alright excited for today's conversation we are talking beckett which i am excited about we have seen a lot of news and updates from the beckett brand this week and it caught my algorithm i've seen the posts i'm sure many of you out there have got the updates as well but now is a really good time to have a conversation about beckett and bringing on colin hudson is the general manager at beckett to talk about some of the updates his work a little bit about himself but without further ado colin welcome how are you yeah awesome thanks for having me brett really excited to be here yeah doing great it's been a a huge week really excited to finally have the cat out of the bag with our launch yesterday and just yeah really appreciative of the community and and just to see how the hobby has been reacting i i think overall it's been very positive so far the letting the cat out of the bag what what is maybe your mindset been just i it's hard to describe i'm sure all the work that has been done to get to where we're at today with news announcements and we'll get into a lot of that but what does it feel like for you just as the leader of the business to finally share what's been going on because i'm sure there's just been a ton of work behind the scenes up into this point yeah i mean it's it's a lot of things it's it's a relief it's an excitement it's you know as you could imagine we spend a lot of time ingesting all the feedback around the end to end experience what's working what's not working customer service the website quality control with the products so just everything every aspect of the brand and there's so much that we're working to change and while i would love if yesterday we were able to flip the switch and everything was changed all at once i think it's important that we start somewhere and i think the brand the logo this refresh i think that's a great first step because it starts to kind of introduce here's what we're standing here's what we stand for here's what this means as far as what's to come you know the kinda cheesy analogy i think about is like if we're writing the next chapter of the beckett story a chapter is not a bullet point a chapter is many paragraphs that unfold over many pages and so rather than a a one time huge launch where we're congratulating ourselves for being so awesome it's more of a hey this is exciting but there's a lot more to come and and so that's that's why i'm just excited to kind of turn the page on this new chapter and yeah get things going for everything else that's to come excited to dive into all the details i want to maybe before we get into the work and all the news and what's been going on at beckett maybe learn a little bit more about you i know you've done some you've had some conversations selectively you know and probably many listeners have heard that but maybe let's get to know you a little bit have you always been interested or been in collectibles you know through kinda childhood up until now maybe talk a little bit about your collecting experience yeah for sure so i i grew up in the dallas suburbs and my my dad was the epitome of the kid in the fifties and sixties that grew up with all the hot the the big baseball cards that at some point he lost or threw out along the way that became worth a lot of money and then the junk wax era got my brother and i into collecting so as you can see behind me in my kind of mount rushmore of all my tops baseball sets that we get each year for christmas dating back to the the mid eighties when we started that it's always been part of my life i i'm not the deepest card collector by any means but i am kind of a i guess i have to admit a little bit of a hoarder mentality where i just you know whether it's art different knickknacks and things i just enjoy kind of surrounding myself and having things that kind of reflect my interests my personality etcetera so it really wasn't until i joined collectors back in twenty twenty two that i had seen just how much the hobby had advanced you know for me it was always about completing a set really just kind of chasing cards for a specific player and just the unique variations in business models that's that it's evolved to to me has just been really impressive and and so when i joined collectors back in twenty twenty two that's where i went to some of my first card shows i started revisiting card shops and i've been been getting deeper into it i myself am a big golfer i love falling golf so i've been trying to chase some of the golf cards actually some of the some some live golf cards are some of my first cards that i got slapped with the the new logo and label and just in general just kind of thinking about like okay growing up as a texas rangers fan you know the nolan ryan cards rodriguez jose canseco you know some some of the players that kind of meant a lot to me as a kid that's fun to kind of reconnect with those as well as just seeing where things are going you know we have the dallas card show this weekend and it's always exciting just to kind of see the next generation of collectors that are out there hustling so it's it's really fun to be reconnected with the hobby and now playing this role within a at the helm of beckett so you mentioned you were you came via collectors working at collectors before taking your role at as gm of beckett maybe talk how did you get pulled into the collectors ecosystem maybe share a little bit about when you first got started at collectors what were some of the things that you were working on and responsible for yeah sure so in general my my background is in strategy and consulting and so in in my role on the corp dev and strategy team at collectors i would work really across all the brands so i spent a lot of time working with psa pcgs just kinda working on projects where it's really looking at you know whether there some growth opportunities are there categories that are attractive that we could expand into were there some partnership opportunities that we could develop so i worked very closely with gamestop standing up the integration where you can now go into so many gamestop stores across