More good stuff than budget.

Here's what you don't want:

You don't want to stock up on all the good stuff you can get, and then have sales still too low to pay the bills.

Here's what you want:

You reorder all the good stuff that you know you will sell, and your budget is almost used up, and the little bit extra is for new or experiments.  If I had to room, I could actually order more.

There was a period of time in the late 90's where I felt stymied.  Everything I was selling -- comics, sports cards, non-sports cards, etc. were declining, due to no fault of my own.  All the fads were pretty much finished -- pogs, beanies babies, and pokemon -- which had tided me over the collapse in comic and sports card sales.  I didn't have access to books or games or toys or books, because there were no wholesalers I could easily work with because of my limited funds.

I was stuck.  I took a chance on Magic, and that worked to some extent, made things better.  Then I started dabbling in games, but there was a game store in town so I really couldn't make headway.

What really helped was the the wholesaler I used for most of my material started carrying toys and games.  Then graphic novels got to be bigger.

That was all well and good through the first half of the 2000's, but I could tell that everything was artificially high because of the boom in the housing market.

Even though the store was full and I was pretty much using up most of my budget, with the collapse of local bookstores and game stores, I decided to take a real stake in those product lines.

I had about a year before the Great Recession hit, but I'd positioned myself in advance so I wasn't in debt and could still bring in new product, which I did for the first few years of the recession.

Then the store really did become completely full.  No more room to be had.

So I've been in that position for a couple of years now.  Now it's more a matter of tactical buying than strategic buying.  The games and books helped immensely to spread the risk, and as I said above, I now find plenty of great material to sell within my budget.

So it took a long time to diversify that much, but it was worth it.

I especially love that there are dozens of games I could still try, and thousands of books that would probably sell.  That is, the potential is higher than my budget.  Which is vastly better than having the potential be less than my budget, if you will.