How to Create a DM For Hire Service for D&D (Part 2)

Transcript: How to Create a DM For Hire Service for D&D (Part 2)

Part 1 can be found here: How to Create a DM For Hire Service for D&D (Part 1)

We’re getting back into building your DM For Hire Service. This is part two of three total parts. If you remember, when we talked about building your service, this is something that we can imagine as a blueprint. We are pre-planning how we’re going to ensure that our players come back for additional sessions with us. We want to create a few things to make sure that we have a baseline, as we talked about in Part 1. We must have a baseline of how we want to build everything. So that we will have a solid foundation for starting your DM For Hire business. This is gonna be a first pass, or your first draft, we’re just gonna jump in and just start building some things.

Let’s review what we talked about in Part 1.

Obviously, the end goal is to get ideal clients to come through to our paid game sessions. We do that by presenting an irresistible offer, and we want to do that without compromising our values or things we care about.

If you recall from Part 1 we also talked about the struggles. There are three main struggles that we talked about.

• The first struggle was around what elements are we supposed to be including. That was Part 1 of this series, where we’re building all the elements of our DM For Hire service. That is very important because it’s stuff that you care about. When you are doing something you care about, and having fun with it, your players at the table are going to see that and they’re going to enjoy themselves a whole lot more as well.

• The second struggle was having no consistent experience. That’s the second struggle that we talked about when we want to build a DM For Hire service. That’s the one we’re gonna talk about today, we’re gonna be covering that struggle.

• The third and last struggle is a lack of confidence in what to charge for our DM services. We’ll go over that in the next post of the series, in Part 3.

Recall our goals for creating a DM For Hire service.

We want you to go from being unsure about elements of the offer, no consistent experience for both ourselves and for our players (we’ll cover that here in Part 2) and lack of confidence in what to charge (covered in the Part 3). The end goal is to have the elements that bring the best of what we can possibly have in a game for our players, so they give us really raving reviews and come back for more. Lastly we’re going to make sure that we get confidence around what we’re going to charge.

We have a “Build Your Service” Action List. In Part 1 we talked about the how to determine what you want to add what elements you want to put into your into your offer. We talked about several categories, there was a Service category, what kind of services can we give to our, to our ideal players? What kind of Software we’re going to use, there’s a lot of things behind that a lot of options and choices want to make? What kind of Resources can we offer?

Today, let’s talk about creating working procedures.

When you are building a DM For Hire Service, I want you to make sure that you create the most amazing experience that anyone has ever seen when they come to your table. That’s that’s the ideal. That’s what you want to try to shoot for. As a DM for hire you want to do everything in your power to convey a level of professionalism, because that’s what this is all about. If you do that, your paying players will notice and they’re going to tell all their friends and then they’re going to become a regular at your game table. That’s what you want. That should be your goal.

In order to do that and keep everything free from chaos and clutter, I want you to start thinking about how to assemble a series of standard working procedures. What this is going to do is generate quality and consistency with every session. It’s gonna help you feel like you’re in control. You won’t have this chaos going on, and all this overwhelm, and disorganization all over the place. If you treat this opportunity like a real business, then that’s what it becomes. It becomes a real business that you can be proud of.

What is it working procedure?

Let me start by giving an example of what a working procedure is. You see I used to own a game shop that I built about five years ago. I ended up losing it to COVID, but that’s a whole different story. Sadly, I had to close the store for good. When I was running that game shop, I started a working procedure with my staff. Okay, not just one working procedure, working procedures around every aspect of the business. I don’t just mean we thought about it and agreed upon what working procedures should be. We took the time to create actual documents. It sounds like a tedious task, but keep in mind you’re only doing this deep work once.

We took the time to actually write out the documents, and we detailed step by step instructions for each of the areas of the business. Those could be a bullet point list, it could be a narrative format, or whichever way is easiest to convey what needs to be done for each task. So whether it was handling customer service at the register, or if it was like setting up tables for a magic tournament, or how to handle incoming inventory, we had working procedures for all these things. The point here is that we, we made sure to cover 95% of all possible tasks that could be handled on a day to day basis.

You’ve got to think to yourself, “What are some things that you are going to have to be doing in this business on a regular basis?”

If you write a document around those things, it will be consistent every time. For your DM For Hire service, you want to create working procedures as documents. Maybe you create it as a narrative format, or some kind of step by step on how you are going to do certain things.

First, let’s say that a working procedure is going to be a living document, which means it’s definitely going to change over time, because you’re going to you’re going to tweak it and refine it. Once you get that process locked in, it will be more of a semi-permanent thing. It might change every month instead of every week. Maybe it ends up only being once a year when you make some changes to it.

The best way to create and maintain one of these working procedure documents

Use Google Docs which is a free tool, everybody has access to it. You just create a document in in the cloud up on Google Docs. What’s cool about that is now you can access it from any device. So if you’re somewhere where you don’t have a laptop, or maybe you just have your phone, you can open it up on your phone and review it and or edit it or whatever else you need to do. But you will always have the latest version of that docment.

