alright everybody welcome back to another episode of passion profession brought to you by my good friends at ebay had a little time to catch up before we hit record with today's guest and i'm i'm the energy man i'm fired up i'm i was already excited before this but today's guest is i'm sure gonna be bringing a lot of passion and insight which is perfect for our show i am joined by john amendola of mint inc there is a lot to talk about a lot about what he's building and i think this is gonna be a really fun chat but without further ado john welcome back man or welcome how are you i'm great thanks for having me brad i'm super excited i love what you're what you're doing i love your show i love the crates of vinyl behind you too love it collect collector of collections i think i was listening to a pod you were on at some point and you were talking about how i think you haven't just collected sports cards but you've collected a lot of things over the course of your lifetime so i'm sure you can resonate in some way i love it i i the sports cards are the least thing i collect like i'm a big pop culture junkie i i have all kinds of content we produce where i'm just video games comics and everything's significant i collect stuff that really matters to me and so there's like a story behind everything and typical like you know i'm a grown man you know in my mid forties and it's like everything i couldn't have i grew up an only child single mom lived in housing i think you guys call it projects and so you know going back and and buying everything i couldn't have when i was a kid is definitely a a a a really cool trigger for me you were were talking about before we hit record just about all that's happening at meninc and we're gonna get into that in this conversation but maybe brief the audience if there's anyone out there who is not familiar with your brand and what you guys are up to maybe give everyone the skinny of who you are and what you do so we're we're canada based we're out of toronto we're in the midst of a a national expansion which is crazy because the days aren't long enough and that's really cool we we we definitely can talk a little bit more about that we've we've gone from like five to fifty employees and we're about to add thirty more so it's it's crazy but i'm a lifelong collector i'm a collector of things i love i grew up collecting you know gi joe's and cards in the eighties and the nineties and in the late nineties a business we were on ebay power selling early and when the card market softened we went into video games and all that kind of great stuff we were buying out video stores which was pretty cool in the late two thousands i started an ad agency that's sort of my my passion is i'm a marketer i love content i love new business development so i've been an entrepreneur essentially almost my my entire life since since twenty three twenty four you could argue before that i was a hundred percent commission so i've sort of always been a you eat what you kill kinda person so that's exciting twenty you know i'm into my thirties now and and my wife and i we tried to have kids it didn't really work so you come to a point in time where like okay you know you gotta shift focus a bit all of a sudden i had some extra money i wasn't you know dance lessons weren't a thing and and all that kind of stuff so started to dive back into cards the pandemic hit and absolutely destroyed my ad agency we were big into small business community local events so canada we we were shut down for the better part of two years it was awful here a horrible experience a lot of people suffered so we had like sixteen seventeen employees at that time we were down to just a couple and i'd given up really my wife and i were all in there was no bank loan so you know it was all our money we had just had a grand opening hundred and twenty people at the office raw rah and you know two weeks later the world is over and i sat there one day and i was done crying and i said well i'm having fun selling cards i'm just gonna sell cards i was into it for a little bit and you know all of a sudden i'm buying gretzky and jordan rookies a year before i'm buying you know sixes and sevens and eights for five and six and seven grand and all of a sudden they're ten and twenty and thirty thousand in both currencies like it's crazy and i got on the phone and i said to my wife this is it this is what we're gonna do now and that was it mint ink is born i'll i'll let you a lot of people ask what mint ink means so this is kinda how deep from the very beginning if you think about mint obviously everybody understands mint is the form of measurement and in our industry it's the standard you know if it's mint gem mint it's it's gonna be top quality and then ink not i n c i n k because at the end of the day like i started my career it's a pokemon card i started my career i was a print guy i own newspapers and magazines so it's ironic here i am twenty five years later and i'm still in the the print business i i mean i sell i sell paper ink so that's what mint ink means it's pretty deep there's a there's like i actually have like a a whole sort of thing behind it but when we started out it was all about the lifetime value of the space and the way i believed it was gonna go and right from the beginning we were in it for the the long run as we had sort of already done so then six years later i'm on your podcast so pandemic sucked although it opened up a lot of doors and opportunities opportunities for entrepreneurs like yourself and you got into cards seeing the opportunity when you started netinc like you talked about it from the jump like you're a national brand right now was that part of the original vision or what was the vision you had for the business yeah so like in in in spring summer of of twenty twenty when i really kinda got an idea of what was happening and i i i started to look at consumer behaviors and trends and and you know culture shifts and all this and i saw like you know being in this space my whole life it's a hundred and twenty five year old business i saw like the the the the demand for the nostalgia come and then you know just the fact that it was it was hitting mainstream so if you follow like malcolm gladwell the tipping point everything he kinda talks about in that book was happening you know we dug a little deeper i did some more research and i wrote this paper in the middle of the night crazy you know six or seven pages of what i thought it was gonna be and the late later that week i went online i had just left walmart buying chronicles blasters twenty twenty you know chasing zion luminance and i turned my phone on know buried entry right a phone and a box of cards i already had production studios so we were we were already pumping out you know great content we were doing webinars and all that so we were ready i went live and it was wild i sold everything that was on the table in an hour people were like you know they just wanted more i was having fun with the community like the well they weren't a community yet with the people the next day i trademarked breaks after dark turned my boardroom into a card store and we started ultimately what was a podcast kinda but we ripped cards two stations set up just shooting the breeze talking sports and cards and next thing you know we're doing fifteen breaks a day so we're running you know twelve hour streams through the middle of the pandemic and and by that fall we'd opened up briefly i tried to open a brick and mortar but it was very difficult so we did like a backdoor in the boardroom so it was showroom by day and streaming by night and by fall of twenty twenty when they locked us up again the demand just went