How to Balance Creativity and Business: Insights from a Seasoned Industry Professional, Jeff Tidball

EP072_01-09-25_Jeff Tidball

Intro: [00:00:00] Welcome to Toy Business Unboxed, your gateway to the secrets of the toy industry. Here, Jason Hsieh, a toy entrepreneur and expert in the field. “Every product we develop is really inspired by some of the real life experience that we have with our son.” “60 percent of all toys last year were sold on Amazon.”

“Be passionate about it. Because it’s a road. It’s a journey.” “Like when you have an idea that you think is gonna somewhat change the world, make things better, I’d say go for it.“

Jason Hsieh: Hello, welcome to another episode, toy Business Unbox. Today we’re thrilled to have Jeff, a game publisher, a designer, and also entrepreneur joining us. And Jeff is also the president of Left Justified studio and prolific games where he’s responsible for some of the incredible tabletop games that he have developed with his [00:01:00] teams. And in today’s interview would dive deep to some of Jeff’s experience both on acquiring other companies and how he approach the process and also of his legacy of his gaming company. And so thank you so much for joining us on the interview today, Jeff.

Jeff Tidball: Yeah, thank you, Jason. I’m looking forward to it.

Jason Hsieh: can you share with our audience a little bit on what is the origin story behind your company?

Jeff Tidball: So I’ve been in the tabletop game business for a long time. I’ve decided really early on that what I wanted to do was design and publish tabletop games. And was lucky enough to get into that business kind of straight out of college. I spent a long time working for other companies, so I worked at Atlas Games for a long time. I worked at fantasy Flight games for a while. I was a freelance designer for a long time, so I had the benefit of having experience with lots of different places and had always done freelancing and projects on my own. But I decided eventually like in the years leading up to the pandemic, that I really wanted to publish games on my [00:02:00] own as well. So that was where I started looking at what games was I gonna bring out and what was that gonna look like.

Jason Hsieh: I see. Okay. One thing in your journey I think is also very different because I also talked to quite a bit of entrepreneur in the tabletop games and also Toy Space. You decide to also acquire another brand as part of your business strategy.

Can we talk a little bit about your decision, what kind of data and what kind of conversation you have with this brand before you acquire them and what make you making?

Jeff Tidball: Yeah. The prolific games was founded by bill Sininger, and then he brought on a partner, named John Harris. And they had run this business for maybe 10 or 12 years before I bought it from them. And I knew them, they are local to me here in Minnesota, so we were at many of the same different events. We had friends in common and things like that. And then also in those years when I was working at Atlas Games, which was in St. Paul, Minnesota here. Atlas Games and prolific games were both represented at lots [00:03:00] of different conventions by a local retail store called Source Comics and Games that traveled around to the conventions like GenCon and represented a number of different publishers there. so like sometimes I would go along to those conventions and it would be either be the Atlas Games representative there or would be paid by source comics and games to work in their booth. ’cause I was knowledgeable about the projects.

Bill and John would be there too, so I knew them. From working side by side with them at those conventions, which is a very intense experience of talking about games, right? It’s a, being in front of customers for eight hours a day is very different from sitting at a desk and answering emails and doing game development and things like that. So I got to know the two of them in that relatively intense convention environment over a number of years when they were running the business. So that’s how it, like I learned about their games, met them, and we became friends.

Jason Hsieh: And how do you evaluate to make that final decision on, okay, let’s [00:04:00] say like it’s pretty much like a merging process, which you

Jeff Tidball: Sure. So I had done some reading about the idea of acquiring either companies or game lines. I, just happened to pick up a book that I think was called Buy Then Build, which is essentially a book about purchasing existing companies, almost as a better way to do entrepreneurial activities because you can pick and choose what’s already working instead of starting from a completely virgin idea that you have no idea whether it’s gonna work or not. But that, so that sort of gave me a framework and kind of the reason I had picked that up was because I knew I was starting a publishing company. But I also knew from my history working in that business for, at that point almost 20 years, that it was very difficult to get independent stores or distributors to take you seriously until you have a critical mass of a catalog. None of those stores have enough time to deal with deal like an inventor who has one [00:05:00] toy, a publisher who has one game. If they had to talk to one person for every product that they stock 10 minute conversations for 24 hours a day, it’s just not gonna work. So I was really trying to figure out, how can I grow the left justified catalog very quickly to the point where I can have a conversation with a store owner, have a conversation with a distributor and say, this is my catalog of games. You should bring these in and take them seriously. So I was already in a place where I was thinking about those issues when it came onto my radar that Bill and John were interested in selling the prolific business. I didn’t acquire the business entity per se. We did an asset sale because I don’t want to like acquire any unknown liabilities that they might have.

