Confessions of a Serial Entrepreneur – THINGS…Humour in a Box

Gina and I had a Christmas party every year since we were married many moons ago. Every year friends and family would come to spend a fun night at the Sherry house.  After most of the guests had gone and the crowd thinned, we would usually break out some board games for the remaining stragglers. On this one particular night, Tom introduced us to an informal game he had recently played that he said, “was a lot of fun”. We had so much fun that we laughed until we cried. We played with about eight people and somewhere in the middle of the laughter I said we should make this into a real game. If you have never played The Game of Things, it is a hilarious, easy-to-play, game that presents players with provocative topics and allows each player to say whatever comes to mind, such as “Things you shouldn’t say to your doctor”. The more out of character a player is the greater their chances of survival as other players will try to guess which response each wrote and knock the other player out of the round. What is funny is what people write on the cards. I have never played any game that has made me cry because I am laughing so hard. Here is one of my all-time favourite videos of someone unbeknownst to us playing the game – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DiVXznYi1hw

 

Tom, Ted (Tom and Ted are brothers) and I decided we were going to make this informal game into a real party game. But after the first three months the momentum stopped as our busy lives took over. Eight years later, I sent Ted an email suggesting that I was going to finish the game and wanted to know if Ted was interested. Ted was in Yemen at the time teaching and I was still in North Bay. Tom, living in Toronto joined the team when he was freed up from working on a movie. Over the next two years we corresponded through email and slowly the concept moved forward.

 

One of our biggest challenges was to find the right mix of topic cards. We started with about three to four thousand topics and narrowed it down to three hundred. At first the topic cards were either people, places or things but we quickly just made it things, as the “THINGS” topics were much more open ended. The topic had to be broad enough to solicit many different responses. If you can imagine we did this by email, through the use of a voting system. It took numerous iterations until we finally arrived at the final three hundred. When I look at them today, they still make me laugh.

 

Another challenge was choosing a name. At first, we decided on Who Said That? but the trademark and website were taken for this name. Then we chose Who Wrote This? Finally, after much deliberation and an all-day session the name THINGS…™ was chosen. Sometimes the smallest of things take a long time to figure out. It was staring us in the face all along because all the topics begin with the word THINGS but it took us a while to get there. The game box was also a challenge for the group. At first the group was looking at the traditional game box, then a plain cardboard box, finally our graphic artist introduced the concept of the wooden box. Sometimes you do not know what you want until someone shows it to you. However, I have always found you do know what you don’t like so don’t settle for the best of the don’t likes, wait and be patient and it will reveal itself. We all really liked the wooden box, it looked great. We thought it would last for generations, and it possesses that sort of cottage feeling.

 

We quickly found out that trying to get a board game manufactured in Canada (this is 25+ years ago) was a challenge. We found a company that would make wood boxes. A small company out of Quebec that made gift boxes, i.e. wine boxes. We found printers for the cards and another for the response and score pads. The response pads, score pads, instructions, were the easier items to print, while the topic cards were not, as they needed to be correlated and cut. We found a local printer that indicated he could do them, but when we got the samples back the cards were not the same size – imagine a playing deck of cards with slightly varied sizes. The decks also had errors in terms of correlations and in some cases, cards were duplicated or missing. I was not happy with the print job and asked the printer to fix them, but he just said he couldn’t. I always wondered why he took on the job in the first place. A reach in business is always good, but a reach too far can kill your company. We found a printer in Toronto that could handle the job and had them reprinted. We purchased golf pencils and die for the games. Yes, the first game had a dice that you would roll at the end of a turn and give bonus points to a response. If you rolled a six, points were awarded to the persons with the “silliest” answer. We did this to help encourage people to write some fun answers. After the first run of games, it became quickly apparent that the die was no longer needed. Here are the original six bonus point categories based on the roll of the die:

 

 

As you can see, other than normal the others were all similar.

 

Sometime in the fall of 2002 all the component pieces arrived in North Bay. We had enough components to make 500 games. So, we put my kids to work with us around the dining room table assembling the games. We gave our son Steven (who was 5 at the time) the task of counting out the correct number of pencils and put an elastic around them – 8 per game. Sami (8) and Max (10) helped Gina and I pack all the components into the games. It took us the whole part of an afternoon, but we packed and boxed 500 games.  If you bought one of those early games, they were made by love…and child labour…but they did seem to enjoy it. Wish we could have taken pictures of the assembly line but this was the time before smart phones – and we were all very focused on our task at hand.

 

From the time we decided to make the game, it took us two years before we had the first 500 games to sell. We launched at Gulliver’s Quality Books and Toys, located at 155 Main St. W., North Bay on December 7, 2002. We were all at the store (Tom, Ted and I) from 1:00 pm to 3:00 pm to introduce and answer questions about the game. We sold about 300 games between December 7th and Christmas as we were back at the store a few times. Compared to all the other businesses that I have built, this is the easiest product or service to sell. Quick pitch and then they buy it, no long-drawn-out sales cycle, no RFP’s, no hurriedness of providing a burger and fry – it was wonderful.

 

With the excitement of the Christmas season behind us we decided to go to the Toronto Toy Show in February 2003 to pick up more retailers. Still a long way to go to be successful but we seemed to be on the right track. Which brings us to the song for this blog From Little Things Big Things Grow by Paul Kelly from Australia. The song is about Vincent Lingiari and Indigenous stockmen. It tells the true story of the 1966 Wave Hill Walk-Off. Indigenous stockmen went on strike for fair pay. This small, eight-year strike sparked the national Aboriginal land rights movement. Change usually starts in little things.