Plan for Jeff Tunnell

I bought a motorcycle shop!!

You have not seen much of me for the past couple of weeks because I have been buried. As you can see from my profile picture, I'm into dirt bikes, and especially motocross, but I also love ATV's and street riding. A few years ago I had a collection of 16 motocross and offroad motorcycles, ATV's, and street bikes. Since then, I cut back a little, but have always continued to ride motocross every week during the Summer.

I have been riding since I was a teen, when I was pretty fast (yeah right, the older I get, the faster I was). I let the sport go for many years while starting Dynamix and a family, but when when my oldest son turned 10, and he wanted to ride, I decided that I wanted to share the same experiences that I had with my Dad when I was that age. I told him we could get bikes, but WE WOULD NOT RACE. Four weeks later, we were at the track and started racing motocross again. For the next ten years, we practically lived at the tracks on the week ends. I can tell those of you with kids that this is a stressful, but absolutely wonderful, way to spend time with your kids.

During this racing time, I invested in the local shop, Herb's Cycle Town, when the owner needed a little financial help. When the shop came up for sale earlier this year, I felt it was a once in a lifetime opportunity to become more involved in a sport that I love.

I thought it would be fairly easy to computerize the shop and make it more or less self running. Most of the employees are extremely experienced and the shop has been in business for nearly 40 years. In fact, I bought most of my bikes and ran out of this shop when I raced as a teen.

Well, I was wrong. The shop is doing nearly $4,000,000 a year in business (but, at a VERY slim profit margin), and is much more complicated than I thought. I'm making headway though, with a new server and software on the way. I have also redone the business plan, addded inventory, beefed up the race team, and started setting the groundwork for a solid future.

I will probably be tied up for another month or so. My hope is to be back to full GG speed in time to help with IndieGamesCon. I love motorcycles, but GG is more important to me.

Wish me luck. I've been working from 6AM to 11PM every day. It feels kind of wierd to work this hard again, but I'm having a blast.

C'ya all in a month or so.

-Jeff Tunnell GG