Autumn Reflections
By Mike Bennighof, Ph.D.
Publisher, Avalanche Press
October 2011

I was told by a management mentor once that the most dangerous, poisonous people to an organization are those who excel at recognizing and highlighting bad ideas and/or failures, but who are never capable of presenting alternatives or possible solutions along with their, typically correct, judgments.

An old college friend sent me the above advice a few days ago, and I’ve been pondering it ever since. I’ve heard a lot about what was wrong with Avalanche Press over the past few years, but only in the past couple of months has a solid path toward success been laid out thanks to professional financial management.

We were also fortunate during a time of change to have Janet Thompson handling shipping and customer service. Janet answered customer e-mails in her own unique fashion, but proved an absolute wizard at setting up effective shipping practices. If we’d had these all along . . . can’t change the past, but we do live in the future’s past. We’re pretty much caught up, with just a few older orders/customer service problems to clean up now. Janet’s moving on to a job with actual health insurance (like most American small businesses, Avalanche Press does not provide coverage – once upon a time we did but that got sacrificed long ago) but Jane Ehrhardt’s coming back to reclaim her old spot.

Janet’s leaving the place better than she found it. The old, unreliable database is no longer in use (after some poking around in its guts, I’m pretty sure this “mail order manager” was originally crafted to manage a multi-national steel-making concern. Yes, really.). Accounting for shipping costs is much smoother. Without pre-orders and with webstore availability tied directly to shelf availability, the worst snags in the old system are gone. And it’s easy: it took about 10 minutes to show Jane how it’s done now. Overseas orders still take a good amount of time, but better scheduling helps there, too,

More than once, turnover in the customer service position(s) here totally jammed up the works: shipping of orders stopped dead and work on new products ground to a halt (since Susan Robinson, the production director, had to handle database issues instead). This time, it not only continued but sped up, so much so that we can now safely offer a fast-shipping guarantee: place your order through the webstore, and we’ll ship it out within four working days.

Last spring we had things under control and offered a similar guarantee; it went well for about two weeks and then a giant tornado plus a personal tragedy threw things into a chaos that lasted for months. Moving the office and warehouse in late summer didn’t help either, though it’s a much better working environment now (with clean, working restrooms!). That choas seems more or less under control now though it’s going to be a long time before the random stacks of game parts in the warehouse see any semblance of order.

All those fixes were absolutely necessary before we could introduce new boxed games to the mix. Once we have those, things should finally be where they should be. There'll no doubt be heart-rending wailing that Bob got his game before Johnny, but I have 10-year-old twins and so have been immunized against No FAY-ur!

Working through these problems and seeing the years of waste they represent sometimes leaves me wanting to cry on the spot: towers of partially-assembled games (useless work done by paid labor; every copy has to be opened and re-assembled). Paid labor to ship one game order that could have handled a half-dozen with Janet’s procedure. Products that truly should never have been published, or at least not in preference to more marketable items. The list is long and painful.

Yesterday, I found a stark reminder of that. Finally digging out a box of French counters for 1940: The Fall of France, I actually paused to look at the wall of cartons uncovered in the search. Stacks and stacks of Austerlitz and Red Russia, stuff I’d thought was already gone. Stupid decisions don’t die quite that easily. There’s another layer between that one and the back wall, but I haven’t mustered the courage to see what it contains. So for the moment at least, we have those two back on sale at their fire sale prices, since they escaped the flames last time. There’s a whole list of deals available:

• Guaranteed fast shipping. You place the order through the webstore, it’ll ship within four working days. That’s not much by internet-giant-webstore standards, but it’s pretty good for us. We’ve been hitting a 24-hour turnaround for the past couple of weeks, but need the cushion in case we run out of shipping cartons or some such.

• A nice discount coupon. Twenty percent off books and games when you use the coupon FAST. That’s only good with through the webstore: we need to funnel all direct orders there, because that puts them directly into our shipping system without introducing human error and forgetfulness. If you’re a Gold Club member, that discount doubles to 40 percent if you add your membership discount.

• Your own private Iron Duke. It’s a real, giant-sized counter, one-third again as large as the Iron Duke that comes in Great War at Sea: Jutland. It’s a leftover from Austerlitz; in that game series there’s usually no use for a single large counter as every unit needs two or three. So you can’t just add an optional division or brigade. Frontier Battles has a giant ship, too, for the same reason.

• Clearance prices on Austerlitz, Red Russia and the pinup version of Rome at War: Queen of the Celts. A complete boxed game for just $9.99 ($14.99 for Red Russia and $19.99 for Queen of the Celts). And no, there’s no reduced shipping charge to go with it: it would be less costly and more fun to fling them Frisbee-style from the loading dock into the dumpster. They still weigh just the same at $9.99 as they did at $29.99 (and make a satisfying crashing sound when they hit the upturned dumpster lid).