Jason Hsieh: Yeah,

Jeff Tidball: And I bought all of the IP for the games, bought all of the files for the games, all of the, like copyrights to the illustrations and things like that. As you probably know, you can’t really copyright a game design [00:06:00] per se. But all of the other things about it the trademarks and the copyrights to the actual physical expressions of that.

Jason Hsieh: I see, okay.

Jeff Tidball: So the way that we went about valuing that is what I saw when I looked at the buy and build framework, which is essentially to have a look at what are the, what is the annual profit that these things generate, and then what multiple of that should we look at when figuring out the benefit of it. And I think that’s probably, I haven’t done tons of acquisitions, but I think that’s a relatively straightforward and common way of evaluating the value of the business. So that just meant that I had to sit down with a bunch of years of their sales data. Because that’s essentially what I’m doing is buying a future stream of revenue. And look at all the different games in their catalog.

Tabletop gaming tends to be a very sort of blockbuster driven business. So you’ll release 10 games and one of them will really break out, and all of the other ones will maybe sell out their first print runs, but maybe not, and just sit around forever. So [00:07:00] it was a process just of looking at sales over time. Trying to guess whether those sales levels were gonna continue. And then figuring out what the right multiple of that was. And one of the things that I did is that would not necessarily be common is my understanding in many business things is a lot of the value was in the inventory. If you were buying, I don’t know, a bakery or something, you’re not at all interested in buying their inventory of flour or whatever. But the fact that you’ve gotta print games many thousands at a time means that it’s not like I want to just buy the IP and then reprint everything again from scratch. That would be a huge capital expenditure. So basically we looked at what did I think the ongoing sales were gonna be, which I had a pretty good idea of their existing inventory. How much of that was gonna sell in the next we came around at 2.7 years is what our multiple was gonna be.

How much of that existing inventory was gonna sell in the next 2.7 years? And so for that inventory, I essentially paid what they had paid for it. [00:08:00] What was the manufacturing cost gonna be.And for any inventory they had over that 2.7 year horizon, I paid them 10% of that because the idea is that they’re probably someday I’m gonna have to put that in a dumpster. It’s hardly worth anything. But it’s possible that I can use that as premiums, buy this, get that. Or that maybe I would be able to resuscitate sales of those things, but that it was gonna probably take a lot of my resources to do that to take a game that has been sold, that the marketplace has said, eh, we don’t know. We don’t take that game necessarily, but if I can put marketing into it, then you can sell that inventory. It’s not like literally without value, but that there’s not really much to pay them for since there’s not an ongoing stream of that. So that’s broadly what the process looked like and what the thinking was in terms of how are we gonna figure out what this is worth.

Jason Hsieh: I see. Yeah. Thank you for sharing that experience, because I’ve seen not a lot of people have gone through the type of acquisition, the merger that you have done. And just like you [00:09:00] say, this is a very, just a different approach of when it come to entrepreneurship and also business. What was some of the biggest challenge that you faced during this process and how long did that process took you?

Jeff Tidball: One of the challenges with is the fact that it’s just for a very small acquisition like this one. My company was very small at the time. It’s still a small company, but it was very small at the time. Prolific games was a very small company. The kind of legal expertise that you need to do something like this is relatively expensive. How does it make sense to get that legal work done? And so we managed to come up with a creative solution to that, that was able to lower the prices in a reasonable way so that it didn’t overcome the entire thing. But it was a struggle to try figure out how is that gonna work? How are we gonna do grownup business on grade school pricing. You can work through that. But we often find in the tabletop game business among smaller companies that were put in that process all the time. If you’re gonna go to a trade show. [00:10:00] As Microsoft, you are going to be able to easily spend all kinds of money to buy tons of space on the exhibit hall floor. And when you’ve gotta truck all of your equipment in there, you’re just gonna pay a freight line to do it.