crazy sort of what i thought and i knew at that point i said to my wife i said we're gonna people need camaraderie they need like minded people around them we need to create an environment where people can come and and congregate and loiter in this context it was in my livestreams and i i there's a video that circulated in december of twenty twenty and it says i'm i wanna create something where when you think of the hobby in canada it's synonymous with mint ink i get goosebumps when i say that because it's crazy oh i get super emotional like six years later like we did it and not without a lot of man armed robberies break ins mail frauds you know people people are really tough employees customers all that crazy stuff and you just kinda and and cash flow and no money and you know the the banks you you know this wasn't what it is today even just a few years ago like you weren't getting money from banks and everything else it was it was you know you kinda had to sort of just do it on your own so we were all in from the beginning and the whole mission wasn't just hey let's capitalize on this crazy market take a bunch of cash you know the italian way let's take the envelopes under the mattress and call it a day it was let's just keep reinvesting because you know where we're going and where it's going it's gonna hit a place where even if it's if it brett if it stops tomorrow and it crashes in half it's still ten x bigger than it was five years ago and my attitude was if or when that happens and that roll up happens you know when the dust settles people still collecting people still need that and and you know mint ink would just be there so i kinda set out and said like if i was rebuilding toys r us or a mastermind you know if if i was building what i thought toys and collectibles should be like today as a big kid my wife will tell you i'm her teenage husband that's what we're gonna do and it worked the i wanna go back to that the the dawn of breaks after dark and you converting your office space into break studios in real time and the demand just kept going up and up well a lot of people don't talk about like the operations behind breaking and so you're you're you're understanding that there's crazy demand it's coming in people want more and more but there's a lot of work behind the scenes especially when you're scaling that operation how did you make those decisions in real time to make sure that what you were doing was efficient and also like you were able to get product to customers on time it's kinda like flying a plane and changing an engine at the same time like yeah yeah yeah to us about how how you went about that so i was i was fortunate number one to have done this before so i was already very familiar with buying and selling cards mail order ecommerce i've done a lot of ecommerce on my career and i had been toying around with live shopping earlier on few of my friends were in the jewelry business and we were you know there was a a a a a an app called livescale before like people don't understand what what whatnot an obs has done we had six thousand seven eight thousand dollar computers running a software called vmix and a whole production and it you know you couldn't just throw obs on your phone and and put what you can out today so we were really fortunate to have already been doing that and course i was already in business for myself so i'd been through a bunch of bs already and and learned and i had a couple of employees at the time that were really digging what we were doing and of course they needed to work what we were doing didn't exist anymore so i was really lucky that i had the the that side of it the production side of it so right out the gate we were already pumping out really good quality show great content all that great stuff so i was able to focus on the hardest part of the whole game is supply chain like i mean anybody that understands knows that that is the absolute hardest thing like you're gonna ask me at some point i'm sure you were gonna do this today would you and i i don't know i i don't know if i would because of where supply chain is you know and how difficult that is so we were able to really kinda divide and conquer right out of the gate although yeah you know i i had to be the face of the company one thing we've always done and continue to do is i'm not the only one you're gonna see on camera we're really big into community and camaraderie and knowing people so i was never shy to that it didn't matter to me how you know you know there's a lot of talk people say oh you know gotta watch out for this you're gonna do that you're gonna put these people on a pedestal and then they're gonna go and try to it doesn't matter i have the blinders on the reason the horse wears the blinders is because as soon as you pay attention to everything else you're done you go off track i've been really fortunate through my career to really kinda take that approach so yeah so i was really lucky in the sense of i had the right people already employed in theory people tell me oh you made this crazy pivot how did you do it and i'm like i was already doing it cards are a widget like i'm a content i'm a business builder i i run staff and systems and policies like it's cards today it could be whatever tomorrow so so for me it was more about just like i'm building this app this infrastructure to take this application and put it in said infrastructure and then be able to kinda grow from from from there and it and it worked so you've got employees in your other business that have moved over into join the mint inc business how long did you run the business with kind of old staff when did you start hiring new staff like how did that go down that's a great question because you know you know hindsight's twenty twenty and when you go in you know like when you when you put people for jobs and not like jobs or sorry when you find jobs for people and not people for the right jobs eventually so so we ran for a a good eighteen to twenty four months and then by the time the the you know comes around and spring of twenty one's coming and we're like okay this covid thing is i think it's almost over and we're gonna be able to open the space if you remember twenty one and twenty two got really crazy so i needed some help i had some friends that i had done business with for a long time my partner freddie and his family and we did a small deal brought them in and that's when we really started to to scale that's when it became a real business i mean okay let's be clear it was a real business before and it's we spent a lot of money back in the business to get to a real business but that was when it when we knew okay this isn't gonna be you know three four five people a couple people streaming you know we're gonna sell stuff online and no this is this is this is something and we were big believers my wife and my partners right from day one that you know they had faith in me that i wasn't out to lunch i guess you know they'd i'd already proven my crazy to them a few times over so in this case it was just like here's the check go make us money and so i sat down and i just said that's it like this is it never gonna do anything else again in my life i'm not gonna go through what i just went through lost everything like i can tell you stories of my wife rolling out the gas station because she couldn't put ten bucks in the gas tank mhmm so you know now it's you know nice day when i go to hit the golf course it's you know you got you must have it made so anyway you know it's definitely heavy brett to get there but i'm really happy that from the beginning that was the mindset but yeah by about the second year we really had to pivot and i'm gonna