Inventory

I don't own a business, but I've got to think one of the biggest sources of tension would be inventory (or what is now more sophistically called supply-chain management).

In preparation for our 2013 series called "The Story", the publishers offered us a great deal on the books.  But we had to buy the books in cases and they had to be bought in November- two months before we would be launching the series.  Buying the books in cases allowed us to pass on the great savings to our members and attenders and also allow us to subsidize books for people who purchased multiple copies, couldn't afford the books, etc.  So we looked through our database, consulted with our children's and youth directors on their best guesses, and came up with a number of cases for each book (there's different books for adults, teens, older kids, younger kids, etc).

We ran out of the popular hard cover pre-school and younger elementary books a few weeks ago.

I could have bought another case- though not at as great of a price- or use my Amazon account and order the copies I need and have them here in 2 days with no additional cost.

I went with the Amazon option because I didn't want to get stuck with extra books.

Well, we're out of those same books . . . again!

And we only have 6 copies of the adult version left . . .