But at a small company, like the cost of paying drayage at the exhibit hall floor from the loading dock to your booth can be crippling. So it’s a lot of creative problem solving with the acquisition, it was the same creative problem solving that I face otherwise.

Jason Hsieh: I see. Thank you so much for sharing. And I want to transition to the next part of our interview to talk about the existing ball game line that you already have. And I know you have some game that you can also share.

What would you say out of your catalog, which one is the best seller and what do you think is the reason behind it? And if you can show like the actual copy that would be great.

Jeff Tidball: So the bestselling game in the catalog today is for sure Flapjacks and Sasquatches, which is the key game that came along with the prolific games thing. This is essentially the game that makes that entire prolific catalog most attractive. And this is a [00:11:00] very simple card game about being a lumberjack and cutting down trees. And honestly before I started to seriously explore the idea of buying prolific games. It was not necessarily a game that I personally took all that seriously because it was not very similar to the kinds of games that Atlas made. It was not very similar to the kinds of games that I was most personally interested in playing. And it was really, it transformed part of my take about the entire tabletop gaming business when.

Obviously, one of the first things that I did after this became a serious thing to consider was I sat down and played all of those games and I played them with different people. A had a really good time playing them. And so then I had to start to unpack what is it that I liked about these games? And furthermore, one of the things that had made me take it seriously was Bill and John were like, look, we’ve been selling this game for 10 or 12 years, or however many at the point. These Amazon ratings that we have accumulated over time are real, real good. This is a 4.7 game over 10 or 12 years. You have to take that seriously, whatever you think [00:12:00] about that game, right? If somebody came to me and told me that Candyland is a 80 year seller on Amazon and it’s a 5.7 and here’s an opportunity to acquire that, whatever I think of Candyland, someone likes it for some reason, and I gotta figure out why. And that really opened my mind to the way people have fun with their friends and families playing games. And how that is one of the very most important things about those games is the way that people have fun with it. Rather than what is the, I don’t know, like college level artistic merit of a game from a game design process.

There’s obviously a big difference between a movie that wins an Oscar and a movie that comes out on Netflix that they want everybody to watch that weekend. And so that was very useful for me and I use that understanding all the time in the business now. And it really informs my thinking about it.

I see. If that makes [00:13:00] sense.

Jason Hsieh: Yeah, that makes sense. And since you mentioned about Amazon, I always want to, I also want to transition to talking about Amazon a little bit because that they are like the biggest 11 in the room. When you talk about, especially online sales, because they, pretty much dominate the US marketplace when you come to e e-commerce.

I, of course we also have been working with your team with what we what, we do here at Toy Launch. Can you also share with our audience, like what was going on in your business that caused you to consider working with a team like ours to help you with digital marketing effort on Amazon?

Jeff Tidball: Yeah. So I had worked with another. Kind of Amazon partner in a previous year, and that process had not necessarily been very smooth. And so I had decided that it was gonna be necessary for me to just try to learn all of that stuff myself. Okay. So I could [00:14:00] essentially do it on my own, but as a very tiny business that proved.

Extremely difficult, right? There are so many things as an entrepreneur that you’ve gotta be doing all the time. Unless you’ve got a gigantic pit of money out in your backyard you’ve just gotta try to, you’ve gotta try to figure out what to do if you can’t just hire as many people as you need. So I knew that there was something there.

Because the hor, the historical sales that we see on Amazon, we did see really big holiday sales that year. I had worked with this other company. So I knew that there was very high potential there. I spent a few months digging into it myself and further satisfying myself of the idea that there was something there that could be done, I just didn’t necessarily have time to do it all myself.

Jason Hsieh: Yeah.

Jeff Tidball: And so it was a good time to meet up with you and to try to figure out if I could hand over a bunch of those pieces to somebody else, bring in somebody else’s expertise, but do it from a better position of knowledge [00:15:00] myself. So that I could have more understanding of how and why it was working, and also use that as an opportunity to educate myself further.

That was one of the things that I thought was really valuable about our early conversations is your willingness to say, look, all of this work that we’re gonna do is gonna be completely open to you. You’re gonna be able to use this as a learning springboard for the future. We’re not trying to attach ourselves like a parasite to your next 20 years of burning on Amazon. And so that is something that I felt real good about.

