What no one knows.

Know one knows but me.

Just how incredibly well stocked my store is with graphic novels.

Most customers probably just assume that a good comic store is well stocked, not really realizing how difficult that is, especially in a town the size of Bend.

But I know.

I've been trying for decades to get to the proper level.

There's an old saying, that the three most important things in business are Location, Location, Location.

Since I've been in the same location for 27 years, it's a bit of a moot point. I'll accept the common wisdom, here. (Ew....I hate accepting common wisdom....)

I would say for my store, it's inventory, inventory, inventory.

Roughly put, the more inventory I have, the more my sales. The better the inventory, the better my sales.

So that should be easy, right?

Well, there is the little thing of getting the RIGHT inventory. I mean, you can't just buy stuff willy nilly.

But assuming you know what you're doing, why wouldn't you just buy lots and lots of stuff and be done with it?

This is where the rest of the business problems come in. Your level of inventory is going to affect your profit margins, your cash flow, your merchandising, your location, your overhead, your everything.

Probably the best way to illustrate this, is to recount a little history.

When I bought the store from the previous owner, he'd been an absentee owner for a couple of years. He'd raided the Bend store for material two times to open stores in the Portland area. The store had been starved of inventory.

Which was good for me. I immediately brought in some inventory -- using up every bit of cash I had -- because I realized I needed to get sales higher fast. I simply couldn't pay the overhead unless I doubled sales immediately.

After accomplishing that, I struggled for a year or two just making enough sales. I often had to discount heavily, eating into the inventory.

But eventually, I took a chance on sports cards. Which took off. Took off so much, in fact, that it put the store in jeopardy. Early on, I read an article that mentioned that the only thing worse for a new business than no sales was too much success.

Took off so much in fact, that I couldn't catch up. I'd have to spend every dime I had just to buy new inventory, which I would think sell out of, and use every dime I had to buy more and on and on.

A nice problem to have, you'd think.

But boy, did it reek havoc with my cash flow. I was almost always running behind. It got so that I was ordering more stuff than I had money to pay for, because sales were the least of my problems.

Eventually, I even borrowed money. The banks looked at my overhead and my sales, and that was enough to impress them. If they had done a cash flow analysis, they would've run screaming in the other direction.

Still, with sales growing nearly exponentially, I just figured the cash flow problems would eventually resolve themselves.

They did. 20 years later.

I've mentioned before, the old rule of thumb that I have to sell an item four to five times, depending on markup, to both get the full retail profit and to keep the item in stock.

So every time I wanted to keep an item in stock I had to sell it up to 5 times to break even.

It's a lot harder than it looks. You can't just order "more stuff" and get the job done. You have to be conscious of 'tailing off' sales -- items that sell fast one or two or three times, by slow way down by the fourth or fifth time. (In fact, I think this is one of the hidden destroyers of new businesses-- new owners only see the fast sales, not the fact that the third time took twice as long as the second time, and the fourth time twice as long as the third time, and so on.)

If you want to carry anything other than bestsellers, it's even worse. You may only sell an award-winning, highly praised independent graphic novel once or twice.

Eventually, instead of buying massive amounts of books and inventory, and getting caught flat-footed by unexpected slowdowns still owing the money, I decided to slog my way into a small increase each and every week, month after month, year after year. All within cash flow. I take advantage of every sale that comes along, filling in with the slower selling but still worthy books.

Hard to take out much profit, when it's servicing cash flow and inventory build-up.

I'm very pleased with the results. I can truly say there aren't a lot of good graphic novels that I don't have; and I'm in the position now of being able to order anything I don't have within a week.

So, for me, the three most important rules of business are; inventory, inventory, inventory.