Late in the game to get here, but it's nice.

 It's astonishing how well stocked Pegasus Books is right now.

When I bought the store 37 years ago, we were depleted. The previous owner had stripped the already bare-bones store twice while opening shops in Portland. As he told me in wonderment, "I made more in the first week in Portland than I ever made in Bend."

Admittedly, I got the store relatively cheap--but not because of the inventory. What made the store possible was that I only had to put half down and the rest was paid monthly. I went home and did the math and realized that I'd have to do about twice as well as we were currently doing to make the purchase feasible. 

But doing twice as well didn't seem like much of reach. We had the customers, I reckoned--we were just missing the inventory to sell them. I got a couple thousand dollars in the bank loan to flesh out the store and, sure enough, sales immediately doubled.

Sounds good. But doubling only made the store viable--it wasn't exactly flourishing. I used up the paltry reserve cash at the very beginning. We were C.O.D. for the next couple of years, and we were trying to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps.

I remember that every time someone said, "Is this all you got?" it was like a stab to my heart.

Still, it seemed to me that the potential was there, and a couple of years after we started, I went up to the C.O.C.C. small business center and they helped me get a loan.

I remember saying, "I think we could do "X" amount of business in about five years."

Adviser: "Why can't you do that now?"

"I have no money for inventory."

"Then let's go get a loan."

The loan was great. It made Pegasus a real store--but it also meant that most of the extra money we were making was servicing the loan. 

That was pretty much the pattern for the first 15 years or so. Striving to reach viable levels while paying off loans. There's a reason this blog is called, "The Best Minimum Wage Job a Middle-Aged Guy Ever Had."  

And then--the disaster of over-expanding into 4 stores; the slamming of consecutive bubble collapses; the huge credit card debt I built up. 

I spent one 7 year period working every day of the year except Thanksgiving and Christmas. I ground my teeth to the nubbin, and it was a race between my hair turning gray or disappearing altogether. Stress city.

Debt payment to the tune of 40% of our gross sales. I repeat, not our net profit, our gross sales. 

Any normal person would have declared bankruptcy and started over. But I was certain the store still had great potential. I also figured that all the hard-won lessons would be wasted. If we could just get out of debt, we'd have a real chance.

And sure enough, when in 2002 we emerged from debt, things immediately became easier. That day marks about the halfway point in our existence. There was debt and after-debt and it was like night and day. 

But we were still a long way from making much money. I turned that 40% of gross into buying inventory--diversifying as best I could. I was still making minimum wage.

Here's the thing. Even then, even without debt, I could never quite fully inventory the main product lines. We could only get about 80% of the way there, especially since I was trying to create a stable platform of product lines, which constantly required new investment. 

Of course, about the time we would have reached full equilibrium, the housing bubble crashed. Bend was a bubble within that bubble. So again, it was back to basics.

It has only been in the last year or so--after more than 35 years, that I felt all the product lines were fleshed out. And once that happened, I wasn't needing to constantly invest in new product lines. I just needed to keep the product lines up and incrementally improve them. 

I fully stocked the poster rack yesterday with new posters. I got a case of jigsaw puzzles that completely filled that section of the store. I ordered some miscellaneous supplies that we don't strictly need but which will probably sell. I ordered some discounted books from my suppliers. I gave Sabrina the go-ahead to make a couple of game orders. And so on.

The store looks and feels prosperous. I mean, you can always tell when you walk into a store whether they are doing well or not. At least I can. It is probably subconscious for most customers. 

What's more, now that the inventory is in, all it requires is maintenance. I don't need to constantly take some of the gross profit and invest in something else. In other words, we don't need to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps any more. Of course, I feel like we need to be on guard for disasters--but as of now, the store is working.

Late in the game to get here, but it's nice.