Jason Hsieh: How was the business goal doing like before you work with our team and what was some of the result that you’re seeing after we implement a lot of the changes? Of course, we’re still in the middle of launching a lot of the new product for you right now.

Jeff Tidball: We’re seeing pretty good return on the advertising that we’re doing. Honestly, one of the things that had made our Amazon business very up and down in the past is that we would go outta stock of our key games sometimes for months and months at a time. And that was not necessarily as much about anything else. It’s just [00:16:00] our predicting what our needs were going to be, but then also predicting what the supply chain was gonna look like around those times. And then also predicting what it was gonna take us to be able to. So one of the things that I did when I first brought Flapjacks and Sasquatch on from prolific was that I rewrote all of the rules and did a whole bunch of work on the packaging and changed up some of the cards.So I knew that I wanted to do that. And I knew that their inventory was about to run out, but I could just only revise that stuff so fast, and that led to a inappropriately long stock outage. That was very frustrating, but there was just nothing for it. I didn’t wanna send back a game that I knew was not easily improved. And so I guess that’s relatively further back in the past. We actually wound up with this last reprint. It arrived at my warehouse on the same day that I sold the very last copy to one of my web store mail order customers. ideally, we would’ve had more copy is sitting in FBA at that time, but it was very close this time [00:17:00] around. So that inventory management is gonna continue to be something that I need to work hard on.

Jason Hsieh: For sure. And that’s something obviously our team will also partner with you alongside.

And how has that impact your business since with all the new implementation that we have done on your Amazon account? Like you noticed on your end as far as revenue and also streamline some of your operation.

Jeff Tidball: Yeah, it’s been nice to have kind of somebody else driving that forward. One of the things that I’m sure, as I have been not particularly good at is reviewing all of the new creative as fast as it comes in, because you can obviously only push it out as fast as I can say, yes, this is correct, or like I’m the person who knows the most about the brand. So to be able to review some page copy and say this is not quite true about this game. We need to put it in another way so that customers are not confused. But that back and forth has been extremely productive. Because I feel like you have the expertise of how is this game best positioned for an Amazon [00:18:00] marketplace? Whereas I spend a lot of my time talking about these games either to experience tabletop gamers, so I talk about it for them in a very specific way or to store owners. So I talk about it to them in a very specific way. And both of those ways are very different than the way that you would optimize it for an Amazon search or talk about it to someone who is not necessarily an extremely experienced game player, right? We can’t use technical terms very much or even middling technical terms, like what’s a push your luck game? An average person off the street does not necessarily understand that term, even though they played games like that and enjoy them.

Jason Hsieh: For sure, also with your catalog, there’s a lot of different, like variations and a lot of different product we’re also working on. And of course getting that information correct and also highlighted in a way that people can understand it, like really quickly. Especially for Amazon, because people have very short attentions span on Amazon, right when they’re shopping and looking through the [00:19:00] images and looking through the copy. That’s one thing that we really enjoyed working with you and your team on making sure we can get that kind of information correct and that point across to the potential customer as well.

That being said any other project that you’re working on into 2025 and beyond?

Jeff Tidball: Man, we’ve got a list of I think maybe eight or 10 or maybe even 12 different games that are in our development pipeline. The way kind of the tabletop game business works is a little bit like the way the like novel publishing business works.

I don’t know if this is the way it’s done in kind of toy making or not, but most of the games that I publish are designed by someone else who comes up with the idea and tests it out, and then goes around to different publishers trying to sell it the same way that a novelist might write a novel and then bring it around to different publishers to try to get that done. So i’ve got a lot of different designs that I have contracted with designers to publish where we’re still just working on them, making changes, developing them. We have [00:20:00] new expansions for flapjacks and Sasquatches that we want to do. We have a new expansion for the flapjacks and Sasquatches dice game that we wanna do. That’s another thing that we did last year we released a DICE game

Jason Hsieh: Oh yeah.