the country and submit cards to psa for grading i've also worked very closely with ebay in that partnership across the entire collectors surface area so i i i i know the car break grading business very well and yeah i was just very excited and felt very fortunate when i learned that we were in the process of pursuing this acquisition and had the opportunity to step into the role maybe what behind and i don't know what you wanna share or can share but just behind the scenes working in a role like that connecting with other businesses understanding how other businesses who are servicing the collectors work and operate i talk a lot about just how the infrastructure that supports the the sports card industry has just changed dramatically over the last three to five years when i got back into collecting it seemed very less sophisticated i don't wanna use the word corporate because i feel like that might get a a negative connotation but just it it didn't seem like it had the systems and structure backing it like it is today it sounds like just in your previous role you've kind of been behind the scenes analyzing and looking at that like how would you say just over the last you know few years the the industry as a whole has has transformed and evolved to kinda be in the spot where beckett can reintroduce itself mhmm it's amazing how much it's evolved in that short period of time i mean even think about within that window towards you know the immediately immediately post covid you had that boom in nfts and so everyone was pursuing the digital twins and infrastructure around that and so to see that happen and and now with with repacking and buying at scale there's just so many evolutions where it's really just kind of only expanding the surface area of the hobby and so then it's just interesting to think about well where all are all the growth opportunities and you look international and it's really interesting to see how each country is kind of at different stages of its adoption curve in terms of the hobby and how it looks to grading and secondary marketplaces and just the unique nuances of the mechanics of the hobby there so yeah it's been a very busy several years that i've been kind of having this crash course getting back into the hobby for sure i was making lunch before we started and i was actually listening to doctor beckett's podcast as i regularly do when i'm going on walks or eating lunch and it just kinda hit me that i was talking with you shortly after and it's you know i think it's for collectors you know there's such a you know weight behind the beckett name it's one of those things that's burned deep in the hearts and minds of so many collectors especially groups of collectors that are you know in their thirties forties and fifties who grew up reading beckett and then later on you know started grading their cards with beckett maybe like what what beckett represented to collectors during its peak was truly you know monumental like what what has it been like for you as the leader of the business to inherit a brand that at its peak was the probably most recognizable brand name in the space yeah i mean it's it's it's a unique responsibility and i i'm certainly a child of the nineties where i grew up with beckett magazines and just kind of would flip through and just try to imagine what my fortune of tops base baseball cards would be worth one day i think the unique challenge is balancing that nostalgia and that nostalgia specific to the magazine and how do we carry that forward to where beckett has evolved to today now that same magazine is still in production with the the online the with the price guide values for raw cards where it's you know there's still a healthy subscription to the magazine but at the same time we're seeing so much growth in the card space and so trying to not necessarily look backwards but instead honor the past honor the legacy i i think that's kind of that fine balance that we have to strike and that's where i i'm really excited with where we landed with this marketing rebrand because on the one hand it would be very easy to say okay let's start from scratch you know what's the back of the future look like but i think returning to a modernized version of the existing brand i think is kind of a a clean bridge between the two where it's kind of honoring that legacy honoring that past but in a way that's kind of really kinda giving permission for what we're doing going forward what when you you know were tapped or got the opportunity to be the gm at beckett i'm sure there was a lot of emotions a lot of decision making and things going on in your head when you landed at hq yeah getting your hands on the business meeting the people understanding how the business the current state of the business was kind of your thoughts on where the business could go and the potential like maybe what's what surprised you most during your onboarding process to the business good question i think it was really just taking stock of the business understanding because it's obviously card reading autograph authentication manga formerly comics and vhs online price guide the the beckett publications and just trying to kind of understand the unique nuances of of each who are their customers what's driving growth or decline in each of those business what are the underlying economics look like i think what was most surprising to me is just seeing how strong the organic demand for beckett card grading is we are consistently just every day every week as we kind of have meetings with operations and grading to kind of understand what does backlog look like you know are we at the point where we can do more marketing just seeing that organic demand continue to grow and we're we're hiring a ton of people we're investing in technology to support scaling the operations but it that's to me probably the most surprising and most challenging thing to solve is like how can we scale the business while maintaining our expertise as a service where we're not compromising quality at all but at the same time opening the door for that much more future growth because i really