i'm not gonna lie to you like it's really only the last eighteen months where we've really now scaled to like a full fledged retail operation as opposed to like a card shop if that makes sense you know friendly mom pop it's you know the owner's there every day that's that's challenging for me i my favorite place to be is in the store with the customers and i don't get there too often these days i i really cherish those moments and just earlier we're we're talking about the streaming that's the hardest job in the company the streamer has the hardest job in the company yeah they might make the most money because they're a salesperson they have the hardest job in the company there is so much happening and in those intense moments you deal with customers maybe they're not happy you got sometimes you're on two three four platforms you're following all these chats it's the toughest job in the place when you are like let's zero in on like this the role of the streamer at mint inc when obviously like very valuable position very you have to have the right personality type the right motor all the the i'm sure you've evaluated it time and time again since the business has been open when you are thinking about bringing on someone to do that role let's say today let's say you have a an open role and you're trying to bring someone in what is more important to you is it having the professional skill set in place or is it having kind of the domain knowledge and expertise or is it kind of like an overlap of both like how do you evaluate bringing on a new streamer to the many team so so a couple things number one it's the hardest job and the hardest position to fill we've been looking for for streamers for a while we really really we just built three brand new studios looking to scale up very very very particular we've had a few people in and out some have worked out really well some haven't but but myself adam and maz so i'm very fortunate my first three employees all still work here they're now key you know people running entire systems and and the three of us still do the majority of the streaming it is my favorite thing to do because i just love hanging out with the people but it's you can teach product knowledge you can't teach professionalism you can't teach i i don't even know what the way right way to describe it is like in the moment it's happening so fast we live in a world where everything is being recorded everything is there like you know you're you know what time of day what channel am i on how can i talk what language can i use is it okay if i drop an f bomb and you know i don't have to tell you like we you know you see it online all day whatnot crash shows is probably one of my favorite instagram pages but so for me it is professionalism first and then i'm looking for you know i'm looking for salespeople real hardcore salespeople which i am one and and it's a dying breed i used to hire people the kids won't even know but i used to make my staff watch glengarry glen ross boiler room and rounders before i would hire i'll be like you're gonna go like you're in school you're gonna go do an essay on these movies the you know boiler room is probably one of the most underrated movies of all so good so good vin diesel and ben affleck in like their infancy is like it is just you know the best so for me the the institutional knowledge the product knowledge like that's easy to teach anybody i'm really looking for you know the the level of professionalism is the most important you're the one that people see the most and i can't control what you're saying in a live screen and trust me man i have been there seen it all i've had people slip we we've been reported for all kinds of different shit one of my instagram accounts is frozen because people report us for selling weapons you know i'm very fortunate brett we get a lot more flowers than bricks but there's bricks sometimes people gotta throw but yeah professionalism and just general sales experience outweighs for me the product knowledge like i can teach you what's in the fifa box you know yeah what what makes a good salesperson to you like what are those traits that you think about whether it's you from your own experience and anybody who's an entrepreneur who's been through kind of the different stages you have been through like is a critical skill set in any line of business how do you evaluate kind of like a good salesperson yeah in twenty twenty six salespeople don't get enough credit like commission salespeople and i'm talking about real ones you can't tell me there's a hundred thousand real estate agents in toronto when they're all good commission salespeople are you know a special breed it's it's about relatability and and relationships so it's we took a very transactional business very transactional retail business and we made it about relationships and community so so finding people that are you know that's that whole sell me this pen mhmm the pen is blue is irrelevant it's like what kind of pen do you like how do you like to write maybe it's not even the right pen for you so like one's ability to to like be received by people i mean they're they're spending their disposable income their entertainment funds we're entertaining them we're talking livestream now they have to be able to be relatable and and build relationships so so we'll have customers that will only rip with certain people like they have you know you know what i've been you know my same real estate agent does all my deals or that you you you and your family maybe buy your same car from the same car dealership so it's really about you know their interpersonal skills is is everything it's not about you know let's just close that deal right now and i'm i have two speeds you know now and right now are the two speeds i operate at i'm a little bit nutty that way but at the same time slowly is the fastest way to get anywhere and it goes with with relationships i've had customers sit in our life for shows on shows on shows and not spend a penny and then all of a sudden they turn into the biggest customer because now they're finally into you they trust you trust is huge huge huge huge huge it's everything in this space and i you know i can i love the the motor that you have and the energy that you come into kind of this conversation with which i can't imagine into your business with it's not for everybody right you're you're what you're you're you're all gas no brakes pretty intense yeah people think i don't sleep that's such a hoax i sleep eight hours i get a oura ring i get eighty nine most nights i get up in the morning i get my phone i lie in bed for an hour with my dog drink a coffee but then i just go and what else am i gonna do on tuesday night at seven o'clock like watch tv fuck forget that and like i said you know i had to find silver linings my wife and i weren't able to have children we really wanted to so it's not like i'm missing recitals i'm not missing hockey practices i would have been a horrible hockey dad because i can't even speak but i'm a football guy we actually have football in canada by the way nfl not just the cfl but yeah you're you're a hundred percent right i'm definitely not for everybody but the i pride myself in that the right people thrive with me because i i i i push you know tom brady's got a lot of great analogies like you know you need to be coached hard i'm a hard coach if if it's not for you great it's not for you you should never do anything in life that's not for you is one of my philosophies and i just if i find a good and that's the other thing i am the hardest on the ones that i feel have the most potential so you're probably like personality test probably like a hundred and