I love doing the end of the year analysis of my business. Seeing what sold and what didn't sell. Trying to figure out why things sold or why they didn't sell. I've never understood other business owners who don't do this. How did you do compared to last year? I ask. And they don't know, and don't seem to care.

I can probably tell the percent increases or decreases in every category over the last five years. I can probably tell you if we went up or down each year from the beginning.

To me, it's almost the essence of small business. Making plans, trying to decided which products to support or increase, which to let slide, which to drop, which to add. To me, it's the whole ballgame. It's where I can prove myself right or wrong, and separate myself from the other business owners. I really trust my conclusions, and I find that I'm often ahead of the other guys in making necessary decisions. I think it is where you prove whether or not you really think for yourself, or just follow the lemmmings off the cliff.

We've had increases in sales overall in each of the last five years. We are currently about double in sales than 2002. 2002 was a real low ebb, matched by 1997. But we finally paid off our debt in early 2003, and the Sword of Damocles was no longer hanging over my head. I could start to take a few risks, a few chances, spend a bit of money.

Which proves, I suppose, that you can't run a successful business without risk, and you can't make money without spending it.

The earlier low ebb, at the end of 1997, we'd just suffered 3 straight years of decline as sports cards, comics, magic and other bubble's had all burst, and all the stores I'd opened in the bubble were closed and all the debt on the credit cards came down on our heads like a ton of bricks.

I found out later that Congress had changed the rules for credit cards in 1997, more or less removing the limits to the % level and when or if they could be raised. Suddenly, bills that we had been paying since the sport card collapse in 1992, became too much.

Anyway, Pokemon and beanie babies came along around then, and we went to Consumer Credit Counseling, and just hung on. By 2002, all those bubbles had also burst, and sales were declining but we were all but finished paying off the credit cards.

I'm proud of the way we paid off our credit: it was an amount that would've probably sent most people into bankruptcy. But at the end, amazingly, our credit was still decent enough to get a regular 30 year mortgage.

I started my project of diversifying. There hasn't been a bubble in my business since the peak of Pokemon in 2000, so the sales I have today are more solid than ever before. I never would've expected 7 years without a bubble, since we had more or less about 9 bubbles in the first 18 years; sometimes overlapping.

But the foundation is more solid without a 'hot' product, and the risk of it disappearing overnight isn't there.

Our overall increase in sales this year was 7.5%, not quite the double digit increase I've become used to. Our sales actually dropped 2.% in the second half of the year, which isn't what I wanted, but I can sort of see the reasons.


What I'm going to do, is each of the next 8 days, I'm going to sum up the results from each of the 8 cash register keys, starting tomorrow.