So, November 1st marked eighteen months in business for us. It’s crazy to think how far we’ve come in a year and a half. I keep telling people that it’s one thing to believe in your own idea, but it’s an entirely different experience when you get a community that supports it. I was looking into our Google insights, and was surprised to find out that our most recent 6 months (June 4th to November 30th 2019) was 3.13x larger than our first 6 months during that same time period for 2018.
While we opened on May 1st 2018, and had our Facebook page going since mid-year 2017, I wanted to look at the same period of time I mentioned above with our Google Insights. Our Facebook page started June 4th 2018 with 656 likes, and ended November 30th with 1,087 likes. Looking at our page today, we started June 4th 2019 with 1,314 likes, and are currently sitting at 1,467 likes. That’s over 100% growth on our June to June comparison, and roughly a 35% increase comparing our November 2018 to November 2019.
I look at that as a huge positive. Our numbers are still growing, and our sales reflect that as well. November just finished for us with a 28.5% net growth over last year’s November. And our October before that grew over 46.5% from the previous year’s October. We have nearly 1,400 unique customers entered into our system, and we are seeing many of them return – well above average! Retail stores like to see an average return of 26.8%. Of our most recent 100 customers alone we have seen 22.43% return within 30 days.
I hope to see a lot of these figures grow more this next year as we get ready for the start of our third year in business. Customers always ask me how it’s going (running the store), and my response is still the same. “We are still growing, but not there yet. Eventually, it’d be nice to pay myself a salary.” That will come in time, but it’s definitely a gamble of how we can continue to manage our expenses with the resources we have available, and continue to grow this business at the same time.
There is still a multitude of things I want to incorporate into our business model that we either don’t have the time, or the financial power to do it. Usually it’s a bit of both, but time is definitely the most valuable commodity. We made a trade with ByteSpeed last year that provided us with some small all-in-one PCs that we hope to incorporate into our business model within the next 12 months. However, that adds another layer of complexity for our setup. Most of those games will be digital purchases, and with our PS4 and Xbox One 8TB hard drives already hitting capacity in less than 12 months (since we installed them), how quickly will we run out of space in these mini-PCs.
I could write volumes about what I want to do with Replay Games, but we need to walk before we can run. All I can say is, if we can continue our patterns we’ve seen so far, you ain’t seen nothing yet!
Cassidy Schnase
Owner
(Photo taken from publicdomainvectors.org)