ambition you're running a hundred miles an hour and you're like telling everyone to like catch up and you're trying to get everyone on your on your level and as a part of this right you're growing and scaling this business like inevitably like things don't last any longer and stuff breaks whether it's you know people process technology the strategy you once worked with like you you outgrow it maybe share some perspective on something throughout the history of growth that you've endured that yeah kind of just broke and you had to figure it out and nothing happened i've had that happen a few times and it's you know we're going through it again this year because you know we're going what's what's what happens is you kind of alluded to it is we're going through five year plans in eighteen months so and eighteen months is like this so by the time you start to get your stride let's say it takes a year for you know to get a stride in anything you know you get the rookie year done you go into your softman year you're just like oh my god what like i gotta start over so that's been the biggest challenge and and what was happening and i i learned this you know is i would have i would hit this so i try my best to stay in front keep the road my job as the leader as the ceo is to deal with all the bs in front get the mountains and make sure the road behind me is as straight as possible for the team managing the lanes in in the road and what was happening is is we're hitting these critical you know critical mass and scale and i'm like okay need this this and this and this by way of of leadership and everything else and i was hiring talent for the day in that moment as opposed to okay you keep going through these so this time around was a little bit different about a year and a bit ago we we just hit this this crazy i don't even know what you call it it's been it's been awesome and it's not slowing down we planted a lot of seeds over the years and you know i wasn't really trying to plant a garden it was more about we're gonna take our time because we're gonna build a jungle used to say to people we're literally building a jungle and and that's what happened and all of a sudden we just exploded you know like where revenue is going you know monthly revenue is turning into weekly and you know of course expenses go with it so this time around brought in the recruiter i understand okay we went from five in place to ten or twelve okay to twenty then we went from twenty to forty five then we went back a little bit now i just approved like thirty we're about to open three more stores in the next few months plus corporate and it's like thirty five forty people i just approved so in the last year brought in recruiter i brought in real senior leadership like i am not the highest paid person at mint inc that's amazing yeah we have a senior retail director director of finance we brought in a proper fulfillment manager we're in the midst of hiring an office operations manager now you know so i go from having the whole company reporting to me to four or five direct reports i'm in an office in another building by myself now and it's crazy i don't stop but it's i wanna be interacting with customers in the store and i wanna be on here but if i'm not in my office getting the next lease negotiated or dealing the next security contract or you know we had a store get broken into like my job is to make sure like my team has what they need to get the store back open and the customers and the staff have a you know their environment and you know it was a great proof of that this weekend in the gta some stores got broken into and our security is really good so luckily they they didn't really get to too much and and they shouldn't have got in at all but we had the store back open in a few hours brett the community shows up these guys had like one of their best sundays ever their coffees lunch so it's really important to really not lose sight of you can't do everything you know i don't read a lot of books good to great jim collins is another one and level five leadership i got through that in twenty twenty three we had an armed robbery three years ago and crazy story for another time and and since then it's been a whole other trajectory you know the conversation was okay i said to freddie i said we can do two things we can just go join the golf course and this will be fun and when it's over it's over or you know fuck it we're gonna go all in we're gonna build the greatest thing in canada we're gonna take this as fuel and and you know what the last three years have have just been insane and the level five leadership talks about how it's gotta be about minting it's not about johnny or freddie or adam or maz or anybody that's come gone or coming it's about mint ink and and mint ink for me it's i built it for the people it's a hundred percent community and i see that every time bullshit happens every time something like a break in happens or somebody tries to throw bricks like i sleep well knowing that if there's people in a room when they're talking about me there's those people in the room that are gonna like tell the real story and i had a conversation with somebody this morning that never spoken with me before and he was telling me we have some mutual friends and or acquaintances and you know what they were saying and and i lost my ego and checked my ego a long time ago when i had an ego lost all my money so for me it it you know at the end of the day sure i mean we all have ego when i have a chip it gives me a lot of validity when i hear that i have a great shrink too that i see every few weeks that's been a game changer for me this last few years because it is just crazy how much comes in a day how many different people and the other thing you know like i said to you when we started i'm this crazy loud talking italian if you know italians the passion sometimes it can be fiery so i've really had to learn especially in twenty twenty six i've really had to learn the change in people and and really understand as we grow where i fit in the whole thing and you know for me as much as i don't wanna be in my office that's my job to go there and do the stuff that no one else can do and hire the best people to do everything else and that's what we've done and twenty twenty six has just been epic so far i wanna talk about kind of build the experience that you're building but you said something there that i i have to get some further insight on i i think the hobby can be so transactional at times like people want quick wins want everything right now they wanna be a star overnight they want their business to grow and they wanna be making millions of dollars you know next week but that's just not how it works and you made mention like you planted a bunch of seeds to me that that means like you did a lot of the right activity and i guess how did you manage like your ambition as you planted those seeds to not just like go continue and to move on to the next thing but like wait for those seeds to grow and then for you as a owner operator and someone running a business to be able to see those seeds kind of popping up and take advantage of those opportunities yeah so i was i was i mean baptism by fire i have no i don't have an mba or any of that stuff i have no you know real formal any of that it's it's baptism by fire so i was fortunate enough to learn through my past experiences in business ventures anywhere i failed was because i tried to do too much too fast so you know any business connoisseur or coach will tell you you know it's way easier to go vertical than it is to go horizontal right so you go deep first before you can go wide build the foundation all that stuff so i try