For my game shop, I created a working procedures. For example, when a customer purchases a ticket to one of our D&D or Magic the Gathering events, right. I had another working procedure for when new inventory was delivered, and one for how to close down the store at the end of the night.

What are some areas that you can think of that need a working procedure around running paid D&D sessions?

That’s kind of important, right? Here are a few ideas that I can think of. I’m sure that if you were to think about how you want to run your DM For Hire service, you will come up with a whole bunch of different ones.

• Can you create a work or procedure around how to get the word out about your paid sessions? In other words, marketing. What is your what is your plan around marketing? Do you have a certain procedure that you want to do around that? Every Monday are you going to go do some online posting? What does that what does that post format look like? Marketing is a whole different topic and we’ll go over that in another time. But you always want to have a certain format for marketing. It’s going to have a certain structure to it. So you’ll probably want to lay that out in a working procedure.

• What about steps you need to take when you’re onboarding new players? They can certainly use some handouts from you or some sheets. Perhaps they go over some ground rules or expectations that they can see. Maybe you email them something, with a structure that you send to all your new people. Or maybe some kind of text that you want to send them to keep them up to date on things.

• What would you do if you had some steps for preparing every paid session? Do you have a procedure or a structure or some kind of step by step that you’d want to make sure that you’re running through? What about the things you need in order to to build a new adventure? Maybe it’s because your service has a group who wants a specific type of adventure? Do you have a working procedure around that?

• What about providing character creation sessions? What about the things that need to be covered with one of those sessions when you’re helping a player create a character? If that’s a new person, then maybe it’s it’s got a different working procedure. Rather than somebody who already knows what they’re doing and you’re just doing an audit of their character sheet

What can’t be missed? What what are some things that could be missed or forgotten?

That’s where you got to make sure you’re writing it all down and documenting it. Because in the moment, when you’re trying to think of everything, you’re gonna end up forgetting things. You’ll say: “I wish I remembered XYZ.”. As you can see, there are plenty of areas where you can build out working procedures. With them you will be able to prevent overwhelm and feel secure knowing you’re organized. Those are just some examples I gave, you can come up with a whole bunch of more that are specific to you.

Imagine having a way to remind yourself the best way to do something.

Most folks don’t write anything down and they spend mental energy just simply wading through the chaos and the clutter in their mind just to try to get to the details. They try and work on not forgetting certain things. Here’s an example. Have you ever noticed that when you don’t write down a to do list, and you just try to keep it in your head it kind of feels like a lot of weight, right? It feels like there’s this big list. It’s filled with so many things and you’re worried about. All the things you’ve got to get done, but you’re worried about what things you might forget.

I remember at one time, when I was just being too lazy to write down my to do list.

Instead I would think what are the top three things I needed to do. I would come up with ways to help me remember. What are the top three things I’ve got to remember to do today? Then I tried to wrack my brain to make sure I remembered them. Most folks usually do that, too. But if you take a few short minutes to write down the to do list, instead of trying to keep it in your head, all of a sudden, it doesn’t seem so daunting anymore.

You look at the list and realize it wasn’t actually as big as you were making it out to be in your head. That’s because as humans, you know, it’s human nature, we tend to like loop through scenarios in our head. Like a list we loop through them, and ends up feeling like this big infinite circle that never ends. When you write it down, it’s a finite thing from beginning to end. It usually ends up ends feeling in your head much bigger than it really is. When you have something that you’ve written down in an organized way, it’s very freeing. You feel so much more confident about moving forward with things and then you’re not so flustered all the time.

This is what a working procedure is going to do for you.

I want you to remember, don’t underestimate the power that a working procedure can bring to you, it will get rid of so much chaos, it will help with organization, it will present you as a professional. There’s just so many reasons why you’d want to do it. So let’s review again. What what Okay, so creating a procedure, right, so this is this is just one action that we’re going to take here in our build your service section, right.

Building your service is just one step in a clear nine step roadmap. We’ve got these three actions that we’ve been talking about in this series. The first is building the elements of your of your offer. The second action is what we talked about today, which is working procedures. In the next post I’m going to go over the third action, is going to be around building our offer, which are the pieces of the offer that we’re going to put in a paid game listing so that players know what to expect.

Before I sign off.

I want to invtie you to an upcoming five day workshop in about a month or so. If that’s something that you’re interested in, go ahead and click here: https://go.dungeonmavericks.com/3stepdmpack. It will take you to a page where you will be able to grab our free download for the “3 Step DM Adventure Pack”, which is going to be a bunch of worksheets that you’ll be able to use for prepping your next adventure.

After the download button, when you scroll to the bottom, there’ll be a yellow section where you can sign up to be notified when the challenge is open for registration. So that being said, we are done with the second action of our Build Your Service step, and hopefully some of that was useful to you. If you didn’t already see part one, go back and take a look at that. I will see you for the next post in Part 3 of this series. Have a great week!