want beckett to be one of the best value the best bang for your buck grading companies i don't wanna raise prices i don't wanna have to increase turnaround times and it's challenging because at the end of the day if demand outstrip supply those are some of the levers that you can adjust right in order to to balance demand and supply or you can say hey we're temporarily suspending new submissions but yeah you know that long winded way of saying to me just that strong health of the brand and demand for beckett grading was one of the most surprising and exciting things to step into i think one of the questions maybe that i'm thinking about as you're talking through that you mentioned best bang for your buck i'm thinking about you know collectors in the portfolio of options we have as collectors to submit our cards obviously we can send it to psa we can send our cards to beckett we can send our cards to sgc when you think about those options and opportunities for collectors to get their cards graded and authenticated like how how are you think and this is this is early and i understand like the brand relaunch just came out but like how are you thinking about like the the the differentiation and just what you want collectors to think when they're submitting their cards to beckett you know at the end of the day our key differentiators are the black label the subgrades the inner sleeve those are things that are driving people that have been driving people to beckett to submit to beckett for years and so those are the key differentiators i wanna lean into and and embrace i don't necessarily spend a lot of time thinking about how can we proactively differentiate from psa sgc cgc i think it's more about just how do we be better at what we're already doing effectively do you you mentioned this earlier you're talking about you know what the what the business represented and kind of where it could go and take it i i wanna maybe get some perspective on just like i don't think i i i under i gather from you that like just like nostalgia and how people have felt about the beckett brand isn't necessarily probably going to get beckett back to where it it its full potential is but and there's like this this balance like how are you thinking about maybe balancing like how collectors think about the brand from the past with these new ideas and how you're kind of thinking about your vision for beckett for the future yeah i i think it's really just starting from the point of what's best for collectors what do they want when we talk about cards for example what do you want you want consistent low pricing you want accurate turnaround times you want clarity around where your order is in the process when you receive your cards back you want to have zero quality control issues so you want a a good product you want possibly want to be able to monetize and sell those cards so you want there to be good data that's available out on the market and make it as easy as possible to transact and then if you are transacting in that secondary market you wanna have trust that the the slab the label all the security features are doing their part and there's nothing being tampered with and so kind of thinking about that ideal end state gives us kind of the road map of okay well what do we fix along the way and and so where we're starting with the labels and improving some of that tech investing a lot in our customer service team and some tools just to kind of improve that side of things investing much more in quality control you know that that's really the ultimate vision if we are selling expertise as a service there just needs to be that same bar of quality wrapped around end to end experience maybe getting a little nerdy in the decisions that you know were introduced via social just with the slabs and the technology how how did you all there's probably hours and hours and days and weeks and months of conversations trying to land on what we want our slabs and labels to look like how how did you land on what you landed on in kind of those launch or relaunch videos that have been going out yeah so i'd say there are a few design principles that really drove the decision making process number one was just being consistent at the end of the day whether you're picking up a card that's been a card that's been graded an autograph that's been graded and encapsulated kind of any iteration of services it should look and feel like a beckett slab and just taking stock of our existing iterations of different slabs you know you could have the autograph chip and some of the beckett authentication services slabs you could have just kind of the the standard beckett holder with that label and we were just seeing inconsistencies across the board so one that kind of standardization of of design was was really driving it two it was this idea that we're not going to revolutionize it's more of an evolution and and so just trying to kind of make tweaks that make it feel immediately recognizable as a slab so if you're kind of scanning a case at a card show you know like okay that's that's a beckett slab and and so there's nuances where you almost have to look at and and look side by side to kind of see it and and that's what i love where it's not this huge shock and awe you know this isn't the cracker barrel logo per se right this is more of a okay these are very thoughtful design tweaks that optimize for having as much information as possible all on the front of the slab so you can immediately know everything about that card it's introducing all the tech features on the back including the qr code and and the barcode it it really just presenting it in a way that's as clean as elegant in my opinion as possible let's hit subgrades because i think when i think of beckett i think of subgrades i think so you watch any video at a card show on tiktok or instagram you know you have these conversations between buyer and seller and someone saying the price should be this and then the the seller will be like well that's not a true gem plus and this copy is yeah i just think like it's a fascinating element to the beckett brand that