Chapter 219: Money, Money, Money (3)
If someone were to ask what was necessary to start a business, nine out of ten people who had studied business administration would answer: market research.
First: what do people like? Would they actually pay money for this?
For example, if I made fried chicken and put it on the market, it wouldn’t do if people wrinkled their faces and said, “What do you mean traffic-light chicken? Who would eat something like that?” instead of buying it.
Second: what brands are currently on the market? What strengths do their products have, and what have they chosen to give up?
Think about it. I wasn’t some Cooking Master Boy. No matter how well I fried chicken, there was no way I could create chicken seasoning better than the R&D teams of major chicken companies filled with people holding master’s and doctoral degrees.
Third: if I sold the product, would I get at least the minimum profit margin of 11 percent? If not, where would I create additional profit?
Think about it again. Guillaume, who neither created some monstrous thing called traffic-light chicken nor wanted to differentiate himself from big corporations by selling chicken at the cheap price of 3,000 won per bird—would he still be able to take home money after covering all store maintenance costs and taxes? If you ask me, absolutely not.
There was a reason the fried chicken shop in the alley near my house went bankrupt every six months and got replaced by a new chicken shop. Hell, even when I first made money selling bread, I never let the profit margin drop below 11 percent no matter what.
Fourth: could I secure sufficient customer repurchase intent? In simple terms, I had to make customers come back to my product again.
Let’s change the example a little this time. Say it wasn’t a fried chicken shop, but… right, an electronics store selling microwave ovens.
Chicken was a disposable item. Eat it once and it was gone. But a microwave was a product you bought once and used until it broke. The thing to consider there was that if you made a microwave too sturdy, that became an advantage when selling it at first, but later it turned into a disadvantage.
Why? Because if it never broke, no one would buy a new one. So manufacturers usually designed things so that, no matter how carefully you used them, after about ten years the product would start going bad.
But if you messed up and it broke in one month, product reviews would be utterly destroyed. The moment some apartment housewives’ association lady who liked to chat said, “Oh my, that company’s product is just too flimsy. Ho ho,” the game was over.
Therefore, companies had to find the middle ground and make a product that would make the housewives’ association president say, “If it lasted ten years, that’s sturdy enough.” Sob, sob. Business was just that hard...
Let’s say you put everything together and made a decent product at a decent profit margin. Congratulations! You have now passed Stage 1! Now worry about who you’re going to sell it to, at what price, and whether society will even allow it!
Fuck. That’s right. This wasn’t defeating the Demon King’s Castle. It was just killing slimes in the beginner village.
Even if you made a shitload of product and spread it through the market, you still wouldn’t know whether people would like it. In fact, the very people you thought would be your main target customers might hate it.
Looking at it a little more negatively, this was a world where professional complainers might latch on and start picket protests.
In business administration, this was called target market selection and positioning.
But even more important than that was the marketing strategy.
“So in other words, you mean, ‘How do we sell this game so that people will say it was sold properly?’ Isn’t that it?”
“That’s right.”
“…Boss, I’m not really sure what that has to do with us.”
“That’s right. We’re just engineers and sold— no, security guards, aren’t we? I don’t think people who’ve never thought about that side of things are going to come up with grand advice.”
What nonsense. That was exactly why I had dragged all of you here at this ungodly hour.
Without saying much, I shrugged and slid a large sheet of drawing paper onto the table where my employees were sitting.
“What is this?”
“All right, I’ll hand out a pen to each of you, so write down everything that comes to mind when you think of ‘board game.’”
“…Pardon? What on earth do you mean?”
What else? Brainstorming.
With my hands behind my back, I walked in front of the dozens of employees and said,
“It doesn’t matter what it is. Just write down everything that comes to mind. It can be something simple like ‘it’s fun’ or ‘it’s not fun,’ and it can also be something more advanced like ‘Ah, I wish there were this kind of game.’ Anything that comes to mind, write it all down on that paper.”
“Riiight…”
“B-boss! I can’t write!”
“I know, which is why I paired the people who can write with the people who can’t. Ask the person next to you for help.”
Everyone tilted their heads, but since I hadn’t asked them to do anything difficult, they quickly grabbed pens and started scribbling things down.
Some scratched their chins and thought deeply, while others seemed to write down whatever came to mind and filled the paper in no time.
When I first gathered them, the clock had pointed to seven in the morning. By the time it pointed to ten, the once-brisk hands had started to droop.
This wasn’t fun.
I slapped both hands together hard and shouted,
“All right, for reference, the person who writes down the most will get one paid day off tomorrow.”
The magical words: paid leave.
The eyes of the people who had just been looking at the clock with dull eyes as if thinking, Ah, what’s for lunch today? suddenly came back to life. Those who had been nodding off smacked their own cheeks awake.
