Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Dru Sepulveda. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Dru, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Talk to us about building your team? What was it like? What were some of the key challenges and what was your process like?

Modern Explorers Guild is owned by a partnership of three people. Myself (Dru Sepúlveda), Brandon Toyzan, and Travis Vajcner. When we started the business in late 2020 we were the only workers. As the only partner without a traditional day job, I took most of the shifts. During this time my wife was able to support our family with her job as an engineer. After about six months we decided to hire some workers. We did not have any particular ideas about how to go through this process since our backgrounds were all in the realm of computer science and not business. So, not having a clear picture of how to do this, we put our Google-fu to work and did our best with some internet-sourced interview questions. We picked up a part time worker, who quickly after became a full time worker and shortly after that we hired a store manager and an intern.

Here is where two things went wrong. Firstly we did not understand how to communicate with people outside of our realms of expertise, and our expectations were way… way to high. I want to make something clear, these first employees are great people, who we still have positive relationships with to this day. What I am saying here is not a reflection of them as a person, but how they specifically fit into our business with their particular skill set. See, we didn’t have our interviews tailored to our business so the people we hired did not have the specific skills that our business needed to be successful; we just didn’t realize this at the time. We struggled with communication, setting expectations, and making our business run as well as it could under these conditions. If I had known then what I know now we would have let those employees go much sooner, so that both they could have found jobs that were a better fit for them and we could have all suffered a little less in the meanwhile.

With our employees skills not matching what our business needed we were not only rapidly approaching insolvency but also critical levels of frustration. In 2023 I and another partner attended the The Tabletop Game Association (GAMA) conference in Louisville Kentucky. There we attended a seminar put on by a man named Seppy Yoon who gave us the tools and the language we needed to find the right employees. Empowered by our new knowledge and confident in our ability to come up with a plan, we made the hard decision to let our current employees go and start hiring people who would be a much better fit for our business.

We did this by focusing the questions around covering the problems we had with the previous employees and making sure the skills they had matched the job descriptions that we clearly defined. We focused on social skills and willingness to talk to customers for our sales associates after realizing we can teach them the technical points about paint, games, and comics, but social skills are much harder to impart. For our management team we focused on organization, leadership, and creativity. All of the interviewees had to write a cover letter telling us about their favorite game ( and then sell us on that game in the interview), and all interviewees had to learn a small game and then “teach” us how to play it. We are a board game store after all.

After we learned to let go of employees who were a poor fit and tailor our hiring process to find the employees that would be a better fit for our specific business needs, we were able to turn our business around, keep positive relationships with our former employees, and are still here today to tell the tail.

Dru, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

Modern Explorers Guild is a specialty retail store that has two locations, a neighborhood location and a downtown location, where we sell CCGs (collectable card games), board games, comics, table top war games, and paints. We also host classes and events at both locations all while providing a safe, third place for community members to spend time enjoying their hobbies when we are not running events.

We are most proud of our stores safe and inviting atmosphere. We have all gone to some amazing hobby stores where they are clean, well lit, and well stocked, and most of us have had the opposite of that experience at some point. We are consistently getting feedback that we are firmly in the realm of the first type of shop and continue to work to keep it that way.

Can you tell us the story behind how you met your business partner?

Originally there were four partners who came together to start a Local Game Store when the long established, previous store owner retired during the COVID19 pandemic. The leader, Brandon approached me in early 2020 about making a store and I initially turned him down. I had just sold off a previous business and was looking to have some time to relax with my family during the home time provided by the pandemic. After a couple of weeks he came back to me and asked again. After ruminating on it, I decided that if I was going to be a part of a new business I might as well do it when I was young and had energy left to take on the endeavor. I agreed to be the fourth business partner in the venture and the rest is history.

Can you talk to us about how you funded your business?

I usually refer to this as the original sin of the business. When people looking to start a business come to me for advice, I normally start the conversation by asking them if they have about half a million dollars in capital, because that is about how much we should have had to start this business, but in reality we had around half that and suffered under high interest and hard decisions for a long while until we got established.

Our initial pool of money came from the four partners and one outside investor. Additional resources in the form of product and displays came as leftovers from a previous business Brandon had owned before he founded this partnership. We were also doubly lucky to have an awesome community that was waiting for a new hobby store to open to fill the void left by the previous business closing down once the owner retired and a generous landlord who was willing to give us an affordable rental rate in exchange for us improving the property over time. Without these two things we would not have been able to scrape by the first few years. It would have been nice to have more breathing room during those first few years, but with a bit of luck things worked out for us.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.meguild.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/m3guild/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/M3Guild/
• Twitter: https://x.com/m3guild/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@M3Guild
• Other: Interview with our General Manager on a local news station:
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xpOzrOZ3Wzg