collectors really enjoy obviously subgrades are still available maybe take us inside the an inside look on just like subgrades and and why they matter enough to the beckett brand to continue in this next iteration i mean it's the beating heart of of our service in in my opinion if we were to get rid of the subgrades then what would be the differentiator and i think just having this exactness this level of specificity it really demystifies and and removes a lot of this subjectivity of grading and obviously at the end of the day somebody deciding if the centering is an a nine a nine five or if the surface is an eight or an eight five sure there's some subjectivity to that but at the same time it allows everyone to speak the same language and then when you get something to attend where you know speaking of doctor beckett we we met with him last week and i i thought he put it very well when he talked about how with sub grades of ten it's just unimprovable you know it's basically could not be better for that particular area in which you're judging a card and i think that's a great way to look at it versus if you did just kinda bucket into let's say a a one to five or one to ten that creates a lot of variation within any of those given grades so i i think it's really important for us to just kind of embrace that this is so unique for us to do and just do that as well as we possibly can going forward i think that connection with the subgrades and collectors today it's it's one of those trust factors and one of my observations through just the marketing and messaging that beckett has put it put out this week is trust has been a central point for your reintroduction into the market maybe like as you're thinking about messaging as you're thinking about marketing like why did you maybe why did you and the team continue to point back to trust and use that as a message to go to market with and then at the end of the day trust is what underpins all of our services you are like looking to buy i don't know some boxing gloves autographed by muhammad ali you want somebody to provide their expertise regarding the opinion of the authenticity of that item you want to know if you're overpaying or underpaying for a given card so you're looking at beckett pricing and so all of our services come back to a trust in us as the authority in the hobby and so to me it's just really important to kind of embrace that core proposition and it's also just setting a bar for our excellence you know whether it's within grading or being accurate with pricing or if it's just how we're treating customers through our customer service just kind of having that level of transparency honesty being the brand that stands for trust is incredibly important i think maybe during some of the previous ownership of the beckett brand there might have been some trust lost between the the brand and the customer base there wasn't a lot of news there wasn't a lot of updates and then the and the next kinda update was collectors acquiring beckett and then we're i think all of us are like wow this is interesting what it's what is gonna take place here obviously during that period like you are stepping into this role and i'm sure you're trying to like put your arms around everything that's happening with the business from the people working at the business to the customers to what's working what's not all of that stuff maybe during that process of trying to analyze like everything that's taken shape over the last and there's been a lot over the last like several years with beckett maybe what are like some of those opportunities or observations you've made where maybe trust had been lost a little bit between the brand and customers and kind of how you're thinking about this in this next chapter of beckett yeah i mean really kind of each sub business of beckett probably has some good examples you could talk through i mean within card grading for example i think the bccg offering started to deviate a bit you know i i like the proposition where it's kind of a very clean entry level grading system but i do think if you're putting a beckett name on a ten that would maybe be an eight in a different beckett holder that to me kind of erodes the value prop of our core offering of you know the beckett slab plus upgrades so so that's one example i think too just kind of looking at the magazine and trying to kind of make a bridge between the past and the future and think about what role does the magazine play in the hobby going forward now certainly thirty years ago the card show you would see a lot of people walk around with magazines and kind of using the price guide as a negotiating tool obviously a lot more people are on their phones now so we think okay well just putting monthly data out there is that really helpful is that kind of leaning into our role of being responsible for installing more trust in the consumer and kind of having trust as that through line for our services and so that's where i'm kind of now thinking through the magazine of like what role does the magazine play going forward how can we evolve the magazine to be more suited to its role in the hobby today i love the magazine i grew up with it and obviously don't wanna get rid of it but i do want to overhaul it entirely and so that's one thing i'm i'm excited to talk to consumers talk to some of our dealers that carry the magazine and yeah for your audience here please weigh in we'd we'd love to get some feedback on the magazine and think about how can that be another tool of trust with our customers and how can we evolve it in in ways that customers get excited about i love the just like yeah i wanna overhaul this i i wanna make some changes i wanna update it i i think that's refreshing to hear from someone in in your position the i i'm thinking about just the the the listening component and that was something i i picked up from kind of the video with with you in it mentioning like i've been listening a lot what like what have you heard you i i'm sure everyone probably has something to say about beckett and what they thought or what they want whether it's