to give this analogy to people if you're driving past let's say you're you know you're driving down the street and there's a field and all of a sudden there's a sign up and it says hey we're gonna change some zoning and we're gonna build something here and it goes before council and this and that and let's say you know a couple months later okay now there's a rendering of what they might do and so a year passes and now oh now there's an approval and then it's like okay here's the rendering this is what it's gonna look like and they start to dig a hole so two years later there's a hole in the ground k six months later there's a fifty story tower done complete people are moving in so this whole grind to get to that point to then just to be the other thing is the hardest thing in business especially when you're like it's way easier for me now because i have i let people make decisions i have partners aboard like we're we're we're you know we're expanding quite aggressively so it's it's great to not have it all on my shoulders but you gotta know when to cut stuff and you know contrary to what i just said when we started the ultimate hobby experience in canada like the the the vision statement the the mission of mint inc from day one is to provide the ultimate customer experience i've had people work for me to say johnny the ultimate customer experience is impossible and i'm gonna tell them the word impossible i'm like kobe fucking brian he just doesn't exist you know i'm the i'm the guy that possible like you know we get broken into on saturday when i'm just like yeah you know it is what it is positivity trumps everything i i lived through shit in my life like i've been there done that i know what it's like to not have food i know what it's like you know getting toys that were donated through so my mom could give me a christmas you know we had somebody comment on a post the other day talking about how people are forced to steal nobody's forced i can give you a million ways legally to make money accountability you know the answer to entitlement is accountability so for me that's that's what it is brett it's like i i i knew from experience i had to let the the the seeds mature and kinda grow but at the same time like i'm only gonna put so much miracle grow in the plant before i realize the plant's dead now at the same time we had to in canada build the ultimate experience so we now had to find a way to be not master of all trade you know jack of all trades master of none we needed to do brick and mortar e com live shopping grading consignment and buying all very well so i took the burbank model and i found a two or three or four of the what i thought at the time were like the best live experiences and and then i went one step further because they told me they could never do sports and tcg together and i realized canada was a very unique market in the sense of the way it had been sort of approached and i said yeah no not gonna happen i might like lose any hair i have left i'm not gonna get paid for a couple years but i believe in this i believe if we do it properly and we went all in on it and and and i think we just really paid attention along the way what worked and didn't work if it was working we would let it sort of fester slowly and we you know it's same thing with people they say hire slow fire fast same analogy in business if you know you're onto it then you hit the gas because the other thing is there is absolutely not a single delta in business that trumps momentum so when you're on a run you you can't stop you just gotta keep going and i'm built for that so that's we're really lucky we're really lucky so you've got a speaking to experience you've got a ton of different service lines and offerings and they're the hobby is so diverse and even like you look at just canada the hobby is diverse and there's a lot of different participants in this hobby doing a lot of different things whether they're buying into your breaks whether they're using your consignment services whether they're just stopping into the shop and wanna buy some packs intentions are different across the board with what people want to do with those cards and how they want to interact with brands like mint inc like how do you how do you think about that diversity when you're thinking about like creating the ultimate experience so like i said at the beginning i'm a collector of many things have been my whole life and i just always was like even when i was back twenty eighteen nineteen twenty twenty one i'm going to like i grew up in a town just east of of toronto and i went back into the store that i would go in the nineties and it was the same store so i was like right away i was just like i'm gonna create what i believe and i believe i'm like the biggest nerd going and i'm gonna have like i know what i want and i'm gonna just build for everybody else what i know they want because it's what i want and me and you we think the same and we created these great big vibrant stores you know lots of staff that are really knowledgeable again very much about relationships and my staff are trained i don't care if the people spend no money educate the shit out of them answer all their questions give them a free pack if they're not buying anything they're gonna come back they're gonna leave maybe you're being secret shopped by tops or upper deck who knows my attitude has always been you you have to treat although you know the world is is not everybody isn't always treated equal you know especially at first interaction you can never judge a a book by its cover we have to you know allow that opportunity for the relationships to manifest so i had a mentor you know he passed away now and we had this conversation and through the pandemic and i was like people are gonna need a place to congregate you know more than ever and in a small like minded so i said i'm gonna build something completely the opposite of what people want i'm gonna implore people to loiter in my business because eventually like tap tap tap tap tap you know like if you're in the space you're in the space like why not give you the the the best place to do that then we took it one step further and and our stores are you know forty feet slab walls one of my stores has a speakeasy in it like no shit you walls open up and you go into a whole other room like it's pretty cool when you come to toronto you'll you'll see but so we just tried to be really different and again going back to the equality thing like i don't care if you're ripping baseball football hockey ufc pokemon gundam one piece riftbound or you're buying one dollar cards or you know i'm selling you a twenty five thousand dollar jordan card like that's the widget cards as cards as cards supplies as supplies it's all the same it's for me it goes back to the relationship with the people the camaraderie loitering in community i had a mom come to me after we run a trade nights every other friday we run kids collector days every time schools have a day off and they'll be packed sometimes there'll be a hundred kids in our in our bigger store had a mom come to me pull me aside one night and i was like oh here we go what what happened you know something stole or something she said i just wanna commend you for what you built and i was like oh thanks i love the feedback she says no i don't think you understand my sixteen year old son can't make friends meanwhile he's rolling up with his mom on the back of a motorcycle and i'm like this kid's the coolest kid in the place but you know it he he was different she said he came to your trade nights and all of a sudden he's making friends and life is great because sure you know the the kid wants to be able to go put