Games Aren't Just Child's Play

I am the founder and co-manager of North Star Games, a company in Maryland that designs, publishes, and markets original board games. Our mission is to bring people together through memorable experiences that inspire laughter and cheering while engaging the mind. I have been designing games since the sixth grade but got the idea to start this company when several friends started arguing over who could take Cluzzle (our first award-winning game) home for the holidays.

I attended the MBA program at the Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland to find a business partner and learn how to start the board game company of my dreams. My passion about the benefits of face-to-face social interaction led to my choice of industry, but I was delighted to find out that the board game segment is growing quickly. In fact, most parts of the industry have been outpacing those of computer games for the past several years.

CAPITAL CONNECTION.  As a Dingman Scholar at the Smith School, I was required to work 10 to 20 hours a week at the Dingman Center for Entrepreneurship, where I consulted for local entrepreneurs. My job was to help people find capital by working on their business model and plan.

This experience gave me the tools and relationships needed to raise $200,000 in seed money for North Star Games. An MBA is nearly essential when your goal is to take a product to mass channels because it goes a long way toward convincing investors to trust you with their money.

Since we are in the early stage, I am involved in every aspect of making the company grow. This means there is no typical day for me. Instead, the layout of my day depends on whether we are developing a new product, creating a marketing plan, making sales calls, structuring legal relationships, filing for intellectual property, raising capital, or determining our strategy.

Here's a look at a recent day in my life:

9 a.m. -- I never set my alarm. Whenever I wake up is when I turn on my computer in the living room and make coffee.

9:15 a.m. -- I look over my e-mail and respond to anything important. My partner, Satish Pillalamarri, whom I met at business school, and I returned from the International Toy Fair in New York a few weeks ago, so we have already followed up with the big-name contacts.

I am now getting in touch with smaller independent retail outlets. Building these relationships takes a lot of time, but they're important. The large national chains do not want to carry our products until we have created demand. The smaller stores are interested in learning about our games, demo programs, and whether we can conduct in-store demonstrations.

10:30 a.m. -- Data entry. Boring. We still have about 100 business cards from the Toy Fair, and all of the contact information needs to be entered into our customer relationship database. The small, independent store owners are looking for products that are not yet being carried by the large toy retailers. They compete by finding the coolest new games and providing great customer service.

11:30 a.m. -- Take a shower and cook breakfast.

Noon -- More data entry while eating.

12:30 p.m. -- Satish usually arrives around this time, and we talk strategy. He does more of the sales and accounting, while I do everything else. That said, we don't have set tasks. Since we work together and talk about everything that is going on in the company, we can easily divide tasks based upon who is most suited for each.

1 p.m. -- You guessed it, more data entry.

2 p.m. -- The next few hours are usually devoted to follow-up phone calls for the retail businesses that I entered into the database several days ago. These calls are often enjoyable. I always push our most recent product, Wits & Wagers, because of the amazing reception it received over the 2005 holiday season. It's the first trivia game you can win without knowing any trivia because you can bet on an answer provided by another player.

My goal with these calls is to get the owner excited about our games so he or she will play it with friends or family. Because we believe that our games sell themselves once they are played, the trick is in getting them into people's hands.

6 p.m. -- Cook dinner, while Satish and I talk about marketing initiatives and bat around ideas for game names and slogans.

7 p.m. -- About twice a week we have some sort of company event. Today, I give a talk to the Smith School MBA Entrepreneurship club about our experience of starting North Star Games. I spoke about packaging and marketing problems that we faced when trying to get into the mass channels.

Our newest marketing initiative is to run trivia nights at several local bars because this enables us to get a crowd of 30 to 40 people to play Wits & Wagers at the same time. We run the board game like a trivia game show. Running these trivia nights is fun and makes all the hard work worthwhile.

If there is not a company event scheduled for the evening, I usually go to the gym to play basketball or indoor soccer for several hours.

10 p.m. -- I spend another hour or two responding to e-mails or working on marketing materials.

12:30 a.m. -- I watch 30 minutes of recorded TV or curl up and read a book.

1:00 a.m. -- Ahh, sweet sleep.

Satish and I have come to terms with the fact that North Star Games does not have the resources to shoot meteorically into the mainstream. The truth is that the short-term prospects for the company include lots of hard work for little immediate payoff. It takes time to build a great company (see BW Online, 10/25/05, "Teaching the Startup Mentality").

There is already a group of people who believe that Wits & Wagers will become the next national board game blockbuster, and I believe in that possibility. In fact, the national game buyer for Target (TGT ) said it was the best game he had come across during his five years in the position.

But he also said that without a recognizable brand name, the game would not sell well in his stores. The mission he set out for us was to get more exposure for the game, and that is precisely what we are doing.

If I could do my MBA again, I would focus more on marketing instead of finance. While finance is important for large companies, it is not as important during the start-up stage. My biggest misconception was that a superior product was the most important factor in creating a successful company.

While this might be true in the long run, there will never be a long run for your company if you cannot sell your product from the start. Now, I believe that tailoring your product and marketing message to a group that can be reached inexpensively is the most essential ingredient for success.