Jeff Tidball: To extend the Flapjacks and Sasquatch brand and we had did a bunch of other lumberjack games as well. So we have more of those things that we wanna do that are just in various states of development. The thing that is going on right now, honestly, is that a bunch of my consulting clients have completely blown up. And so my entire. First quarter is gonna be a lot of my time working on other people’s companies and trying to juggle all and spin all the plates on my own. So there’s lots of, tons of projects that I wanna do looking forward into 2025. And they’re not necessarily all as fully baked as I would want them to be because my time’s divided as I’m sure tons of other people know who also have small businesses that are either still working on consulting or have two or three businesses they’re running at the same time. Or they’re trying to [00:21:00] spin those up on their nights and weekends while they have another full-time job. I think that’s pretty common.

Jason Hsieh: I can relate to that entrepreneurial

Jeff Tidball: situation.

Jason Hsieh: I can totally relate to that because that’s my position running a few businesses. try to juggle everything and make sure everything can stay in the air

Jeff Tidball: and the kinds of people who want to do entrepreneurial businesses. Like most of them do not only have one idea. Do you know what I mean?

Jason Hsieh: Yes. We tend to be the visionaries and try to come up with different ideas and really try to also get that push over the finish line as well. And since you mentioned about your consulting you might also sharing a little bit about what do you do for other people for consulting as well?

Jeff Tidball: Yeah, sure. Because I’ve been in this tabletop game business for so long, I’ve seen lots of different ways of doing business, and I’ve done lots of kind of different tasks. I started out in game design. I’ve done tons of writing, rule book writing, marketing, writing, things like that. I’ve been a project [00:22:00] manager. I’ve been an executive at different publishing companies. So a lot of what I do now is consulting on creative process in tabletop games. So like how do you make sure that if you’ve got a Kickstarter that kickstarted six different games in 20 stretch goals how are you gonna make sure that comes out on time? How are you gonna use the assets at your company and make sure that when the game designers get done with it, that information is passed to the graphic designers in an orderly fashion and at the level of quality where you don’t have to redo it three more times because the graphic designers didn’t understand all of the information that they needed to understand. So because I’ve been involved in those creative operations, like all the way from the blue sky brainstorming at the front of a project to receiving it from the printer, after you work with them, I’m in a real good position to offer advice.

All of those different stages. So that’s a lot of the work that I do with different [00:23:00] companies. I also my original training was I have an English major and then I’ve got a graduate degree in screenwriting. Lots of writing, and so I’m in a very good position as someone who understands game mechanics, but also the technical details of writing of just sitting down and writing rule books for people so that they’re very easy to understand and people can get to the fun right away. So that’s, a more discreet chunk of task that I can like parachute in and do for one company and then come back out again.

Jason Hsieh: I see. Yeah, that’s definitely a very unique skillset and I think that especially for the board game in market, that rule book and the mechanism on how the rule is being played and the interactiveness between the players and also the pace, how fast the game is going is all very important to make sure we keep the player engaged and they actually wanna come back and play it again. Otherwise they play one and they don’t like it and they don’t play it over again.

Jeff Tidball: Yeah. And it’s especially true. Because the ideal circumstances that [00:24:00] no one ever has to pick up that rule book, right? What you would really want is for that thing to not even exist. But somehow people have to learn it. And the thing that we sometimes say is the designer doesn’t come in the box. He can’t pop out and tell you how to play it. And so we’re left with the situation where there’s gotta be a rule book or like a video to support it or something like that. I learned a lot from a guy named Luke Peter Schmidt. When he was consulting for Spin Master and I was working for him. We were working on the gon toy, the little the little robot spheres that pop open and become robots. And he would talk to me at great length about how nobody wants to read this rule book. Assume that you have one sentence to tell them what to do and they will not listen to any of this. Jeff, you’ve written tons and tons of beautiful stuff and we can’t have any of it ’cause no one wants to read this garbage. How can we communicate to the people how to play this game without telling them anything? Or if you’ve got one image, what could you tell them? ‘Cause that’s not something that if you write this stuff. [00:25:00] You wanna believe that everybody’s gonna read it in great detail

Jason Hsieh: read it yeah. That’s not true. Yeah.

Jeff Tidball: But at the end of the day, no one cares about that. You’re right. That’s not true at all. So how are you gonna communicate this stuff? Do the best you can to make something that no one wants to read. Enjoyable and effective. Not easy. Not easy.

Jason Hsieh: Yeah. Definitely not easy. That’s, but that’s also very important component do it as well. And one thing I always like very interesting, how are you currently doing the play testing process?

