Business

Are Customer’s Always Right?

/ ebashbozack / 6 Comments

The Customer is always right????

A recent flurry of feedback from our customers in the eBash Terre Haute store has me thinking of the age old saying “The Customer is always right”.  I am not sure I can buy into that customer service mentality these days when I think of people who complain about anything at restaurants or browse through the awesome pictures at People of Walmart (www.peopleofwalmart.com).   It seems like these days all you have to do is get angry and throw a fit at a store to get whatever you want for free.

I want to share a link to our forum thread that I have now complied all of the complaints and feedback into a new eBash Terre Haute Comment Box format.  This started from my recent 3D blog and quickly bloomed into “everything wrong with eBash” but in a somewhat constructive way.  The cool part is that I have been inspired by a few of the comments and also had a revelation that I will share in my blog tomorrow.

eBash Terre Haute Comment Box: http://www.ebash.com/forums/forum_posts.asp?TID=9441

Reading through the thread brings a few things to mind that I want to highlight and get some feedback from other game centers and customers.

#1 – If comments or complaints seem to be repeated or have a theme then there is more than likely a problem that needs addressed.  Many times there will be certain customers you can’t please no matter what.  They have super awesome triple processor liquid cooled mega machines all over their house and your systems cannot stand up to their 3DMark test.  However if 3-4 different people mention the same thing then it is probably worth looking into further.

I wonder if KL and Kyle know what they are talking about?

#2 – Try to look into an underlying message beneath the surface of the actual comments.  Is the customer missing a feeling they used to get when coming to your center that has been removed through a change in store hours, pricing package or remodeling project?  Much of the theme through the thread on the eBash forums to me says “We really want to be proud of our store and hang out there but…..”

#3 – Like a parent protecting their children it is hard as a game center to hear anything “wrong” with the store and not immediately go into defensive mode.  You can see that in some of my responses.  I start to pick apart the comments and tell the person where the holes might be in their complaint instead of addressing the actual problem.

#4 – In our business, most of the time the customer probably IS right.   If they are pointing out a problem or making a suggestion you can almost bet that something needs to be changed.  The situation is probably not of the same magnitude that the customer perceives.  “All of the headphones do not work on the computers” probably means they tried a couple stations and then got frustrated and stopped looking.

#5 – Get the customers involved.  Turn that problem into an opportunity.  In our case it seems like we need a regularly scheduled walk through and testing of our PC equipment.  I am going to work with a few of the customers who are the most passionate about these problems and give them free hours to help us with weekly maintenance.

My final opinion?  Yes, customers are always right.*  With an asterisk next to it because the customer may not know exactly what the problem is or the actual level of concern but underneath the surface they are probably on to something.

LAN Center Employees Playing On Shift?

/ ebashbozack / 2 Comments

My good friend Mike DeCarolis who owns and runs The Battlegrounds in Vernon, CT yesterday chatted with me on Facebook for a bit about employees playing while on shift.  This is something that I have gone back-and-forth with over the years but after many problems just finally made it black and white and said no gaming while on the clock at eBash.

eBash's Amazing Asian Duo a few years ago.

Mike told me that he lets his guys play while they are working because honestly on slower nights the employees can get some fun LAN events started that regular customers won’t do on their own.  There are obviously some great arguments for letting them play but recently he arrived at The Battlegrounds to find the store completely full of customers and his description was that the store was in “chaos”.  Both employees who were “working” were in League of Legends matches and no one was really running the store.

I have found that when employees are less than stellar at their jobs first I have to do a self-evaluation on my management tasks (This has nothing to do with Mike BTW but just for me personally).  Have I given each of the employees defined lists of the tasks they need to perform and trained them on how to execute those tasks correctly?  Am I doing a good job of following up on task lists and praising the employees who are doing the jobs correctly in our bi-weekly meetings instead of thrashing the ones who are under performing.  I am sure over the years I have lost many employees that I poorly managed for the wrong reasons.

However, let’s also be realistic.  The guys and gals I am employing (and most other LAN centers are in the same boat) are between 17 and 24 years old.  Many of them this is their first job or have only worked at fast food or other retail.  They are not exactly the most motivated and driven bunch of workers like a small business owner.  If there is a chance to get their checklist done and then hang out in AOL chat for a few hours or surf Facebook then they won’t go looking for more work to do.  I have had really good workers over the years who have to be reminded numerous times of a task they should perform before they actually get it done.

