Perhaps I should preface this by saying I’m not much of a businessperson. Which is to say, I’m only as good a businessperson as I am a competitive (important adjective here) and competent Pokémon player. Which is also to say, I’m not a great competitive Pokémon player. Not bad, just really not good. And perhaps by design.

So what does any of this mean? There’s a lot of expositional leg work I should be doing here as an essayist—What is Pokémon? What does Pokémon have to do with any sort of business savvy? And what is Min-Maxing?

The first of these three questions is, arguably, dumb. You know what Pokémon is in the year of our Lord 2023. Pokémon is the highest-grossing media franchise in the world since the first two games Red & Green were published in Japan in 1996. The Pokémon Company exceeds its closest competitor, Disney, by nearly 25b in gross revenue. There is your Pokéxposition. If you remain unfamiliar with Pokémon, you’ll have to forgive my disdain for your intellectual poverty and your seeming inability to remain curious about the shifting tectonics of an ever-confounding global zeitgeist. While the former run-on sentence suggests otherwise, I just don’t have the time to hold your hand through this. I’m a businessperson, after all. However mediocre, time is money bebe.

Pokémon, from its humble beginnings, was a success for a number of reasons. Marketing this zoologically fascinating world of husbandry and fictional animal-fighting with a popular animé and merchandizing up the wazoo did wonders for the brand. But, the game itself was a success among RPGamers because it offered a surprising amount of depth. Players could not only choose to curate their experience (complete the adventure? catch ‘em all? dominate your friends in competitive play? collect and train your favorites?), they could also choose how deep that experience would be. See, even in the original game, which offered comparatively little in the way of discernible Pokémetrics, there were hidden values. Why, for example, was my Rare-Candy-Coddled, level 100 Blastoise comparatively (and competitively) less powerful than other level 100 Blastoises?

It was because my Blastoise had been spoiled with Rare Candies (an item that increases a Pokémon’s level without any effort at all). All along I had taken for granted two things: Effort Values (gained from training in battle) and Determinant or Individual Values (akin to a Pokémon’s implicit genetic makeup). Elsewhere and elsewhen I wrote about my obsessive quest to breed and hatch a shiny Greninja with near perfect Individual Values and Min-Maxed Effort Values (and the coveted hidden ability Protean). Effort Values and Individual Values, when carefully attuned, make the difference between a mediocre Pokémon and a competitively viable Pokémon. You cannot succeed in the modern meta-game without strategy and a team of Pokémon who’ve been Min-Maxed to peak performance—all of which, in the meta-game, constitutes arrived-at best practice. Because, of course, you wanna be / the very best / like no one ever was…

So what is Min-Maxing? If you don’t already know, I’m sure you have some inkling of what it means. Min-Maxing (or Minimaxing) in its broadest sense is an applied method or decision rule for minimizing losses in a worst case scenario (max loss scenario). It’s the kind of choice or plan that would allow one to stanch a wound so that one isn’t bled out (if you’ll pardon the visceral metaphor).

In role playing parlance, min-maxing is “the character-building strategy of maximizing a specific desirable ability, skill, or other power of a character and minimizing everything else, seen as undesirable. The result is a [Pokémon] who is excessively powerful in one particular way, but exceedingly weak in others.”

In the case of the above Greninja, with its timid nature, Speed and Special Attack were maxed out, while Attack was minimized. That might seem a bit confusing if you’re looking at the numbers. Defense and Special Defense are the lowest stats on the build only because Greninja’s particular stat balance (his inherent capacities, let’s say) does not favor defensive stats. I nevertheless sought to bolster his defenses (more than his attack stat) because every little bit of defense helps my special sweeper in a pinch (and the attack stat is generally useless if one relies exclusively on special attack). In other words, my Legba is a specialist. He didn’t have to be good at everything, he just had to be exceptional in a few key ways.

The idea was to breed and train a Pokémon that was both aesthetically special (shiny/dimorphic black variant of Greninja’s typical royal blue coloration) and competitively viable. And yes, my Greninja was/is an extremely effective special sweeper. Bit of a glass cannon. But, he strikes first and often hardest.

For those who play Pokémon competitively, min-maxing has to happen on a larger scale (more than just one gorgeous Greninja). One would need a well-balanced team, full of ‘roided out Pokémon, to even dip a toe in the cold, cruel waters of the metagame and expect any traction. Unless one is given to cheating, min-maxing even just one Pokémon requires a significant investment of time and attention. It’s a grind. In fact, it requires the kind of time and attention most adults can’t afford to give because most adults are living a different sort of grind, where the stakes are one’s livelihood.

The essential thing to understand for a business owner (which is not quite the same as an “entrepreneur”) is how to maximize one’s profit margins. This could be said of any person or thing imbricated in capital generation. You want more coming in than going out. You want the best deals on the most in-demand items, titles, goods, etc. And all of this requires attention to detail, negotiating, organizing, pushing for more beneficial terms, analyzing and min-maxing those small costs, like shipping fees, that cut into one’s GMROI (gross margin return on investment).

This is, without a doubt, a requirement for any business owner—and especially for retail. The minutia of one’s transactions matter because, yes, every penny counts. In fact, this aspect of running a business is so important it has a name: good book keeping (and accounting). For some, this is an addictive game (not unlike Pokémon). I have a taste for it, but it’s not my raison d’etre. Neither was having the most competitive build in Pokémon the major draw for me. I’m not so pressed.

I was rather interested in the para-social/fantastical elements of the game. It’s the simulation of an adventure that I couldn’t have experienced in real-terms that draws me into any role-playing game. Nothing attracts me more than a story, a side-quest, something gleaming on the horizon. While I find some inherent joy in balancing numbers and shaving costs/stats, it’s still a forest for the trees thing. The joy for me isn’t the devil in the details. It’s really the adventure. It’s cultivating key relationships, helping resolve problems in creative ways, offering support and finding kindness returned, and pursuing special things (instead of all the things).

I suppose in business, as in life and Pokémon, I’ve found a few strategies that seem to work well enough for me—even if they might not be industry standard best practice. What’s left for me is to enjoy the adventure as best I can without worrying too much about the min-maxing. A nice, clean spreadsheet is a thing of beauty. But without some semblance of purpose, meaning, or joy, it’s just another thing. I never want to lose sight of that.