his you know pikachu cosplay on and hang out with snorlax and go through their cards and play a game and not be judged and and that was big for us the other thing is the diverse collect eclectic mix of people i'm seeing with the hobby there's a major urbanization of it it's not just baseball and hockey and you know it's not an old man's game anymore we're getting not only kids but the amount of female collectors i'm seeing which is really awesome and the and the kids and the parents and the other thing is you're getting this like multigenerational you get the grandpa the the son and the grandson or the grandmother granddaughter and the daughter all in you we're at a moment in time and this is another for me big big piece of data that that really tells me kinda where we're at is there's not too many moments in time where you're gonna have three or four generations of of people that have a commonality right so so that's very very unique in the the the trading card world i'm seeing seventy year olds fifty year olds thirty year olds twenty year olds fifteen year olds and eight year olds in the same family entire families you know our store on a saturday it's not as big as burbank but same idea you know we'll we'll have hundreds and hundreds of people through our stores on the saturdays and it's i'm not you know the the the the families that are walking through the store aren't the same people that are coming on the livestream or buying on the website so we have to treat at this point in time each of these buckets you know essentially we run three businesses we run a brick and mortar experience we run an ecommerce business and we run a livestream so so the business is now separated you know amongst the forty fifty sixty employees across those macro buckets if you will i think something you said and maybe you can help me understand but might be the connective tissue in those three separate businesses under one roof and that's just the educational aspect that you're kind of infusing in your employees and in your business i i find in having a lot of these conversations with people running businesses in this space those that are the most successful and those that sustain all the ebbs and flows are the owners operators entrepreneurs that lead with education because they come from a place of abundance and they don't expect the transaction right there right now you're a content guy like you understand media you understand the power of content and education like how do you think about like your knowledge of content your knowledge of education and and what it what's possible if you continue to lean into that with minninck well i think i think like a few years ago i was telling people you know especially when fanatics really started to get going and all of a sudden you know again you go back to the tipping point you know drake is ripping cards and luke holmes was here a week ago mike trout was here so you know now anybody that comes to toronto that wants cards it's it's pretty awesome they come to me and think but lifetime value is what we've always chased i tell my staff the first sale is the easiest when you get to sale number three or four now we're winning because the first sale is the easiest it's like you go to a restaurant if there is hair in my food and you're a great server i'm coming back shit happens i'm coming back so another thing is is you know conflict resolution because nobody's perfect that's lost in today's society i'm very fortunate with some of the new leadership that we've brought in calm cool collective and and they really understand that and can really you know articulate that through you know a lot of people face to face is difficult because we just run behind our phones keyboard warriors right so that's important to me and and the lifetime value of the customer to your point is is what i'm after so we're building mintinc to always be there five years from now ten years from now with that being said i used to i would i would equate the hobby to a baseball game and i said there's a point in time where you know x y and z will happen and that's the seventh inning stretch and i used to say that would happen between twenty five and twenty twenty eight and we're there i i feel like we're in the fifth sixth inning the question for me will be when we hit that seventh inning which you're gonna see in like the next eighteen months as it really ramps up the manufacturers are gonna do a really good job keeping supply and demand the way it is like i as much as i want more product i don't want more product you know i don't i don't mind that some of the retail gets out to costco and that because it it pushes the masses as long as the manufacturers do a really good job and we learn from history and we keep the specialty chops to specialty and you know walmart's not gonna start breaking cards tomorrow they might have a platform but it'll still be with with the with the sellers i think that the question then is is this a nine inning game or is it going into extra innings i i think that based on what i'm seeing the last little while like brett you've been around remember twenty twenty two was over mhmm no is normal close to over it was like any other industry that's hype there was a little bit of speculation and the ten or twenty play like zion and mellow find here we are today and all those grail cards today are worth more than they were worth then and sure a guy like zion that amounted to nothing but i give i often as part of education to people that are looking at this from an investment perspective i try to equate it like this i say if you're chasing rookies it's like pay penny stocks you gotta hit one you might miss a hundred or a thousand before you hit one though otherwise be happy with your you know regular returns and the like anomaly the last few years crushing every other return but every other market but if you're buying brady and gretzky messi ronaldo now we're we're talking about like etfs you know you're buying your blue chips you're gonna get your three or your eight percent whatever it is there's way too much institutional money in the game now it's become an asset class the liquidity i know how much we spend i know my buddy jeff wilson burbank like i i'm fortunate enough to talk to a lot of these guys like i know what they spend i know what i wanna spend and i also know how fast it turns over so i think that based on a lot of those i think it's i still think we're just getting started like it's crazy and us economy is popping right now i mean the the the recession is over just like in two thousand and eight i started a business in two thousand eight and it exploded in the worst economic time ever so there's a lot more positives and then of course it's mainstream the amount of people that i promise you brett watched me on my instagram i was this guy wearing custom suits every day to like live in my actual best life i thought i was fucking right out to lunch that are now first of all telling me i'm brilliant second of all asking if they could buy pokemon for their kids that's the best i lol and i looked i'm like hey look at that thread up top from twenty twenty one when you asked me if i was still smoking too much you know but yeah i think that it it's very important to understand that getting them back to three four or five transactions that's when you know you have lifetime customer i have some amazing amazing data we were having a a a a meeting last quarter and my my finance team showed me a report that showed a five year history of customer and not only do i have an insanely i'm so humbled amount of people still shopping with us from the beginning they're spending more money than ever that's that's a good good