I love it when there is a line at the counter!

My biggest beef with allowing the employees to play is that the customer has to INTERRUPT the employee to get service.  “Hey would you mind selling me a Mt. Dew?”  I would literally blow my top anytime I heard a customer complaint that someone was too busy playing their game to help them with a technical problem or sell them some snacks.  As corny as it seems the employee should be looking for people to help, almost like they are being paid a commission to help them.  As new people come into the store and wonder around looking confused a simple, “Welcome to eBash, can I help you guys find anything?” will give customers the green light to ask questions if they are shy.

So what should you do if your store is slow and the employee isn’t busy at the front counter?  My theory is always have them do something that might help with the reason that they are not busy.  What can they do to try and get more customers in the store?  I give my employees the liberty of throwing a special out on our twitter or facebook accounts.  I want them to go through our facebook wall, website forums and any other forums looking for people to connect with to invite to events at the store.

Of course there are also tons of jobs around the store that need done besides “if you can lean then you can clean” tasks.  A big problem for small business owners is taking the tasks that we think are super-duper important and delegating them to those working for us.  For example I don’t do our accounting tasks because I have Tucker do it, who has worked for eBash almost 5 years now.  He is studying to be a CPA and honestly he is way better at it than I am because I am not detail oriented.  (the electric bill? bah… that can wait a few months I need to run a few sweet tournaments instead!)

The problem Mike had at his store is that leaving the employees the ability to CHOOSE when it is appropriate to play leaves a ton of GRAY area in the rules.  Most individuals will always find a reason that they should be playing instead of thinking of a reason why they shouldn’t be playing.  In my opinion it just leaves the situation too open for interpretation that will lead to a conflict down the road.  And while our employees almost always love their jobs they might not be mature or experienced enough to recognize the benefits of working hard.

What does everyone else think?  Is there actually a way to pinpoint a good time for employees to play while they are working?

Video Game Sound at LAN Centers

/ ebashbozack / 2 Comments

A recent conversation with Will Wilhem from Quantum X game center about headsets really got me thinking about how we have struggled over the years trying to find the perfect solution.   A quick search of “headsets” on iGames forums had 741 matches while a search for “game sound” found 544 posts.  I want to take a walk through some of the options we have used at eBash over the years and the positive and negatives that come along with each option.

The Sound Dome from Brown Innovations

I do want to mention that many centers take advantage of renting out headsets to cover the cost of maintenance and upkeep.  Probably the pioneer of this type of policy was the guys out at Euphnet in Sunnyvale, CA.

First let’s look at PC Gaming sound.  Obviously I don’t think I have EVER heard of anyone that uses external speakers instead of headsets except for Netheads in Indianapolis, IN.  They use a very expensive product similar to the picture shown on the right made by Brown Innovations.  99.99999% of other centers (yes, I made up that percentage) use headsets of some kind for sound when it comes to PC gaming.

PC Headsets
This is probably the most commonly used option at LAN centers because a headset integrates the microphone with the speakers.  For me this is our #1 broken item/complaint in the store because it seems no matter how durable a headset appears, customers will find a way to break them.  We have tried many products over the years ranging from inexpensive to moderately expensive.  Currently the $6/pair behind the head models that have detachable microphones is what we are using at eBash (similar to THESE) and seems to hold up just as long and doesn’t make my blood boil when I find a pair that has been broken.

We went through a period where we tried many different products at a higher price level for a few different reasons.  Originally eDimensional stepped up with a deal for iGames members which put their $100 retail headsets in the LAN centers for only $50 each (I think they were 6 headsets in a box for $300).  We tried out a couple cases and of course had some sets broken.  They replaced some initially and probably would have kept replacing them but it became tiresome.

Next we struck a deal with Turtle Beach to put both their Xbox headsets and PC headsets in our stores when we opened our 3rd location in Bloomington, IN.  I worked out a deal directly with their promotions group to buy the headsets at a significant discount in non-retail packaging.  We actually stocked the brand new store in Bloomington with 100% Turtle Beach headsets throughout.  Honestly the PC headsets held up pretty good but our frustration with the Xbox headsets led us to look for other solutions.

Probably the best deal we have seen yet on the PC side was the one provided by Creative that had them match our purchases 1-1 with free units to use in the store.  We didn’t like their behind-the-head style as they seemed to break easy but their Fatal1ty version was really nice except they hurt a bit when you wear them more than a few hours at a time.

