4 years ago on July 1st, 2006 we moved our first eBash store into a new building which started a whole new chapter of our story.  After being in a dimly lit warehouse setting for 2 years we moved to a prime retail location and business immediately started to pick-up.  During that same time I was going through personal bankruptcy while shutting down another business of mine that had failed.  It was stressful to say the least but luckily for me Shawn Wells was there to help share the load (intentional LOTR reference to Samwise Gamgee).

Shawn invested into the company so that we could afford the renovations during our move and he took over (and still to this day continues to run) our PC side of the business.  Almost immediately after this 2 more investors approached us and made an offer we couldn’t refuse to purchase the company. We would stay involved and they would finance the growth and expansion of the business.  I always wondered if Shawn and I would have been able to make it work together.

Now we will find out.

As of July 1st, 2010 we are once again the sole owners of eBash Terre Haute.  Shawn and I have already started some well overdue renovations and improvements and plan on continuing to work on the store heavily through the end of the year.  Those of you in the store may have already seen Shawn’s new Sony Bravia 3D LED set-up on the Sony Playstation 3 replacing the old DDR machine.  I probably will slip up over the next few weeks and let everyone in on more of our plans but for now it will be fun for everyone to just anticipate what we might be doing.

For me this is a fresh start in an industry that I have been very active with in the past but have fallen out of the past year or more because of the recession.  As a store we have not invested in *new* technology in 3 years.  Our “Operation Platypus” events in the past that were $10k investments in the store have turned into scattered maintenance replacements as our investments were put towards franchising and new stores in other cities.

The focus for Shawn and I now is now 100% eBash Terre Haute and the exciting part is that many of my old friends are jumping right back to help out again.  I think many of you will be excited to see what things people like Chad Killion, Fred Strohm and Jason McIntosh are able to do now that their efforts are personal and not professional.

So moving forward with my blog I really don’t want to make it a commercial effort at all.  I am hoping to use this each morning to put down my ideas for the industry moving forward, get some feedback, brainstorm and talk about other game centers and technology that will affect our store.  It is good to be back.