Building a viable business
As far we know, Tabletop Library is the world's first and only purely membership-based board game club. We’re glad to have it for ourselves, and would love to see the concept spread beyond Berkeley. So one of our goals is to “discover” a viable business model for board game clubs. Something that motivates the creation of more of them. To that end, we've decided be sharing our financials every quarter.
We won't have a quarter of data to share until ~February 2027, but to get things started, here are the the projections we used to set our opening day pricing.
We also think of this as a way of bringing the community along for the ride, offering context to whatever crazy-seeming decisions we end up making in the future.
We’ve been told this level of transparency is a bad idea and will backfire. We’re experienced enough to realize that this is almost certainly true! But, tragically, foolish enough to do it anyway. Enjoy it while it lasts :-)
WHAT’S A “VIABLE” BUSINESS MODEL?
To keep our place in Berkeley running, we just care about breaking even... but break even is not “viable.” We strive for a template that an aspiring small business owner who might otherwise open a climbing gym or yoga studio looks at and says, “hey, I could make a living doing this!”
Below are what we believe to be the key qualities of viability. If you looked at the pitch deck of someone raising money to open a climbing gym, co-working space, boutique fitness studio, pickleball facility, etc. — you’d probably see numbers similar to this.
$500,000 in up-front capital. This is what we estimate it takes to open the doors: buildout, initial inventory and furniture, deposits, and the first months of losses before the business finds its footing. Typically financed through an SBA loan.
20% target profit margin. This is the ultimate goal—the payoff that makes the risk and the work worth it. We treat it as a long-term target rather than a day-one expectation: it’s the number that lets an aspiring owner look at this and say, “this is a business I could make a living from.”
A realistic timeline to get there. ~18 months to reach operating break-even (covering ongoing costs), then ~3 years to climb to the 20% profit margin, and finally ~5 years to fully pay back the up-front investment.
A market-rate salary for the GM/owner. The owner draws a salary for the day-to-day work of running the place, kept separate from the business’s profit—especially in the years before margins reach the target. It should match what that same person could earn managing another small business.