sign that's for sure i i think about like this conversation all that we've talked about and we've talked about the business and maybe just like your professional growth like you you made mention like things have changed like you've got more structure you've got some direct reports like you're probably you probably don't have your hands on everything because you gotta specialize your time you're in an office space like through this transition to more professionalized mit inc bring in really talented smart people like how have all of those decisions and those people coming in how do you think that has changed or how has how have you grown professionally through that yeah it's uncanny especially the this year this year we i probably went through this year i've been through probably the biggest challenges of my professional career and some of life like i alluded to earlier this isn't the podcast for it there's a few out there if you google me where i'll tell you my my story about growing up and it's crazy you know i'm not supposed to be having this conversation with you i'm one of those guys you know i'm not supposed to have made it a lot changed for me this year i realized that you know especially the bigger we get i'm not here to be friends i have to be a a good leader a respectable respectable employer you know well i i love to have fun i'm the fun guy so we have team building events and now i show up and do my speech and greet everybody and have a glass of water and leave you know before it was like oh let's get the limo and go downtown you know what i mean so now it's like now you know little things like that and and i'm really i think which is crazy i think a lot more about what i'm gonna say and i've been a really unfiltered authentic very passionate so i'm learning sometimes to just slow down a little bit when i when i'm especially if i'm reacting to something but i i wouldn't be able to do it without the people around me like i said i have these these legacy employees kathy who's our chief of staff she's also my wife she runs life she runs this place she keeps me in line everybody knows it and then i have a a a very very very close friend and mentor and of course my therapist mary like i mean she's a like absolute the best money i spend i could probably use a gym membership but the best money i spend people say oh your health i sleep because people think i don't sleep i sleep and i talk to my therapist on a very regular basis i'm huge into mental health minton had commitment of a hundred thousand dollars to the local hospital in support of youth mental health it was a five year commitment i think after this year which is third year we're already gonna be like almost at it so we're not gonna stop we're gonna keep going and i love to talk about it because nobody talks about it because they're ashamed or embarrassed and i'm like if i did not have her i would not be here having this conversation with you because i would have never been able to get here or i would have imploded you know or whatever but yeah i checked my ego a long time ago this year i'm learning patience slowly is the fastest way to get anywhere and just learning when to shut my mouth when when i started to focus in on my mental health gave up bad habits bad addictions bad things good things in my life started taking place most notably this platform it would never have existed if i didn't get help and look lived in this old world do you find like now that you are seeing someone and you're having conversations and you probably feel a lot more clear upstairs do you do you find like you feel almost unstoppable as entrepreneur yeah it's crazy so again i've been in in and out of therapy my whole life i had a really rocky childhood but way different then it was like you know you're a kid nobody especially we're old like it was way different then there was no i was like get him out of the class kinda the teachers were no good to me one of those this this was much much different i went in with a much different approach i i went in with i have no more ego i have no no more chip on my shoulder i recognize cognitively i see a therapist not a not a shrink i don't take meds or anything like that which nope great if you need it let's get it don't pretend you don't but for me it's the cognitive way of of thinking so i went in with a much different approach i went in with a much more positive okay you know what i i do need this not being it's not being forced on me and i'm dealing with some stuff this year and i've been on extra appointments that's how that's trust me there's a lot of people out there that don't know she's saving them all and and and and i'm talking to her and i'm saying i can't believe i didn't do this and how i didn't go you know get in my car and she's like that's john that's therapy working this is the idea this is you doing what you're supposed to do not being that you know so huge for me and honestly like where we are and where we're going the old version of me you know would've never would've never got us there like i thrive in chaos it doesn't mean i wanna be in chaos and i'm seeing that now the the it's like you said you know you go in with an open mind you embrace the change cut a few things out kind of a little bit more focus and oh my god man like unstoppable is a fucking understatement i i love to hear that i have a couple more to dig into before we get out of here i'm curious like you see a ton you are running one of the biggest hobby businesses in all of canada like an entire country lot of different service lines running around you have your finger on the pulse of this industry probably more than most people like look like what is what is the what is an opportunity right now that you see with inside the sports card industry that maybe most people don't quite see it yet or aren't taking it taking it seriously so it it goes full circle back to the camaraderie i think too many people still look at it as purely transactional look at world cup stickers so you guys are getting like you know i'm seeing all the content in boston so toronto's the one of the most diverse cities in the world soccer's massive here i believe on the brick and mortar side we might sell the most soccer in north america for tops so from a from a cultural perspective and and and you know all of that we're we're you're seeing now with these the events these trading card events people are trading stickers the stadiums are full of people trading stickers i think people don't understand because we lost it like i think we're close in age you maybe are a little bit younger than me but it's like you know the boys and girls club and after school programs and going to play manhunt with your buddies like and we live more and more and more in a world where we're trying to get know just buy it on the screen it'll show up at your door i think people really underestimate the value from a business perspective the roi on spending a little bit of money and creating an environment where people can congregate i think that that's that's missed a lot and then and then i think there's you know anybody in the world of sports that that thinks pokemon is a joke you gotta really look at that again and and the other side of it i get is you know pokemon people will say well where are sports cards because pokemon's here let's remember pokemon is first of all the highest grossing ip of all time people don't understand it's bigger than disney marvel and lucas combined and there's ten or fifteen gamers for every sport so if you look at the the math i mean just open up carladder both markets are are growing at the same pace one's just traditionally a lot larger so that would be the other thing i would