Jeff Tidball: Two different ways. One of them, this was the smartest thing that I did when I left fantasy flight games in 2009, was I started up a weekly play test group and like just found some very reliable people who are willing to meet with me every week and just sit down and play, test the things that I was working on. And that group actually stayed in place for nearly a decade. eventually came apart during the pandemic when we could not meet in person anymore. But just the fact of having a regular time when I was gonna sit down with people that I knew pretty well and that developed a good [00:26:00] rapport with who were willing to like, test out things that were half baked or discuss things that were even just ideas.

So having a regular group like that I think is really key. Once we were able to play back in person again, I wound up starting a different group with some other local publishers here. So we meet every other week now. But it’s with a group of people who are all also publishers and we play each other’s designs. We use that group to evaluate prototype submissions. So part of the answer to that is like having a group of people who have a professional mindset about publishing games so that they can offer feedback on a higher level and kind of get to key issues instead of offering a I like this. I didn’t like that. Take that back and do what you will with it. The other thing that I do is there’s a series of professional development conventions called profield here in the Midwest.

Jason Hsieh: Oh, yes, I heard that. Yes. Uhhuh

Jeff Tidball: That are annual events, in a series of cities. So there’s one in Minnesota, there’s a another one in Minnesota called the Twin Cities One, [00:27:00] but there’s one in Madison. There’s one in Ann Arbor, Indianapolis, Chicago. And going to those is an opportunity to bring designs and workshop them very aggressively with other designers. There aren’t very many people there who are just civilians, and I find those very useful in getting good feedback.

Once a game gets really close to being done, I try to play it with lots and lots of different people. One of the kind of weak suits of my own situation is that I’m not able to do a ton of kind of blind feedback with people who are less gamery. Like I don’t have the budget to hire somebody to pluck random people out of a mall and put them at a table with the thing like the way that you like run a focus group for a toy or the way that Mattel might pursue that question, right? They drop $30,000 and hire somebody to stand in a mall with a clipboard and bring people to the back room and say, here’s our game. Do you like it? And like video record them [00:28:00] interacting with it or whatever. The way I’m able to make up for that is essentially just the 30 years of experience selling games to people. I’ve got a reasonably good idea about what’s gonna work with people based on just past experience. So I supplement with past experience, the feedback that I’m getting from playing a lot of this stuff in person in a professional setting like that.

Jason Hsieh: I see. Thank you for sharing that. And the other thing I noticed and interviewing so many people in the board game or tabletop game industry, that’s usually like two route that people decide to do either like you mentioned earlier, pitching to other publishing company and goes through the licensing route and the second route is, sell publishing just what you did, either buying other businesses, buying other brand, or launch your own line of tabletop games.

Based on your experiences, what are some of the pros and cons and what make you make that decision of going to sell publishing route?

Jeff Tidball: Yeah so I’ve done both. I spent a lot of time doing freelance designs or being hired to work on someone else’s line. So I was in role [00:29:00] playing games for a long time earlier in my career. And there people would have a line of games and they would need to hire someone else to write an expansion for their games. So I did a lot of work like that. And then I did a lot of, inventing my own designs and trying to find other publishers. This iteration of my company is the first time I’ve done it where I’ve got these designs and I’m gonna publish them myself. And honestly, yeah, I think it was, it’s very valuable to do those different things. ‘Cause now I really understand these projects from everybody’s perspective. And it makes it a lot easier to talk to a game designer. And listen to a pitch from a position of understanding what their concerns are, right? A lot of them are concerned that a publisher is going to buy their idea and then make it stupid, and they don’t want it’s gonna have their name on the front of it, but that’s a real concern that they’ve got. They’re gonna make some decision because they’ve played games that are bad, and so they’re concerned that a publisher is gonna make their game bad and it’s gonna have their thing on it. So like just talking to them and saying [00:30:00] I like this about this game. I like that about this game. I would love to work with you.