internal teams whether it's customers like what are some of the things that stood out to you during your process of just listening that stood out to you kind of in in this next stage abeka yeah it was a lot i mean i i i spend increasingly a lot of time on twitter that's that's been i mean new for me to kinda put myself out there publicly and like that in in in this setting as well but that's really just talking to customers firsthand whether online directly or at shows or at our retail drop off location here at our office and just trying to gather that feedback directly and really just not having any sort of preconceived notions or biases and just kind of ingesting it all and just start to say okay i'm hearing a lot about loose labels rattling around in the case i'm hearing a lot about how it can take days if not weeks to get responses from from customer service and so just trying to kind of understand here are all these points pain points and even given that these customers still love beck and they're coming back so i'm just really appreciative of the patience that our customers have granted us as we're starting to work through some of these improvements but yeah you know it's it's everything from the product itself including the case the the label to the end to end experience you know the online submission center order tracking being able to use an app to make submissions things along those lines so the listening tour really translate into this laundry list of okay here's all the things that we can tackle that translates into okay road maps for new labels road maps for new cases road maps for improving and overhauling the website and app entirely on the one hand you could say well let's kind of fix all of these things and have one big launch all at once i didn't wanna do that because if if we're trying to wait until everything's perfect there's always one more thing that can change and so i was excited to just okay once stuff's ready let's push it out so getting this launch out the door this week to to me is just really exciting because now i feel like okay we can start building momentum and i think that i'm hopeful that momentum feeds itself because i i think the number one thing that i just want the community to know is that we are investing a ton in building and growing this brand and just very excited for what's to come i can remember maybe six years ago putting in a submission at beckett and i remember vividly like printing off pieces of paper i remember writing down and sending it away and i might get an email from somebody i might not hear it all i've i've said that it kinda felt like you're sending your cars into this black hole and you just hope that yeah they come they come back obviously like a lot has changed since then but i'm sure there there might have been collectors during that point that decided to after that experience which maybe wasn't a great experience to not sub with beckett anymore obviously a lot of changes since then like what would you what would you share with those collectors just based on the experience that they might get now than what they got you know five six years ago well i mean first of all i understand the sentiment i i'm a consumer as well and if i have a bad experience with the brand then i'm gonna shop elsewhere and what what i'd say to those customers is look if you're seeing a change try it out firsthand for yourself to to see if if it really is meeting your needs and if those pain points that you previously experienced have been addressed so that specific case that you gave of sending it in and not knowing where the submission is we still have a lot to do to improve that you know right now it's a pretty lengthy process between when it's received and then your next notification of when it's been invoiced and so there's just a ton of of underlying infrastructure tech that we need to invest in to provide that much more of a granular view of where things are in the process and so maybe for some customers they say well i'll just wait until i see that improvement but i i do feel optimistic that there are some customers that and i started seeing this yesterday in some of the the socials and and replies on our posts and whatnot i do start to see and feel that sentiment that there are some people that are saying okay i i see what's going on over here beckett i'll give you a second chance i'll come back and we're hey come on over party's big enough for more happy to have you the i i remember it it felt like this psa in the brand was in a similar phase and then nat took over and the thing that stood out to me right away was just like the the the focus on tech and the focus on experience and making it easier for customers to understand what was happening in the process and that i think has probably led to the instrumental growth with psa and their submissions do you look at what a brand like psa has done from a tech and infrastructure and experience perspective do you do you try to gain in influence and understand like what's worked over there and try to apply it to kind of what you're doing at beckett and making those improvements or are you just kinda heads down kind having conversations with an internal teams having conversations with customers and taking that feedback in order to kinda improve your process just curious on like how you're thinking about those tech improvements today yeah good question so we're in a unique position where beckett we're operating basically as autonomously as we want to right and so for all intents and purposes like all of our teams we are still within beckett where we have the benefit of the broader collector's family is working with the tech teams working with the data teams and the long term vision is where it makes sense let's kind of use general like corporate capabilities and then where it makes sense each brand has its own functions for whatever it is whether it's marketing operations obviously but tech you know a a core infrastructure that takes inventory from an online submission to accepted in the warehouse processed through each step graded and then that data feeds through