So, you love coffee and you love board games, but how can you combine these two loves. Well, starting a board game café would be the best way to do this right? Back in 2018 thegameshelf did a study in the UK which could place you along over 100 other Board Game Café’s. This is compared to 25,000 out and out Café’s, so much less competition – it’s certainly more of a niece enterprise. So, the question How to Start a Board Game Cafe: Lets look below.
Table of Contents
- What are the Benefits of Starting a Board Game Cafe?
- What are the Cons of Starting a Board Game Cafe?
- Why Do Businesses Fail and How Can We Stop That?
- Well, How Do I Start?
- Supplies
- Cafe Food and Drink:
- Board Games:
- Conclusion
- Additional Sources:
- Why Don’t You Check Out:
What are the Benefits of Starting a Board Game Cafe?
- Be your own boss – you choose the people you work with
- Challenge yourself – you will learn heaps owning your own business which will give you plenty of transferable skills
- Any board game you could want (within reason) if your business model is board games then first you’ll be buying hundreds and so thousands of hours of content. Eventually you’ll be big enough that publishers might even send board games to you for free!
- Board games are re-usable, this is your main attraction, it is an initial investment, but a well looked after
- Profit $$$ – the most appealing factor for those of us with entrepreneurial spirit
What are the Cons of Starting a Board Game Cafe?
- Hard work – Especially to start with, you need to establish a brand and some days you might only just break even; you’ll need a constant flow of customers to ensure success.
- Risk – No not the board game, financial risk. You’ve put your money upfront and most likely a loan from the bank, we’re looking at £20,000 at the absolute lowest end for just the lease. I’d suggest starting with a friend, you’ll share the risk, build a closer friendship and have fin along the way. Alongside this £20,000 you’ll need to consider the budget for the games and fittings/furnishings, this takes us to about £30,000 minimum.
- The business could fail – Up to 20% of businesses collapse in the first two years of being open, 45% during the first five years, and 65% during the first 10 years. Only 25% of new businesses make it to 15 years or more. But why do businesses fail?
Why Do Businesses Fail and How Can We Stop That?
- Lack of funds – many new business owners don’t allocate enough money to the startup, especially if the first few month are rough it can lead to a quick downwards spiral. Let’s up the budget to £40,000…
- Bad Location – location location location, you need to be in an area of high foot traffic especially when you first start out otherwise you’re not giving yourself a chance. A good way to understand if your location is good or not is calculate your monthly expenses. Let’s say £2200 for easy maths, there are 22 working days in a month (unless you decide to open every day). 2200/22 is £100 per day, now figure out what kind of footfall you need. Is it an average of £5 profit per person? You’ll need 20 people to visit your café to break even in that case.
- Bad Marketing – You’ve got to create interest around your business; we’ve already established that this is a niche business, so you should have less competition than say a neighbourhood bar, but how do you stand out? You can do this a couple of ways, maybe you have a rare board game that people want to travel far and wide to play. Another idea could be to designate certain theme nights, for example, Tuesdays could be D&D night, so that would attract the D&D players in the city to your café. I would suggest scoping out the competition, you wouldn’t want to clash with one of their theme nights or you could risk losing business.
Well, How Do I Start?
I would recommend purchasing a current business, rather than completely starting from scratch. The benefit of this is that you will be able to carry over many of the regular customers, the business will also already have an established reputation, so you don’t need to work quite as hard building a brand. As we discussed earlier, there seems to be around 100 board game café’s established in the UK, so while it would be ideal to buy one out, I think its unlikely. Better to buy a traditional café and convert it, hopefully in this way we can keep the furnishing costs down also. And most importantly, you just need to take the dive.
Supplies
You know what they say, it takes money to make money. Let’s look at the two main parts of our café and try to estimate costs. Please be aware these estimates are very, very rough.
Cafe Food and Drink:
Lets use Cosco as an example (although when the business grows you will be able to get better discounts) and only tea because I’m British and that’s what I like. 960 teabags at Cosco cost £14.99, the average coffee shop sells 200-300 tea’s/coffee a day, in our 22 day work month that’s 4400 on the short tside, we’d need 4 of those Cosco boxes per month, so that’s around £60 on teabags. Let’s double that for coffee so running total £120. We’ll double this again for food as we will offer this also, so £240. Now this is just speaking about one brand of tea, lets include coffee as well, so we’ll have 5 tea brands, 2 coffee brands for a total of 7 to give some variety so £840 in coffee start-ups plus another £840 in food start ups for £1600 as a conservative estimate. Remember the point about financing earlier? Well, lets round that up to £2000 to get started
Board Games:
Board games: well, how many board games should I have? Most families, 57%, have up to 25, the next group has between 26-50 making up 22% of respondents. After scouting numerous existing board game cafes the largest number I found was 2000, the smallest 300, lets start at 200 and we’ll build our way up as time goes on. On average a board game costs £40 new at amazon, so that’s around £8000 there for a total of £10,000 start-up costs.
Conclusion
So, what have we learnt about how to start a board game cafe? Well, its very, very expensive. We’re looking at £40,000 to buy a business and another £10,000 on top for supplies, for a total of £50,000. Let’s say you and your friends put £10,000 up front, you need to borrow £40,000 from the bank, this would cost around £900 per month, not counting bills etc you’d need to make £40 per day profit to pay the monthly interest; now what if you wanted to be paid minimum wage (we’re not even counting staffing costs here because that’s a whole bag of worms), that’s another £1500, so now we need £2400 per month, just to pay ourselves minimum wage which is £110 per day. But this isn’t about the money, it’s about sending a message. We’re doing it for fun and we want to start our very own board game café.
Additional Sources:
https://printninja.com/board-game-industry-statistics/
Why Don’t You Check Out:
About Us – TableTopTemple – Owning a Board Game Café is our dream
