Planning for Success

For those of your who like the "business insight" part of this Patreon, I thought you might be vaguely interested in this idea.

Planning for failure is what most of us do and what businesses tend to be, well, if not good at then natural at. My plan for failure, last year, was to return to my professional roots, which I did. I'm working with a small community benefit enterprise on the side, and they are great at planning for failure! But planning for success is where it seems a lot of small businesses and Kickstarters go wrong.

Whilst I'm not expecting the KS campaign to be over successful to the point that it takes me two years or more to fulfill the orders, I am anticipating what will happen if I do exceed my expectations to the point that it looks like there's a market for my designs that I need to exploit further. Which is why this post had the illustration that it does.

Longer-term patrons will probably recognize the picture because it's not the first time I've posted it. This is Lao, the Spook who appears in Operation Nemesis. But this is also an example of a number of designs I have on paper to be able to push forward quickly with new sculpts for Zero Dark miniatures if the campaign is a sufficient success (e.g. it hits enough stretch goals to be going on to resin or metal casting).

It's not just about designs, though. Fulfillment, if we get there, will also provide enough insight into the exact costs of delivery-to-market that I will know exactly how much the in-year burdens (time and money) of a new miniature are and, therefore, the sales per year I will need to glean a net profit worth putting back into new minis.

With that in mind, I have established initial contact with alternative casters in order to raise volume, if needed, and additional digital sculptors to increase speed and reliability (Adam is good, but having one sculptor is a single point of failure).

You'll already be aware, of course, that I have made myself au fait with the absolute basics of Blender, giving me capacity to do limited amounts of file manipulation myself.

However, it's always worth remembering that my capital reserves are essentially negative. I loaned the business money to cover my tax bill and I haven't yet built up enough reserves to pay that debt back. My least hopes for the Kickstarter are to pay Adam and pay myself and have Precinct Omega back at neutral buoyancy. But my best hopes are that it can do its job as a marketing tool to raise the profile of Precinct Omega, to push sales of both books and miniatures and to grow the size of this community.