Our contract is gonna say that I have the final authority on what the game looks like when it comes out. ’cause that’s just a necessity from a legal standpoint. But as we work together, what you’re going to come to understand is that we are gonna publish a game that we both agree is the best game, you are free to go talk to the 50 other game designers I have worked with in my career and ask them if that was true about the process when I worked with them. And so that part of having a reputation is the ability to say that and that can give them a fair amount of confidence. So that’s something that has really benefited from me doing all the different parts of this. In terms of whether it’s better or what are the advantages and disadvantages of selling your design to others versus being a publisher that really comes down to like self-knowledge or where are you in your career and what do you wanna be doing with your life at this time? I was in a meeting earlier today. Discussion got [00:31:00] around to the question of whether you should own a house or rent a house. There’s lots of pros and cons to that. But the final answer to that really depends on what can you live with. At one point in time, my family relocated to Kansas City because I got a job there. And it wasn’t necessarily clear how long are we gonna live there? Or even if we’re gonna live there for the long term, do we wanna rent for a while and then buy a house after we’ve been in that market for a while? But we looked at some rental houses and they’re fine houses, but at the end of the day, I just could not bring myself to the idea that if I wanna paint the walls, I gotta go ask somebody else and they’re gonna say no. And then I just gotta live with these terrible walls. I’m just not, it turns out that I’m not a person who is easily able to live with other people telling me what to do.

Jason Hsieh: Yeah.

Jeff Tidball: If you are the kind of person who can make a passionate case for what you want, but at the end of the day, you’re fine with someone else being the decider. I think that you’ll probably be happier not owning the business because there’s a [00:32:00] lot of hassle that comes with owning the business. You’re the one who’s gotta file the taxes. You’re the one who’s gotta pay the accountant. You’re the one who’s gotta just care about a bunch of stuff that nobody cares about and it’s hard.

Jason Hsieh: Yeah.

Jeff Tidball: The benefit that you get is you get to be in control of it, and you get to make the decisions, so deciding based on whether you’re the kind of person who wants that role is the key thing.

Jason Hsieh: For sure. For sure. Yeah. Thank you for sharing all the different, valuable insights in today’s interview and as well writing down.

If you have to just share one piece of advice with someone that’s just getting started inside of the toy and the board game industry, what would that be?

Jeff Tidball: I think it would be to just start doing it right away. I generalized this from some screenwriting advice that I got when I was in the film program at USC and somebody said, the advantage of screenwriting. As opposed to being a director or a cinematographer or any of those other pieces, is that no one can stop you from writing a screenplay. Like literally all you have to do is sit at your [00:33:00] desk with your computer and write a screenplay if you wanna be a director. You’re outta luck. You gotta have actors, somebody’s gotta pay them. You’ve gotta have a script already. You’ve gotta have somebody else to run a camera. Like the screenwriting is the only part of making a film that you don’t need anyone’s permission to do. And by the same token, if you want to be a game designer or a toy inventor. There’s parts down the road bringing it to market is a different thing, but if you want to be a game designer or a toy inventor, you can literally just sit at your table and start doing it and no one can stop you from doing it.

And that process is a great way to find out if you like it before you quit your job or spend a ton of money on it or whatever. You can just learn that. And the sort of culture around game design now is even such that like you can build a prototype of your thing. You can actually make it look very nice. You can 3D print components. You can get clip art, you can build it in free software. You can bring it to proto spiel events and play it with other [00:34:00] designers, and you can learn a lot about whether you like that or whether you’re any good at it. Before you have spent anything other than your time on it. And also throughout that entire process, you’ll get good at it or you’ll improve your skills at it. It’s not like you’re even if that design that you did first never gets published, you didn’t waste your time ’cause you got better at it. So that’s the thing that I tell game design students. Or people who are thinking about whether they want to make a career transition, I just tell ’em, look, start designing games. There’s a ton of resources. All of the tools that you need, have free versions. Just start doing it.

Jason Hsieh: It is very important to just start taking action instead of sitting on the sideline and waiting and evaluating and not taking any step further. So yes, thank you so much for sharing that.

And for our listeners, thank you again for tuning into today’s episode of Toy Business Unbox podcast. We hope you have enjoyed the conversation and find it insightful and inspiring. If you like what you have heard, be sure to subscribe to our podcast on your favorite platform, so you never miss an episode.

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Join the conversation and connect with us on social media using hashtag #ToyBusinessUnboxed and would love to hear your feedback and suggestion for a future episode. Until next time, keep innovating, keep creating, keep bringing joys to toys. This is Jason Hsieh signing off on the Toy Business Unbox Podcast and we’ll see you in the next episode.