Console Loudspeaker Sound
I am going to talk about my experience with chairs soon so I don’t want to talk too much about sound through gaming chairs.  However those are by far my favorite option for external sound if you aren’t wearing headsets.  There are a few other options for loudspeaker sound that I want to touch on and I will save the chair sound for a later blog.

TV sound is probably the most common for console sound.  This isn’t bad at all, just a bit common since that is probably how the average gamer (not diehard) plays at home.  Our first store had 27″ CRT TVs that sat on top of plywood boxes we built and each player just controlled their sound through the TV speakers.  The major problem with sound out loud is that each player begins the “volume war” to turn their system just a bit louder to hear it over the others around them.  Next thing you know the room is full of TVs blaring out at 90% of their total sound level.

Bose Companion 2 Speaker System

In our current tournament rooms we have our XBox 360 systems running on VGA cables to 22″ Samsung monitors.  This forced us to come up with a 3rd party sound option as the monitors do not have built-in sound.  (*** Side note *** Most monitors I have tested with built-in sound is terrible anyway, so you might as well plan on external sound)  We tried the Turtle Beach headsets which I will discuss more below but the longest standing solution is the Bose sound system pictured on the left that we buy at Sam’s Club.  These little babies can really pump out the sound and make for some REALLY noisy rooms.  However they have a headphone jack right on the front and they are simple with just a power cord, volume knob on the front and RCA inputs.  By my count we have 24 sets of these still running at our Terre Haute store.

Console Headset Sound
This has to be the biggest area of headaches for our center when it comes to maintenance and upkeep.  I have yet to find a great solution but I do feel like we have come up with some good solutions so far.  The first thing we have done for 3-4 years now is simply rent out the cheap Microsoft voice headsets (that come with a new 360 or you can buy wholesale for around $10) .  We just rent them for $1 and after they are used 40 or 50 times we have to pitch them and buy new ones.  Gamers using TV sound, gaming chair sound or Bose Speaker system sound will all rent these so they can talk online.

I feel like that is the generic solution but after that honestly nothing is much better when it comes to LAN center solutions.  Sure there are tons of other headset manufacturers that combine game sound and chat for Xbox 360 and (sometimes) PS3 but the cost of those units sure make it hard to swallow when a cord gets caught around a chair and torn in half.

To defend each of the manufacturers I do want to point out that Microsoft really screwed the pooch when it comes to their chat/voice set-up.  Instead of just letting something work that plugs into the console they make you plug into the controller which adds more cables to get in the way.  Most of the headsets are made so that a person on a couch can use their headset for the TV across the room so when it comes to a LAN center you don’t really want wireless for theft reasons NOR do you want 25 foot cables since the players are sitting right next to the screens.

Here are a few options we have tried:

Turtle Beach – These are just not built for the long haul from what we have experienced.  The plastic breaks, the cords get pulled out and the microphone booms get broken off.  Not to mention adapters get moved around and lost and the units just feel very light and dainty.

The Tritton AX720 sell for around $130 and are an expensive option.

Tritton – We are currently using 6 of these in a room that we charge a premium to experience.  This has made customers realize the value of the equipment and I honestly think they are more careful in the room.  Secondly by charging for the room the cheaper customers just steer clear and the room is used probably 50% less.  That leads to the only problem which is that the room generates less profit than the other rooms in our center.

Astro – Honestly I have never used a pair of these yet.  Guys bring them to the store and spend 15 minutes hooking up all of the wires and players ooohhh and aahhhhh over their “ultimate pro gamer” experience but for a game center there is no way in the world I can drop $250 headsets at each station and feel good about it.  Maybe if I was reselling the units and could get them to set-up a room for the store it would work but if I am shelling out my cash I will stick with the less expensive options.

In the end each game center has an opinion on what works best for them.  The sad thing is that there is no real consensus on the best option even for the groups that will agree on headset vs. external sound.   I am somewhat motivated to start testing out products specifically for LAN center use.   Hmm… maybe testing new products each week can become a regular feature.

Video Game Tournaments of Old

/ ebashbozack / 5 Comments

A comment in the iGames forums yesterday from DIZeLAN made me start to remember the good old days of tournaments past.  Not only did we have tons of support from up the food chain but at eBash we also pulled off some pretty amazing tournaments on our own.  I thought it would be fun to quickly look at a few of the top events that I remember and then look forward at what we are planning to run the remainder of this year.