say this day and age especially because it's like any business that's hot it's getting competitive i don't know if i you like you can't open again today it's really tough like maybe because you know i'm forty five and i wanna retire and just sell my singles and be that guy like a secondhand shop but you can't at scale like you're not getting tops and upper deck accounts distributors don't have product like you know it's really really tough today but i think that that's two things that people are really remiss on not taking enough investment into events and and opportunities with with their customers to to congregate and then the overlap you can't just do sports you can't just do pokemon you can sure but there's limits limitations so i i would say there's a couple of things just from what i see but again respectfully i don't really you know pay too much attention to what anybody else is doing right from the beginning like i said i went out and i found what i thought were the you know i took the mark cuban approach i didn't have to reinvent the wheel i went in and found what i thought were like one or two best and i said let's just do it a little bit better or a little different and and i think that's the approach we took we took this model and we just did it a little bit different and here we are today and you know we finished runner-up with mantle to burbank for best car shop in in the world which is pretty awesome that's that's amazing since we're in our forties we can remember having vcrs and yeah we can remember hitting fast forward so if we're we've got like the min mininc vcr we're hitting fast forward and we're going all the way like ten years from now based on what you've built and what you're building now what do you hope people are saying about minnink ten years from now so they're gonna say that oh my god this is the absolute you know the ultimate experience in the space they're gonna say that loud crazy guy that talks with his hands knew what he was up to and and and i wanna believe that they'll believe that you know we did it for them hopefully at that point in time you know that's me talking from a beach because there is a point in time where i gotta get paid you know that that goes without saying but nothing i've done to date is is for the cash like i said my wife and i have a great life it worked out the way it worked it's not like i'm you know having to pay for tuitions and this and that i'm not chasing legacy my head is big enough i'm i'm just looking to to leave my mark on a space in a very positive way where people go back and remember especially from the onset we have a lot of day oners that still support us because you know we gave them something that they really needed at a really dark time and i think that that's the mandate and the mission that i i wanna just keep you know getting there and i know there's gonna be people along the way that say i'm full of shit and da da da and that's fine i i got really thick thick thick skin i sleep well at night i know what we're doing is great i know we provide for dozens of people and i think that's what it is it's gonna be like you know instead of lining my pockets and cashing out and this and that we literally just continue to invest and build the greatest you know i'm gonna call it like like i said it from the beginning what what would i do if i was building toys r us again today this is what i would do and we're full we don't just do cards like that's the other thing my biggest piece of advice for any shop owner is diversity diversity diversity we sell lego toys collectibles it was easy for me because the i collect toys and video games and vhs tapes and music and cards so again going back to what i said earlier i just said well i can't be the only one that does that there's gotta be lots of us out there i go to all these shows so let's just build that so now you don't have to wait till saturday once a quarter well now it's every weekend we're a seven day a week ninety nine card show collectible show you come in our store and that's what it is we have everything you want and very knowledgeable staff so that's how i want it to be talked about then and we'll be coast to coast we're right now we're we're opening our third store in toronto in a couple months in oakville and i am in the in the midst today like my next meeting i'm trying to finalize my vancouver lease we're just going back and forth the west coast is different because of earthquakes and stuff much different and and calgary so we're gonna be west coast and then the beginning of next year we're gonna do east coast of canada and quebec so the goal is by this time by q end of q two of twenty twenty seven we are the first national brand in canada which is really exciting i'm even working on something with a few people for the smaller provinces in between because we don't wanna leave places like saskatchewan and manitoba out but obviously you know if you understand the geography in canada the population is really spread out into five or six cities but we can't lose sight of of you know we we wanna have a mint ink in regina and my wife is from prince edward island which is the most beautiful place maybe in north america so i you know it'd be great to go spend listen i can't get away from work i'm gonna go i want a vacation property damn it and my store is there so i'll go to pei and i'll and i'll work that store but you know people say to me too that like you know if if you somebody came along and bought you tomorrow what would you do i'd be like you'd find john's cards and comics on the corner the minute the noncompete was over i will never go back to doing anything again in my life i'm done working this is what i do i'm here seven days a week i love it i i people are like oh you need to do this and like yeah we're off on a boat in a week we're gonna go to japan but it's like in between like i don't what do i wanna do i can watch sports in my office and i'm not working like i don't consider at work that's the part i think people understand they're like you go all day i'm like yeah but it's not really work for me like yeah there's moments of the day that can be stressful but that that's life you know you get a call from your mom she's not well or you get a call from the principal because your kid messed up in school or you get into a fender bender like okay somebody stole from you there was a fraud charge oh the box didn't come big deal let's get on so so it's not work it's a passion project for me if you can't figure that out by now then you're cooked because that's what it is and i think that's my superpower brad if i was to give myself any kind of kudos it's i don't do it for the money so it's really tough to beat us that's an unstoppable position this was a awesome entrepreneurial story here john i very much enjoyed this conversation and looking forward to doing it again very soon i hope so i hope i didn't talk too much i'm known to talk too much but i love it i and i've been pretty good to keep my hands for the most part together but i would love to pick it up with you again we should we'll well you gotta get to toronto and we shoot an episode in my podcast studio we'll get you set right up that'd be awesome i would love to show you toronto and for all your listeners the the toronto sportcard expo happens in spring and fall and after the national it is you know it's a three hundred and fifty thousand square foot card show and it's not just hacky okay it's not hacky everything just like the national's not just baseball anymore so like let's give canada some love and midthink dot c a we ship everywhere your dollar's like forty cents let's go i love it i love it alright man we'll talk soon thanks brett