After the Storm
By Mike Bennighof, Ph.D., President, Avalanche Press
June 2011

I have a Russian friend who likes to tell me Russian jokes, which sometimes feel more like great truths.

“A Russian pessimist says things cannot get any worse,” according to Sasha. “A Russian optimist says yes, they can.”

A month ago, I wrote an update on my little company’s adventures during and after the Great Tornado that smashed much of Birmingham in late April. I was, I admit, feeling like a Russian pessimist when I should have been a Russian optimist.

The year opened with Avalanche Press in transition: for about six weeks, a new general manager ran the company before the anxiety and sleeplessness became too much and, very quietly, he suddenly resigned. We’d just made it to the end 2010 thanks to a well-received appeal to our fans and some large extra orders I wrangled from long-time contacts at a couple of distributors. Suddenly I was in charge again and if anything things had slipped even further. So much for my new, less-stressful occupation as resident creative genius.

Among my new duties, I now had to handle wholesale sales, and what I found was a shambles. Long-time customers had not been contacted in a very long time, while few new ones had been recruited. I set to work and steadily we picked up orders and got back into full distribution. Even though we were now getting orders, most of them were small: this appears to have been a very weak winter and spring in the retail sector of the game industry. Well, that, and we’d picked up a reputation for slowness and incompetence in shipping what orders we did get.

By April, things began to show improvement. We launched a very popular new Panzer Grenadier book with Go For Broke, a successful download with Prizes of War, and a solid scenario supplement in Carpathian Brigade. But probably most importantly, we completely re-vamped the way we process and ship both wholesale and individual orders: pre-orders and back orders were dropped completely. If something’s not in stock, we don’t sell it (there’s an error every now and then, sure, but the policy is to de-activate the web store page as soon as an item runs out). Out of stock or pre-ordered items were by far the biggest impediment to our shipping speed, and with those removed and some new processes introduced by Janet Thompson, we found it possible to ship most orders on the day they came in. We accordingly offered a guarantee of rapid shipping, and customers responded with a nice flow of orders.

Someone sent me this internet posting from another wargame publisher: You'll notice many of the larger firms in our industry doing the bigger stuff tend to have three or more "principles" floating the operation. That's not the case here: I have no personal resources on which to draw; everything we do has to be funded by everything we do. And I believed we would soon be ready to set a brisk production pace.

I had worked out how to afford new print runs of counters, and thus boxed games, on a very small budget. We can get games like Kursk: South Flank out the door for much less than I once assumed. The call for volunteers made in February was paying off, with lots of new material flooding in. I saw us making the product-a-week schedule I believe is vital for our continued health, with boxed games part of the mix as well as books and supplements. It began to look like I could get a handle on the company’s bills and its array of debts. And then came the end of April, with a horrific tragedy followed the very next day by the tornado.

The building was not damaged and no employees were physically injured, and so I really did think we’d be back in full operation by the following week. Real life rarely meets my expectations, and did not this time, either. The only employee not missing huge stretches dealing with intense as-real-as-life-gets issues was Beth, our now-returned former CS manager, and she works seldom enough that Janet at times questions her existence. I promised Beth when she returned that her children and day-job career would come first and second, and that she’d never have to interact with customers again (she stormed out last February without warning, after an ugly experience with a particularly abusive and threatening Canadian customer).

So it was going to be up to me. There didn’t seem to be much of a choice, at least none that I found acceptable. I learned how to ship stuff, and found Janet’s system to be very intuitive. I still don’t know how to handle overseas orders, which are much more complicated, so I left those for Janet. We’re therefore a little behind on overseas orders but very solid on domestic ones; we are enormously behind on answering customer service e-mail. I know better than to handle those while crushed by exhaustion.

And then I found myself having to acquire still more new skills. I learned to use our e-mail contact software, and promptly began bombarding the customers with newsletters. It seemed wasteful to not use the full month’s allotment we pay for, and as I got better at it I wanted to try again. It was a poor substitute for website updates, but that was all I had to work with.

That created a marketing problem: customers were hearing from us by e-blast much more often than through the website. Many people don’t like that. Daily Content had become our hallmark, and our website looked like a boarded-up, dusty storefront overcome with cobwebs. Posting had slowed even before the late-April troubles, as we put our efforts into getting new products done and I spent a lot of my time repairing our wholesale network. The site had two Content updates dated in April and two in May. This had to change, but the substitute webmasters I set to the task could not gain access.

This dismayed me greatly; one of them, a true tech wizard named Scott, I had believed invincible in all things cyber. Janet – who ran an internet store before coming to Avalanche Press - insisted that the problem could be solved, and so newly-armed with the proper software (legally obtained!), I saddled Rosinante and rode to war. With shipping more or less caught up I have a little more energy; a week ago I couldn’t have mustered the will to try and then meet inevitable defeat. I installed the software Friday night and before midnight the windmill had yielded and I updated my first page (which is why Coming Soon may look a little odd – then I figured out I should experiment instead on a 2004 promotional page that’s somehow still on the site but disconnected from any links). I’m still pretty amazed at my own achievement: you can overcome an awful lot when the stakes are high enough, and I am not prepared to lose my company and by extension all my worldly goods over something so trivial as website updates. By this morning I had figured out formatting and image placement and updated dozens of pages – incorrect prices, missing links and such fell away.

That’s going to be crucial to the company’s continuance; Daily Content drives our consumer sales. And it ties directly to the one really good thing that’s happened over the past five weeks: there are a lot of hands willing to help. Kirk Hoffman drove down from Huntsville yesterday with his son and his friend Patrick McGovern to assemble games, and Duane Parsons’ crew has been in as well. The game design and development teams have churned out a large stock of supplements for several game series, and several boxed games are in good shape as well. And there’s a stockpile of very good Content on hand. Our former production manager, Peggy Gordon, is also helping out. Having ex-employees like Beth and Peg want to return is deeply validating on a personal level, and the support shown by our fans even moreso. I could not have lasted through the last five weeks, physically or emotionally, without it.

So we’re in much better shape than we deserve to be, but we still need good sales results. Browsing through the webstore, picking out some stuff and using that sweet JUNE coupon would be truly helpful. We’ll get everyone back eventually, but until then I have to make sure it’ll all be here for their return. With your continuing help, it will be.