to the online experience of being able to have the grade reveal and all those things i think that both psa and beckett organically developed their own and psa just has so much more investment in theirs that that we're starting to look at it and see okay does it make more sense for us to continue investing in overhauling our existing tech infrastructure or can we leverage some of what's clearly working over here at scale with psa and and so that's the type of thing where it sounds so easy of just oh well just start using that software or you know copy this website or whatever it might be but those are the type of initiatives that just take a ton of time to plan out scope get right because switching over is would be one of the most challenging projects and but incredibly important because that's really going to be the key for us unlocking that next level of scale you mentioned that you've been kind of online you've been on twitter you've been listening you know the collectors love to to talk and they love to share their opinions very very vocal whatever the channel is how have you you know some of the feedback is great some of it's not so great how have you like as a leader of very important business in this industry like how have you been able like what has your process been in order to make sure you're getting feedback make sure the feedback is sound like filter all that like take us in on like how you think about getting that feedback online on a on a day to day basis i think it's really a function of just understanding the product and the customer experience ourselves so sure a lot of the worst experiences get the most traction and lead to the most vocal customers noting their experiences online but all it takes is just kind of walking out and spending time in customer service jumping into our crm and seeing some of the tickets some of the complaints a lot of the issues that come to my desk and realize like yeah we don't get it right a hundred percent of the time there's a lot of room for improvement and that's that's why i thought it really important with this launch announcement to not be too self congratulatory like we did it this is the new beckett because a lot of those issues still have room for improvement and so i think it's important for us to just kind of continuously be looking at our operation and understanding what can we do what how can we experiment for this specific process or aspects of operation and that's why i just really appreciate the team that we have we have an amazing team that is super proactive at just trying to identify new ways of doing things and i i i i love the idea of of just trying things and seeing what does and doesn't work because at the end of the day you know if we're making investments in improvement there's gonna be some things where they don't pan out perfectly and that's okay i just wanna demonstrate to the market that we are advancing we are attempting to make things better and it's not gonna be overnight there's gonna be a series of things that we can roll out over the next year but at the end of the day it it's all just kind of this big feedback mechanism where we're learning as customers ourselves we're learning from the customers directly we're spending all of our time in the operation and and so it kind of all builds on itself you've got i'm sure you've got dashboards you've got operations you've got your customer facing team you've got marketing you've got all of these things that i'm sure you're trying to push forward as the leader of the business when you think about the current state of beckett and where you're at and what you're working on what excites you most as the gm of the business right now one one thing that is is actually just where we've come thus far how far we've come thus far you know early in january we were grading let's call it four forty five hundred four thousand to forty five hundred cards a day we're now consistently getting close to seven thousand cards a day graded and i think we're well on on our way to get to ten thousand cards on a daily basis graded by the end of the year and it's really exciting to think well where where can that go in the next eighteen months could we get to fifteen could we get to twenty and it's not only domestically but international as well we have a office in in germany and that's a a small operation that i think has a ton of potential i i think the european market is very hungry for a high quality high trust brand such as beckett so really just kind of seeing that upside in our core business is incredibly exciting i think also just you know just for the nostalgia factor of just thinking about how can we overhaul the magazine and modernize it for a reader in twenty twenty six and beyond that to me is really exciting and while the the magazine business for beckett or print media in general that's not ai level of rocket ship growth right but it's still an important it's an important capability for us it's an important asset and i think it's just very meaningful for collectors what does success look like for you and the beckett brand in the next you know down the road not tomorrow or next week but you know maybe in the next three to five years yeah so i i just kinda think about this implied cycle of trust that you had alluded to thinking about okay in previous years had there been some sort of erosion in customers' perception of the beckett brand and i think what success would look like is just kind of seeing that confidence in beckett continue to trend upward and obviously you know that's going to translate to more cards submitted that's going to be more customers you know longer lines at card shows etcetera but i i think it's really just a overall sentiment around the brand and and helping to play a role and really just restoring the beckett brand to where it's historically stood within the hobby i think that to me would be a huge success you've been very public this week sharing kind of your thoughts about where you want beck to go you're doing you know some media here maybe for anyone listening just getting having their attention just getting them