2005 – Highlight of the year had to be when eBash was picked to be one of the 8 regional locations for the WCG US brackets.  We were able to see some amazing players come through our store on their way to the US Finals in NY.  Also we had a couple of local guys able to jump into some of the less popular games and one of them advanced to the finals.  The Ogre twins (MLG pros Dan and Tom Ryan) blew through the doubles regional in our store in Terre Haute, IN on their way to the world championship that year.  Kyle McCormick was our local guy that won the Need for Speed event (PC) and was one of the final 8 in the US in New York.

Also that summer we took 2 teams of 4 along with 5 other spectators to St. Louis for the MLG event.  I was one of the volunteer admins for the FFA rounds.  It was our first glimpse into a larger event and gave us some classic memories such as a kid in a pink shirt trying to walk around to everyone in the venue and play him 1-on-1 in Halo in a “money match”.  He just said that over-and-over.  “Money-match?” “Money-Match!”

The end of 2005 was the now infamous EA BF2 $250,000 Tournament that saw our eBash team go all the way to the final 3 for the Xbox side.  After having no problems with any of the other 125 teams in the bracket we were beaten so badly by the final 2 teams it was like they always knew where we were at… come to find out years later both teams knew of a glitch to have always-on radar.

2006 – This year was a transition year for eBash as we moved from our 2000 sq. ft warehouse location to the current 4000 sq. ft facility in July.  That was also the first full year for the Xbox 360 and it really started to pick up steam with the release of Gears of War in November.  The biggest memory for us was the first Gears of War tournament in December that was ran in partnership with our local GameStop.  We capped the # of teams at 16 because we only had 16 Xbox stations to run the tournament.  It was FREE to play if you picked up a ticket at GameStop.  We had people actually SELLING the tickets to other players and tons of upset teams that didn’t get in.  The prize???? $500 total in cash.

Freddy Wong and Michael "Priest" Holmes at WSVG Dallas with Zander.

2007 – Gears dominated the beginning of the year after the crazy tournament in December of 2006.  We held another $500 tournament inJanuary that saw over 20 teams and we decided to really go big (this was big for us, we were paying out 100% of these with no sponsors). We announced a $1000 tournament in February of 2007.   We put a HARD limit of 32 teams.  You can tell by the brackets (yes I still have them HERE) that we didn’t hold our ground for 32 teams.  35 teams was insane. (140 players + spectators + regular customer = probably broke some fire marshall rules that day! 🙂  I believe the tournament finished around 3 AM.

We continued the momentum later that year when arCtiC (K.L. Smith, www.reflectzyn.com) who played on one of the top teams mentioned to a WSVG rep that we ran good events at eBash.  They were looking for a head console admin to run the tournaments for their 2007 tour.  Next thing we knew I was driving all over the country for events in Louisville, KY, Dallas, TX and Toronto, ON.  These events were so much fun to run and watch.  We took many eBash players with us to play and also help setup and run events.

The sad news that WSVG would shut down before the LA event and the season finals in Europe was devastating for us.  It also was an early sign that things were just not going to keep increasing like we thought for professional esports.

2008 – Halo 3 was the strong game for this year at our store in the tournament scene.  We kicked off the opening of the Bloomington eBash location with a $1000 Halo 3 tournament that drew a full 32 teams.  In April we started splitting the tournaments between our TH store and our BT store and had 26 teams total.  Fun esports fact…. check out the brackets and registration to see who was on the 17th seed team in Bloomington HERE.

Towards the end of 2008 we prepared to open our 3rd store (and first franchise, grats to Drew Heckert!) and I created ggCircuit with a good buddy of mine, Jason McIntosh.  This tournament site is intended to pull together the resources from multiple game centers and allow gamers to compete without traveling very far.  Our first “test” event was a $2000 Gears of War 2 tournament in December of 2008 that had 8 game centers participate.  A quick shout out to those who helped us get started besides the 3 eBash locations: The Gamerz Club, AZ (R.I.P.), US Gaming Arena, GA, The GameYard, MI, GameFrog, NC (R.I.P.) and The GamePad, VA.

