[EDITOR’S NOTE: Monday, my house flooded due to a broken pipe and I’ve been living out of a suitcase all week arranging a place to live and digging through the slosh to save what could be saved. It’s all going to work out and we were insured. But this article is releasing late, and for at least the next few days, content may be a bit behind schedule in appearing. I do apologize.]
Enormous news, folks. My ownership group accepted a buyout offer from the Ochoa family, owners of Tucson, Arizona-based Amazing Discoveries LLC, to buy out Desert Sky Games lock, stock, and barrel! Our store has become “Amazing Discoveries Chandler,” their fifth Arizona location (so far). Positioned in the booming west Chandler business corridor, the store provides superb residential demographics in the 1-3-5 radii and near-perfect positioning to the south-central quadrant of the Phoenix metropolitan area.
Terms of the transaction are confidential, but in the purchase agreement I have the ability to discuss the general shape and scope of the deal and use it as a teaching tool and structural analysis. I can tell you right off the bat that it was the largest single transaction I’ve ever done in my life, and I can take the next two years off work if I want to. Rather than doing that, I’m going to take a few weeks’ break and then resume building bankroll. However, I plan to continue writing during that break.
Yes: this huge news means I get to put LGS Net Income into overdrive!
First of all, the course of preparation to sell the store, a years-long steady and meticulous process, can be detailed so my readers can start setting up their own lines of play for your business futures.
Second, I get to dive into deep detail on the sale process and how such an enormous deal actually landed and worked out, in articles that will be stocked with material exclusive to paid subscribers.
Third, now that I no longer have my own business operations to protect with a thin veil of confidentiality, I can write a bit more candidly about business processes, decisions, structures, and so on, and give my readers even more core knowledge than before. And once again that goes double for those supporting this substack.
Fourth, now that I no longer have a dog in the hunt of the local, regional, and national markets, and no longer have to be guarded in my descriptions of competitors lest my writing be seen as unsportsmanlike or unprofessional, I can be far more blunt in my analyses of companies across all tiers of the industry. I am going to be careful with this, however. My intention is not to become a muckraker, but rather to be able to provide absolutely honest, but also constructive/useful/incisive/distinctive commentary in this way.
In the movie “Almost Famous,” Lester Bangs is the mentor, the Kenobi, the wise old sage for young aspiring journalist protagonist William Miller, while Miller travels the continent with Stillwater, the rock band he idolizes. When Miller finally sets to write his big article, he is afraid of betraying the band’s trust. Bangs sets Miller straight with the best advice any industry journalist ever heard:
“I know you think those guys are your friends. You wanna be a true friend to them? Be honest, and unmerciful.”
The perfection of Bangs’s teaching is that the article doesn’t become a puff piece, doesn’t become a cringing indecency, doesn’t become the carrying of water. Any of those things is a trap a writer can fall into and whatever the writer’s intentions may or may not have been, the resulting content is a harm done. Sometimes more obviously so than other times. I never want to do that. I don’t want to be hated more than anyone else would, but I’d rather someone be angry that I told them their process is broken than read me flying cover for them and then realize it was broken all along and now if they change it, the optics will be embarrassing. Or think I was pulling a sleazy move and trying to trick them into not fixing something that was hurting them and helping another party, that maybe I was playing favorites. Or whatever.
Anyway I guess I kind of dove into that a bit but I’m glad I did because I wanted to give you all another great kind of material to look forward to here on LGS Net Income and I think I have done that.
There are even fifth and further good things to come: as I delve deep into DSG’s vault of digital records, another thing I meticulously gathered over a dozen years’ time. I will find things to compare and contrast, tradecraft I can share outright, possibly even things like point-of-sale inventory catalog subsets where I’ve “perfected” a section and can share that for all of you to update your systems. Think “Nintendo GameCube with correct barcodes and part numbers finally” sort of assets.
I know this is probably coming off like a pretty bare-knuckled paid subscriber appeal, but seriously, you all can’t even believe how excited I am at the future here. I’m going to get back to managing my family situation on today’s fine 2112 Day, and I wish you all the very best of a holiday weekend (or if you don’t celebrate this particular holiday, I wish you a weekend of revelry of your own preference)!