Surviving mistakes.

You know, there just isn't much money in comics.

I totally overcompensate by having a huge inventory of graphic novels. I've refined my ordering to a careful art.

But mostly, I've learned to carry a lot of other product.

Sometimes I wonder if -- knowing what I now know -- if I would still buy Pegasus Books. Remembering all the mistakes I made.

I doubt in the current comic world that I would've survived the mistakes I made back then. It's a very different atmosphere, today, and I'm not just talking about the Great Recession. Comics were a relatively inexpensive product back then, and I could afford to make missteps.

Now? Just to get started I'd have to take so many chances that I'd almost be guaranteed to fall down, no matter how much I tried, no matter how smart I was.

To get to where the store is today was a long and winding thirty year road, with lots of hills and valleys and steep turns. I've arrived at a store that works, but only because I survived all the intermediate steps.

First of all, it's less possible today to make a living in comics. Cost of inventory, cost of overhead, and ever dwindling audience make the size of town needed to succeed ever larger. I'm guessing you need (at least) 150K population base now, up from 100K say five years ago, up from 75K ten years ago, 50K fifteen years ago, 30K twenty years ago, and 20K twenty-five years ago.

(It would help to actually have a cross fertilized urban culture, instead of an isolated faux urban culture. It would help to have a real four year university. It would help to an interstate, and a major industry and -- well, just not be so isolated.)

Which more or less parallels exactly what happened in Bend. The percent I need to make it has always been covered more or less by comics to about 65%. I need 35% from something else, and that seems to have always been true. That's just to survive. I find that having comics be 50% of my sales actually means the store makes a bit of profit.

But even that doesn't quite cover it. I can survive today because downtown Bend has revived, because I've got a fully developed store, because I've melded together an array of product lines, and -- because I've become a very experienced and savvy operator.

Just like Linda's store wouldn't be the success it is today without all the previous experiences -- which didn't always pan out -- I doubt Pegasus Books would work today without all the previous successes and failures.

Even then, I doubt if I had to start from scratch today that I could make a comic shop work in Bend -- even with all my experience and canny instincts.

I'm not sure I'd try. Linda's store has been a bigger success, despite being only one fourth as old. Why? Because books are a 25 billion dollar industry, versus a comic industry that is 1/40th the size. Even with all the competition -- even with Amazon and B & N and Borders and Costco and Wallmart and I-pad and Kindle -- there is more of an audience to draw from.

My rather large inventory simply wouldn't be possible to start out with. I couldn't afford it and it probably wouldn't be cost effective. And yet, at the same time, I'm only surviving because I have such a large inventory. I've been able to snatch sales and product in an opportunistic way for years now. I couldn't simply go out and replicate it.

If I had to give a new businessman advice, it would be:

First, to pick an industry that has potential for growth, and pick a city that is large enough. The inclination on the part of many small businesses is to pick a product that is so specialized that the Big Boys aren't doing it, and that doesn't have competition. Well, there is almost always a reason for that.

There is also the temptation to pick a small population area, again because there isn't any competition -- and again, there is almost always a reason for that.

Besides, it actually doesn't preclude competition at all -- in fact, contrary as it may seem, I tend to see more competition with more specialized product and in smaller towns....

I think it is better to start with a very small sliver of a very large potential customer base, than a huge slice of a small potential customer base. In the latter, if you do a good job and get almost all the potential customers you still hit a glass ceiling. Whereas in the former, the better job you do the more market share you'll garner, and the sky's the limit.

Secondly, the margins are always going to be very slim in any small business. If the margin is big enough to enrich you, someone will come along and competitively cut the margin. If the margin is too small, you won't be able to pay your bills. That balance point is always going to be razor thin.

In a world where monopolies are illegal and exclusives are slippery, you will always have competition.

So if you have to live on small margins, you'd better be willing to live modestly. Or start getting a whole lot bigger so that the small margin actually amounts to something.