Kingslayer Games With Store Owner, Travis

In this episode, we're talking with Travis, owner of Kingslayer Games. The store spans three locations in California: Fountain Valley, Oceanside, and Lake Forest.

Travis started his foray into retail in 2015. Having gone to school for business, a storefront was a "front", as Travis calls it, to enable more product purchases from distributors. Initial plans were for the store to be a comic book store. However, after one week, customers asked to play Magic: The Gathering. Three weeks later, Travis was hosting his first Magic: The Gathering Pre-Release event.

With three stores to oversee, Travis employs 19 employees: an Operations Manager, three Store Managers, a Warehouse Manager, and an Organized Play Manager. Regarding hiring, Travis' two requirements are kindness and obsessiveness. The latter refers to an obsession with a particular game, he says. Moreover, he's also able to provide health benefits to his employees.

Travis' day-to-day duties involve managing cash flow for each store, creating content to help scale the business, and staying on top of his calendar, email, and to-do lists. He says the latter is one of the things he's always looking to improve upon.

With three stores, Travis doesn't always get the opportunity to meet his customers. That said, he streams events twice weekly on Twitch to engage with his customers. Moreover, he'll also make it a point to play in events with his customers. The engagement with his customers allows him to receive instant feedback.

To deliver the products his customers want, he leverages the onboarding process of Discord by allowing customers to select their favorite games upon joining. The customer segmentation by "roles" is based on the games they've chosen. Travis can use these "roles" and market products only to customers who seek out a game they've said they are interested in.