2009 – Throughout 2009 we really worked to build up ggCircuit and attempted to host about 3 events each month.  Games ranged from the popular MW series and Halo to games like Madden 10 and Street Fighter IV.  A fun fact for those who may have participated or are thinking about participating as we gear back up this year:  In 2009 ggCircuit paid out over $17,500 in prizes to players all over the U.S.  I bet that makes us the second largest tournament circuit doesn’t it? 😉

Also this year the AmazYn team (arCtyC, orange, Skyllus and Calinorth) went to the MLG Dallas event and took home first place!  We watched almost all of their matches on the 52″ screen in the lobby and usually had 20+ people gathered around and cheering.

The end of 2009 things really started slowing down for all of our stores.  We shut down our Bloomington store in October that year and consolidated staff from both stores while laying off half of the employees.  We took it kind of easy with events the last part of the year.

2010 – Determined to begin the year with a BANG we started gathering support from other game centers for a $2500 MW2 ggCircuit season.  This consisted of a 6 week league, Saturday LAN event and then an invitational only finals for the top teams from both.  There were 16 game centers between the league and the LAN event.  I felt like the entire season was very successful but it also was very long and tiring.

After taking Q3 off to recover we are gearing back up for the final two quarters of 2010.  I have put together a tournament schedule for the remainder of the year that tentatively looks something like this:

July 31st – League of Legends (PC)
August 14th – Modern Warfare 2 (Xbox 360)
August 28th – Starcraft II (PC)
September 11th – Halo 3 ODST (Xbox 360)
September 25th – Heroes of Newerth (PC)
October 9th – Halo Reach (Xbox 360)
October 23rd – Starcraft II (PC)
November 13th – ??? (Xbox 360)
November 27th – League of Legends (PC)
December 11th – Call of Duty Black Ops (Xbox 360)

It will be fun to see how the remainder of the year shapes up for the tournament scene.  I know GameBattles is considered by some as a legit “tournament” system but players just seem to hide behind the fact that they are online and not face-to-face.  There really just isn’t any other feeling quite as good as a packed store full of tournament guys from all over the state playing everything on LAN.

Hopefully Alienware Arena will continue to grow and mature for the PC side.  On the console side we really do not have much support at the LAN center level.  MLG and WCG have done everything online for their qualifiers the past few years.  I still hold onto hope that one of the bigger leagues can realize the value in making LAN centers part of a “minor league” circuit to qualify players for their big national events.

Why Gamers Play at LAN Centers

/ ebashbozack / 6 Comments

After 7 years of being in the Video Game (LAN) Center business the #1 question I have to answer is still “Why Do Gamers Play at eBash instead of just playing at home?”  This is asked by new potential customers browsing the store for the first time, friends I have met that ask what I do for a living or even by long time friends and relatives that still just can’t understand it.

The short answer I always give is “for the social aspects”.  This just refers to a human’s desire to interact with other humans.  You can’t really get the same satisfaction from uttering “gg” into a microphone from your bedroom alone as turning to your partner beside you and giving them a high five.

Looking at why gamers play at LAN centers (or looking why any customer supports ANY business) is a great exercise in staying on top of you industry and continuing to bring business through the front door.  Today I thought I would share some of the observations I have made over the years at both eBash and my other companies that apply to the LAN center business.

#1 – People. There may be a few introverts that just show up and bury themselves in the back room of the store to play all day but I would almost guarantee that almost every customer plays at a game center because of someone else.  It is sort of like a mult-level marketing scheme and is one big difference from most other business models.

The #1 reason for gamers to go to LAN centers is the people.

It starts at the top from the person/people starting the company.  They make contact with the very first customers directly and also hire all of the employees.  Their personality can either hype up the store and make it fun for everyone or just go through the motions and focus on only the technical appeal of the store.  A game center ran by someone with a great personality is a full game center if all other things are equal.

This is the social aspect of the business also that is so crucial.  The “Norm” effect for any of you who have watched old Cheers episodes.  People by nature want to be “liked” and feel wanted.  They want to go where everyone knows their name.  And most of the time players just want to get out of the house and go DO something anyway if they are still living at home with mom and dad.

#2 Technology (working) – I believe that the technology draws people in the door sometimes initially.  After all that is the love that we all share together is the Christmas morning feeling of opening the latest game, trying out the latest headset or using the latest gaming mouse.  This is probably the reason that the store was started in the first place, because of the love of technology by the owners/founders.  I also added (working) to the item because this is so important when customers visit to have stations working.  Nothing is worse for a customer’s first experience than having difficulty getting something to operate correctly.