Right. Nobody could resist getting paid to rest. I couldn’t either.
“Boss, aren’t you going to lunch?”
“I want to, but I have too much work.”
I answered while placing the dozens of collected sheets onto the office desk.
“Welllll… then should I bring a simple meal over from the cafeteria?”
“I’d appreciate that.”
“Heh heh, I’ll bring over stew with plenty of lean meat!”
To the worker speaking with a grin through a mouth missing one front tooth, I gave a light nod.
Click.
The door closed, and some strange loneliness crept up over me now that I was alone in the office. Right, let’s work. Work. If I worked, I could escape this weird mood.
After brewing a cup of coffee and sitting down, I picked up the first sheet and started reading through it. A few things stood out.
[I’d like the rules to be simple.]
[I’d like it if it were a game you could play while drinking.]
The guy who wrote this was definitely a laborer. At the end of the eighteenth century, anyone with a bit of education was always busy showing off how much he’d learned. Among the British aristocrats, there were even people who deliberately made existing etiquette more complicated just to show off.
I turned to the next sheet, and now it said something different.
[I’d like it if it weren’t too simple and there were lots of possible cases.]
[I’d like it if it had that feeling of making you use your brain.]
That was the sound of someone with book learning. This one was probably an engineer from the technical team.
I lifted my cup and swallowed the coffee. Didn’t it take about five minutes for the caffeine to spread through your body? I leaned back deep into my chair and took a moment to think.
It was good that I’d entrusted this to brainstorming after all. Even among French people living in the same era, their opinions diverged this sharply. If I’d marched in like some dictator, the odds of disaster would’ve been even higher.
It struck me again how I wasn’t actually some amazing person. I’d just looked at the answer sheet beforehand.
I couldn’t predict the flows of economics and business like Warren Buffett. I didn’t have the ability of Henry Ford to build a city of automobiles in the wilderness. I couldn’t invent revolutionary technology like Steve Jobs or Bill Gates. Nor did I have the great charisma of Chairman Lee Kun-hee.
Still, there was one thing.
I was confident in listening carefully to the voices around me.
Knock knock!
“Boss, I brought the stew!”
I got up and opened the office door. It was that same worker missing a front tooth, holding out a lunchbox to me.
France was, how should I put it, a country with a very strange moral code.
More precisely, it was the moral code preached by the neighborhood church.
To begin with, if you ate meat on Wednesdays and Fridays, you were a son of a bitch.
If you thought, Come to think of it, I haven’t done anything wrong lately, though? and didn’t go to mandatory confession once a month, you were a son of a bitch.
If you didn’t give one-tenth of your earnings to the church, you were a son of a bitch.
And beyond that, there were the so-called Seven Deadly Sins, so if you were proud, lustful, stingy, jealous, greedy, or lazy toward others, you were a son of a bitch.
Well… I had a lot to say about the Seven Deadly Sins too, but let’s leave that aside.
If you went to the back alleys of Paris, you’d see prostitutes. If the king didn’t keep a mistress besides the queen, people mocked him by saying, “What, is His Majesty impotent? How can he look at only one woman?” But when the king went off to war, rolled around with prostitutes instead of the queen, and caught a venereal disease, people rejoiced and said, “Oh! Our king is a real stallion! Amazing!”
Honestly, from my perspective, it made me wonder what kind of contradictory morality this was, but what could I say? That was the reality. So when other people dropped donation envelopes into the basket, I simply slipped in an empty envelope.
Anyway, putting all that aside, despite all these contradictions, eighty percent of the French still believed in the Catholic Church and the Pope.
“Father, please help us!”
“Oh, amen. What is the matter, my child?”
“Father, please hurry and strike down those wicked, lustful servants of Satan!”
“Ah, that’s a bit…”
But the priests, who themselves had mistresses and children, ignored those things and instead busied themselves preserving their authority by ranting at harmless entertainment.
“Card games are the playthings of Satan! Stay away from cards! Stay away from gambling! Give offerings instead!”
“Y-you do things like that?”
“Aaaah! No, I don’t!”
It was absurd, but true.
To be blunt, for someone like me who had spent childhood at home filled with anime and school life filled with duels, then two full years at GOP outposts with nothing to do but play board games with the other soldiers during personal time, it would’ve been easy enough to make a game people liked.
However, if I wanted those people—especially the overwhelming majority of French who believed in Catholicism—to enjoy the game I made without feeling guilty, the cooperation of the Church was essential.
But making sure those denture-clacking Catholic Talibans didn’t let the words “That is the play of Satan” pop out of their mouths was incredibly difficult.
What’s that? Why?
Because I confiscated all 3 billion livres of Church property. Fair enough, maybe...
In the end, there was only one way to stop the Catholic Talibans from raising their Bibles and crying “Deus vult!”
A second coffee. That alone.