company and were all ready to go then we met the bank! They were not interested in our business plan at all and simply asked these questions:

How much money will we put in?
What would we be putting up as collateral for the lend?


Basically this is what they were saying to us:

We would put in tons of personal money and they would match what we put in and nothing else. They explicitly pointed this out.
We would not be a Ltd company but a partnership so that if we failed to repay they would have our personal houses as money to claim back against.

At this point our respective partners pointed out that this was a total non starter and hence the idea died then.

If you have solved all this then go for it as it is possible to make money.

Hope this helps.

Cheers nanook, where abouts were you looking to open? I can imagine that the bank will be lee intsted than in some other ventures. I have a big chunk of caah to put into if needs be and ghere are new govwrment grants available now too.

Also im not sure if GW has changed its trade policy. The trade department has grown considerably recently as this is obviously the avenue they want to down. If I stock the entire range then I get to pick my stock over and above their basic requirements which only includes 1 box of the hobbit starter game plus I can display it nowever I want and can sell it for whatever I want too.

May have changed somewhat.

Just been looking into the cards qnd yes the margin is small but as you have all said the games are massive and will definitely be incorpoated into my plan now. This was the reason I want this thread up here because I naturally only know what I know and need advice from other gamers to help expand my mind as such.

nanook wrote:
Okay. Interesting proposition that I can offer advice on. My buddy and were all set to do exactly what you are suggesting in Liverpool last year but cancelled it all before we began.

We had done what you had: costed everything out and worked out we COULD make money after about 18months of good business. We had a venue that was pricey and it sounds like the space you will need for 12-14 tables and a shop area, chill out space etc... Would be quite expensive. Maybe you have found the location we couldn't?

We worked out food and drink would be a big seller and money maker with a very good profit margin. Sales would need to come from other models and not GW. You don't get the best discount rate from GW until you have been a supplier of their stock for about 4 years. Plus you cannot cherry pick and have to buy up The Hobbit stock which is dead money. Plus you have to display it all as per instructions...

Be we did note that card games would be the main lifeblood of business.

We had costed the price of decedent tables and how much we would need upfront to spend to get stock in, build terrain etc etc...

We set ourselves up as a Ltd company and were all ready to go then we met the bank! They were not interested in our business plan at all and simply asked these questions:

How much money will we put in?
What would we be putting up as collateral for the lend?


Basically this is what they were saying to us:

We would put in tons of personal money and they would match what we put in and nothing else. They explicitly pointed this out.
We would not be a Ltd company but a partnership so that if we failed to repay they would have our personal houses as money to claim back against.

At this point our respective partners pointed out that this was a total non starter and hence the idea died then.

If you have solved all this then go for it as it is possible to make money.

Hope this helps.

The banks are a joke.

When I set up my company, approaching 4 years ago now, I had my own financing, so I approached the bank I held my current account with to open a business account.

I needed no capital, no overdraft, no credit card, nothing, just a debit card, cheque book and a place to pay my takings into.

I was declined because they deemed my business as being in a "high risk sector."

Fortunately not all banks have the same attitude (Lloyds TSB and Barclays were both far more reasonable, it was HSBC who I'm talking about here) but don't expect any help from them at all.

I'm not an expert on these things but I assume any little bit helps. I recentley had a FLGS open near my house about a year ago. It was a comic/movie/video game/traditional game store and it had a lot of competition in the surrounding area. But it has been very successfull and my prefered place to go. It started out with little GW products and most of its proffit was from Draft/Friday night magic tourneys. Now has a whole section for wargamming due to the mass influx of 40k players and the profit its been making from that. I think its success has been due to the fact that it listens very closely to its community. If people want a video game tournament, movie night, or even a bitz bizzar, it has systems that allows people to set up and make the store a proffit or even just attract new customers. I think to summarize, it never had an idea of what it was going to be, it was open minded to what it could be. I hope that helps but I really do wish the best for your endeavors

Yeah thats kinda where I want to go. I want to have an idea of what the store will be laid out like but want the custo ers to help guide the direction it goes. That way they will gain some sense of ownership and therefore inrease their loyalty. Thats one of the reasons that I won't do the tournament hall as part if the plan as this will be determined by the customers.