Along with the initial technology one thing we have identified at eBash is the importance of a store “refresh” consistently.  We have called these projects “Operation Platypus” since 2006 and we ride the hype of the changes for 30 days before the event.  Sometimes if the project is big we will close for a day or two during the slowest days of the week, black out the store windows/cameras and then have a big reveal once the project is finished.  Just spending money on “maintenance” is not enough.  You MUST continue to change out equipment.  Our rule of thumb is a 2 years cycle on all PC equipment and a 3 year cycle on console equipment.  In those time frames you better rotate in new monitors, TVs, headsets, chairs, mice, keyboards and make the change BIG!

#3 Variety – This goes along with technology but one thing I have noticed is that IF (big IF) you are keeping up with #2 above then you are probably making things available for customers that they do not have at home.  Sure, everyone has a computer for WoW at home or they have their Xbox 360 with HD TV at home.  But even those that are wealthy cannot keep up with every little gadget and gizmo that is coming out in the market.  And remember our customers LOVE technology so you can never have too many new things for them to try.

#4 Events – This is the most overlooked aspect from most game centers simply because it is so much work with so little DIRECT benefit.  I should go through the iGames forums and add up how many times owners and managers complain about tournaments, overnight events and launch parties compared to the number that are behind things like birthday parties.

Tournaments have been a big draw for us at eBash.

Birthday parties are important to most centers because you are just basically providing the customer an extra value service (reserved seats and sometimes other benefits) while getting a nice big group of players all at once.  AND you get to charge for it.  Other events like tournaments sometimes might even seem like a money wasting event but let me give an example.

Tuesdays this summer we have started Facebook Tuesdays.  If a customer is a fan of our facebook page and announces on their status with tags that they are going to eBash Terre Haute along with their friend’s names they can play for as little as $2 for the ENTIRE DAY.  Why in the world would we sell time for so little?

Well every Tuesday our total sales are equal or HIGHER this summer than the other days and it previously was our slowest day of the week.  Customers still leave the house with the same amount of money but they are just spending most of it on snacks/drinks instead of on game time.  This isn’t as profitable obviously since those items have a Cost of Goods Sold (COGS) associated with them but the “sale” of game time gives them the incentive to come play when they might have just stayed home instead.  Also we have seen an increase in sales on Wednesdays also which I believe is because gamers see each other Tuesday, get really involved in a game with their friends, and decide to come back the next day to keep playing.

I won’t go into the tournament aspects as that will be a feature by itself in the coming weeks.

# 5 Facilities/Atmosphere – The place where the gamer is going  to play is also part of the big draw over playing at home.  Not necessarily the technology, obviously you need to have a network installed for 100 stations to work together, but more from the standpoint of just the “feeling” you have in the building.

If a center just lines up computers in long rows inside of a strip mall I would almost bet they will struggle to stay afloat or be closed in less than 2 years.  Even with the best marketing and all of the right equipment if the atmosphere is not right for your business then once again you are not giving your gamers a reason to leave their easy chair at home.

Here is an exercise that I am going to try at our store over the next 6 months that hopefully will solve this problem.  I am going to give all of our employees an extra paid shift to play games.  This will get them out playing with the customers and build the social aspect, but I am going to have them be very conscience of their atmosphere and surroundings and also require that they move around each week to different rooms in the center.

As you and your employees (or best customers) play at your store pay attention to what would make you play longer at the center instead of at home.  In my family for example my wife Janean loves to play Civilization Revolution on the Xbox 360 if she is playing solo.  My son Zander will play either Xbox 360 or something on the computer by himself.  I am happy to do either.  If we all 3 decide to play Lord of the Rings: Battle for Middle Earth together we just sit down in one of the computer areas to play.

However if Zander wants to play Command and Conquer Red Alert 3 on the computer while Janean plays Civ Rev they won’t play as long because they can’t sit together.  We have almost 100 stations in the store but they have been almost “quarantined” from each other.  Now I am looking at one section with 2 Xbox systems next to 2 PC stations for groups that come to the store and want to play together but not necessarily play the same system.

#6 – ? Underlying Theme – As I look back through this list of items I know that there are probably more that some of you can help me identify.  However it seems that the recurring theme in all of them is…. work.  All of the important aspects of running a successful LAN center involves getting off your butt and getting things done.  If you are content to just go through the motions then that attitude will pass through to your employees and customers and your store will become lethargic and slowly decay.