to understand kind of where your head's at what what do you want collectors to understand maybe most about this moment right now for beckett yeah i mean right right now it's the introduction of what's to come so it's a a series of product launches that are gonna be rolling out over the next six months the the new slabs the the new cases were the first of it and there's just so much we can speak to on the specific nuances of that release but it's going to be in completely overhauled website a new app rolling out in the next month i've been hearing the feedback around the existing cases and we're exploring denser more elegant feeling cases that i think will will be a huge hit so it's rolling out new cases and then it's getting to some of those tech infrastructure projects i alluded to in terms of just completely overhauling our existing grading infrastructure and kind of the internal inventory management system in a way such that we can allow for users to send their orders to the vault so that they can take that seamless next step of create your cards sell your cards so it's really just kind of thinking about like yeah kinda going back to that cheesy analogy i i kicked off with of this is isn't the chapter this is the first paragraph of the chapter and so i i i guess yeah i'm just really excited to be sitting in the role at my typewriter kind of thinking through the next several paragraphs to continue the analogy do do you you do you have i guess enough people in the seats at beckett right now to accomplish kind of the goals in your vision for what you want to to do in the next you know twelve to eighteen months is this we're more is this we're going to be leveraging technology ai and automation to maybe streamline some processes like what you just described is a whole lot of work how are you thinking about getting it done with people and resources yeah i mean that that's certainly the biggest challenge we have crazy huge ambitions but the reality is we don't currently have enough butts in the seats and so we've i believe we've hired over sixty people year to date and we're trying to hire dozens more and i don't think that's going to be enough for all that we're trying to do so part of the the learning experience for me has just been patience you know there's so much that we wanna do we can't do everything all at once so then how do we prioritize things and thinking about you know what roles that can we create that kind of unlock new things that we can pursue it it it's a challenge and at the end of the day you know it's good problems to have i i suppose but that's why i think about this more of a ongoing series of improvements versus kind of a a one time alright we're good to go and everyone back to their desks maybe as we close this out just i'm sure it we're in like show season there's going to be a lot of people out at shows you mentioned dallas card shows happening this week in your neck of the woods like if people want to reintroduce themselves to the beckett brand meet some team members maybe submit some cards is there any particular events that beckett will be at where collectors who are listening can do that yeah so so i'd say on our show circuit the we do on-site grading at the dallas card shows the toronto show and the national we'd love to be able to expand that going forward and and there's a ton of other shows where we do take backs and and you can go to beckett dot com to see all the events that we're at but i i would say you know if you want to to jump to the headline and get some of the new cases and the new labels as quickly as possible dallas card show this weekend is gonna be an awesome opportunity to do that so i'm really excited to go to the show over the next several days and just kinda spend some time in line talking to customers get some feedback and really kind of continue to to monitor like okay what should we prioritize next how are people receiving these labels and slabs and so so yeah come come to the shows come to the shows see beckett before i let you go colin this has been a lot of fun i wanna end with just a question back to trust and obviously trust has been a central focus for beckett and for the rebrand and relaunch but maybe you wanna close it out just with some personal sentiment what restoring trust in the hobby means to you as a collector and also someone who is working at a business in this space yeah i mean it's the number one thing i i think about go walk around the show floor and you'll see collectors of of all stripes where they're looking at investing in or trying to sell or trade cards that could be worth tens of thousands of dollars right and so that might represent a significant percentage of their net worth their collection it's their inventory of their business and if you're transacting and and you're starting to have stakes to that level trust is the most important thing you know it's trust in product that you're getting the companies that are helping you build that product if if you will the the other ancillary services that are being delivered whether that's like pricing data vaulting storage etcetera like this entire ecosystem around collecting it's not just manufacturing your card and card grading there's this entire ecosystem where trust is really the through line for all of that and so that's when i kind of see the the level of health of the hobby you know that to me is really inspiring but also just kind of shows like okay there's just so much more weight on us really executing on this vision of being the most trusted brand in the hobby because now there's just so many people that are in in it so many people coming into it for the first time so whether it's somebody that's been collecting and a a like a customer for decades or somebody that's buying their first pokemon card we wanna be there and be that trusted partner that's kind of their introductory into the hobby it's colin hudson gm at beckett it is very nice to hear from the beckett brand and to hear from you looking forward to more conversations like this down the road thanks a lot colin yeah thank you great chatting with you today see you