I look forward over the next few days sharing some of the new ideas and changes we are implementing at eBash Terre Haute as well as hearing suggestions from customers and ideas from other LAN center owners.

July 2010 – A Fresh Start

/ ebashbozack / 8 Comments

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.

Personal Connections in Business

/ ebashbozack / Leave a comment

I have found a funny thing about life especially in the business world.  Those who love to say business is “business” and not “personal” really do not have a clue what makes things work in society.  Maybe a person doesn’t need personal relationships to run a huge existing corporation, but face-to-face relationships are the lifeblood of small business.

I won’t go into all of the details leading up to my day yesterday.  Basically a person that I met as a 17 year old with my lawn mowing business almost 20 years ago contacted me out of the blue to ask for some consulting.  She knew that I started WebLife (a software/website design company), Joink (an Internet Service Provider), Sellabrate (an eBay consignment store) and eBash (a Video Game Center) along with a few other companies along the way since I had last pushed my lawn mower through her yard for $15.  I will count her as contact #1 in this story.

The company she is now with was trying to decide how to move forward with their website and Internet presence.  They  just wanted an honest opinion from someone who was not actually selling them a product or service to help decide how to shape their company’s online offerings.  I met with them a few weeks ago, shared my thoughts about the shift in focus from websites to social media and they wanted me to follow up and try to help them.   The director of their company was someone who knew me and had followed my basketball career at West Vigo High School and then Rose-Hulman along with my business career since graduating in 1998.  He will be contact #2.

Last week I talked again to the director and he told me that they would really like to have me work with Tabco for the graphical and promotional side of the project.  I gave a call to Tabco to talk to Brad Bilyeu about partnering in the project.  Brad and I have worked together since my first company WebLife.  I have used them for business printing and we met on the softball diamonds in the past as well as other connections through fellow basketball players.  He will be contact #3.

Tabco has grown into a broad promotional company from its beginnings as a corporate printer.  I went out to meet with Brad and Kris yesterday (I won’t count Kris as contact #4 just because he and Brad are brothers at the same company and I know them equally) and they indicated that the person at their business who would be working with me from a graphical design standpoint was Scott Boerner.  Yep, contact #4.  Scott went to West Vigo and was a few years behind me in school.  His older brother, Chris, was my age and played basketball with me all through high school.

While we were talking about our families at one point I talked about my son, Zander, and how he is different than me on the basketball floor.  However this past year I coached his basketball team at a new program called Upward which focuses on mentoring the kids through the basics of basketball and also the spiritual side of their lives.  The Bilyeu brothers then remind me that the director of that program, Don Toney, works at Tabco.  Contact #5.

After the meeting we were all pretty excited about the future and the opportunities out there to work together.  We are working on putting together a plan for a meeting with the company later this week and we split up to tackle some of the details.  I headed back to eBash and they put their heads together at Tabco.  Strangely I get a text message from one of Janean and my best friends, Brooke Thomas, who happened to be at Tabco yesterday afternoon printing off letters to use as she and her husband Roger look for a baby to adopt.  She says to me  that she noticed I became a fan of Tabco on their Facebook.  She thought that was funny because she was just in there and heard them say my name.  She said “Small World!”  Brooke you get to be contact #6.

As a spiritual man I know that these “alignments” have all been divinely designed for some greater purpose and direction in my life.  So personally I am very exited to see the ending of this story.  But even leaving the Divine influence out of the equation there can be no doubt in my mind that 20 years of personal relationships are coming together to create new business opportunities.  For one project having 6 contacts from over 20 years in business come together makes things much more personal.

Compassion vs. Profit: When to Turn Away Business

/ ebashbozack / 7 Comments

One of the biggest challenges I have faced in business is deciding when it is actually good to turn away business.  Everyone loves to read business books and listen to experts talk about the 80/20 (sometimes 90/10) rule.  This applies for things like 20% of your customers provide 80% of your revenue but then also gets flipped around to show that 20% of your customers cause 80% of your problems also.

When I started in the ISP business back in 1998 there was some truth to some kind of percentage rule pertaining to problem customers.  Back then I would say that 5% of our customers caused 95% of our problems.  We had almost 14,000 customers at our largest point and we would receive customer service calls from < 10% of them each month and out of that group half of them were quick and easy fixes for courteous customers.  The other half were royal PITA types of people that expected us as an ISP to help them with their other computer problems, fix their printers, make their coffee and basically anything they could drag out of us.

But those customers really didn’t affect the other customers at all except for maybe holding up a CS rep for longer than necessary causing longer wait times in the queue.  When the problems from certain customers start affecting other customers directly is when it is time to step in and make that decision to “break the wrist and walk away”.

With my current company, eBash, we have seen quite a few characters over the past 6 years walk through our door.   As many of you in this industry can probably confirm this business is a sort of melting pot of people from different backgrounds and lifestyles.  Any given day you might see a lineman from the ISU football team, a 60 year old phone book salesman, the son of the county sheriff and a homeless person sitting all together as a team playing Halo, Call of Duty or World of Warcraft.

Although I was being extreme using those examples those are actual people who game or have gamed at our store in the past.  Our current situation has a real unique group of people in our store on a regular basis that I am torn between the decision of compassion for individuals and comfort for other customers.

Around 6 months ago we started seeing a group of homeless folks start showing up at the center.  I use the word homeless based on their own claims but I have no evidence one way or another to confirm.  However the situation as I am going to describe is pretty bizarre as I think about typing it all out.

This group hangs out about 1/2 mile from our store at the intersection of I-70 and US 41.  They use this intersection as their daily job by standing all around the on and off ramps for the interstate with cardboard signs that generally read something like this:

HOMEless & OuT
of WoRK
PLeASE HElP

You can imagine my surprise the first time I saw one of these people standing there and recognized them as one of the group that comes to the center to play.

We have quite a few customers that have bathing problems and we have a strict policy on “Show up clean or go home and shower” so these guys didn’t stand out just because they smelled a little funky more than the 14 year old kid that sweats all of the time.  However after the employees and I were aware that these guys were doing this we started paying more attention to things like their clothing and how they paid.  This group wore the exact same clothes every single day.  Either they really did have nothing else to wear or they are really good at their con game.

Our prices are pretty cheap to become a member and play all day, especially during the week when it is only $7.50 for a day pass.  They would sometimes pay with a crisp $20 bill and sometimes with a ziploc bag of pennies, nickles, dimes and quarters.  I remember one time my employees put a ziploc bag under the drawer and did not roll the coins which irritates me when I cash the drawer out to go to the bank.  I counted the bag and it came out to an odd number of $5.41 and we were $0.09 short that day.  I ripped the employee up and told them to count more carefully.  They were going to get the customer to pay the $0.09 missing but then we saw that person standing by the Interstate begging for money.  We let the $0.09 slide.

The situation rose to another level one day when a customer came to the store dropping off their middle school age kids and recognized one of the guys.  Right in the lobby of the store the customer shared their disappointment (loudly) with them begging for money and then using the money to come to eBash to play video games.

The smart business decision that most people would have made would be to not allow them back when we first were aware of how they were getting their money.  There could be much discussion about the moral and ethical decision of the people who GIVE beggars money but there is another side of the coin for businesses who knowingly TAKE money from someone who has “begged” for it.

Of course they could be using their “hard earned” money and buying drugs, alcohol and who knows what else so having them spend the money at eBash to play games and eat snacks doesn’t seem too bad right?  These people don’t just hang out at the store but they actually play games.  They come to lock-ins and tournaments and seem to genuinely enjoy gaming.  We do not allow any loitering at the store so the ones that tried to just hang out with the gamers were asked to leave.

While I am trying to decide between right-and-wrong, doing the right thing for these individuals, my business and our customers the sheriff shows up at our store one day.  They have a mug shot of a guy from this group and leave a phone number to call them when he comes back to the store. (Side Note: My wife pointed out that these guys are at the busiest street corner in the city every single day begging for money so it wasn’t like they were hard to find) A day later we see that he was arrested and in jail.  Ugh, now I might have a PR problem on my hands.

Luckily for us we run a very tight store and have a zero tolerance policy for drugs, fighting and even control foul language in the family areas of our store.   With cameras in every nook-and-cranny and viewable through our website everyone knows that our store is a safe place to play.

There are just a couple of them left that hang out at the store now and I am torn what to do.  Because one of them was arrested should the entire group not be allowed to come back to the store?  One of them came in this past weekend and I don’t think I have smelled anything quite so bad in my entire life.  There is only so many times you can tell a “homeless” person to take a shower and wash their clothes.

I would love to hear some suggestions if anyone has ideas?  What should we do?