alright we are back with another episode of passion to profession brought to you by my good friends at ebay i had to call a little bit of an audible this week part of the behind the scenes sometimes guests have something that pops up and we gotta move around the schedule so i used the bat line to call a good friend ryan ryan bannister who's the owner at rbi cruise seven he is someone who i've wanted to talk to on this show for a while ryan is an incredible store owner very well known in this space and he's also been partnering on the stacking slabs network with adam gellman on book to last which is the first and only wrestling card podcast on stacking slabs but we haven't been able to do something like this where we're talking about ryan's career decisions he's made entrepreneurial journey and excited to get into that today but without further ado ryan welcome man how are you great brett thanks man i appreciate you getting on here it's just an honor to finally be on this podcast with you i know you do a phenomenal job with this so to be considered for this even if it wasn't audible it sounds like it was inevitable for for me to get on here so you know what better week you know this is my fourth podcast of the week in four days let's do it you know i'm all in and i'm excited to be here man this is gonna be a lot of fun maybe just off the cuff as you said that like you've been grinding on content and trying to you know create more exposure for your brand like as as this space has evolved how important have you found that to be like how important has making sure you and rbi crew seven is not only like participating in your own content but like jumping on people's shows like how important is that for visibility it's extremely important i mean we wanna continue to brand our name you know we're in this the home we call the home of rva cruise seven the building we're in now which is our third location in fourteen years yeah jeez fourteen years since we've been open i'm sure we'll talk about that so it's cues now that we we are in something that we had built you know the building was already built with the structure but we wanna we wanna make people from across the country and even the world you know they come this way in the midwest to make a destination stop to us that's been our goal our goal is to continue to go to the community here but branding our name as a national name so again anytime i could take this opportunity i'm gonna do it i have an amazing team under me who can do everything that i would do so again anytime i could do something of this magnitude i'm honored to be considered for it and i do appreciate the opportunity that comes my way so i knew of you obviously knew of rbi cruise seven but we hadn't really crossed paths and had too many conversations and before we started to have conversations you know i just heard like we do in the hobby you hear about other people and what people think and you're an individual that like across the board through all my contacts everyone would say like you know he's the nicest guy in the hobby he's one of the most hardworking guys in the hobby just like great reputation and obviously like that translates to us getting to know each other us getting to work together and so i think about that and i think about just like character just as a business owner in the space and i don't know like how do you think about like your reputation and like have you ever thought of like character being a business advantage in this space i mean i'm just being me at the end the day i'm just being who i am i try to be very positive i've had a long journey and there's just no point in this stage of my life to be a negative human being it's you know things do irk you and upset you and let's be honest my favorite wrestlers are heels but at the end of the day i try to be as even keel as i can and just who i am as a person and it translate it builds relationships it builds something that is a lifelong friendships in this industry and not just this industry outside of life i'm just me and i don't wanna be anything different and i feel like i've learned from a lot of people throughout the years you know being in this space you tend to make friends with people you've done this so long as you're a teenager you're getting to know guys in their forties and fifties and thirties and because you guys share a similar passion back in the day it wasn't like there were social media so if you went to a show or a flea market or a shop you you had something you all cared about and that wasn't like you could go online and find somebody so i think i learned a long time ago how to treat people with respect and it resonates so our our business is everything and i want my staff to be the same way i have an extensive retail background so i learned a lot you know throughout doing just things in my entire life just how to treat people and how to be as a human being and and i kudos and i appreciate the what you're saying about that and what people say about me it means a lot to me it shows that i'm doing something right as a human being not just about this industry but just as a human being i feel like i can now pass wisdom down to people that was given to me a very long time ago but let's be honest i'm forty two now who i was at twenty two and forty two are two different people i was still partying in college if there was video and stuff out there of me going out and doing things people would probably think differently of me but again i'm a family man i have three beautiful kids i have an amazing wife i i get to live my dream every day i don't work a day in my life and i work more hours than i'd wanna omit but i love this and i i think when you do something that you love it resonates to who you are as a human being i love that let's let's get into the we're gonna talk about a lot of different topics there's a lot on my mind that i wanna dig into but oh i saw the list i was like i don't think we're doing this in forty five this could be long let's do it we're we're jumping in so let's let's get some understanding from you about like your journey with cards like why cards like has it always been a part of your life like how how did it become your what you do like talk a little bit about your journey well it started when my dad traded car parts c a r to a teenager who wanted to build his car and he didn't have any money but he had baseball cards and this is late eighties early nineties and the second my dad brought him home it just was i was in it i was hooked at that point so my journey started a very long time ago with that and when cards were about worthless however there was one card you always wanted and that was the eighty nine upper net griffey it's still an iconic legendary card so that was the card back then even in the nineties was a hundred dollar card and back then that's a lot of money for an actual card a just a base card but yeah that really started there and then i just never lost the feel for it of course you know high school playing sports and then you get to college but you're still doing cards you're still trying to live the college life the frat life all that type of stuff but i never lost the love for this industry it but i've learned a lot along the way what to do and what not to do and one thing i kudos people is try to keep your finances straight i got into bad credit card debt in college because i love to rip and it took me by storm so there's a lot of stress for those for the years but i've been doing cards for i would say probably close to thirty five years now i would i would say very close to thirty five years if not thirty five years so i have a i have a long background in this industry so what was the point you know you were ripping you were a collector when did you realize that this could be what you did for a living like what was that moment when i set up my first card show when i was twelve years old when i realized that i can make money at this i might have been eleven actually but i set up my first card shows at rittner high school put on by ron estes who actually i co promote the three day show here with crazy how the journey's come along but i just realized like man i can i know i'm smart at this i can trade with adults who aren't as smart as me and i can you know like oh like not rip them up like i i knew how to to make money at a young age and i was a little entrepreneur at a young age i used to sell candy bars every day five six days a week for a company and i would make money and then i would try to spend it on cards you know and i just knew the entrepreneurship was in there a long time ago and it just resonated once you start seeing you could turn five into ten and ten into twenty it it sparks something you know and it was doing something that i love it wasn't anything wrong it was like this is fun but i love this i used to collect the first guy i collected was kenny lofton and that was my guy that's where number seven comes from my guy was kenny lofton neil's guy was jd drew so number seven's my guy and that was the first ever player i ever collected in any landscape of sports cards i still have some kenny loftons in my collection but he was my guy so you know i'm making money but then buying kenny lofton cards and then they weren't my profits but it it i think i knew at a young age that i was gonna do this to make money and i was gonna do this to collect at the same time so when did the i love how i i've i've been it's been on my list to ask you and i didn't know like what the seven came from but now i know kenny lofton which is just such a nostalgic name for people in our age bracket growing up so yes love that so when did when did rbi crew seven open up like when did you open the doors like what was i know you know you've been to a a few locations but like when was that moment where like i'm gonna get space to lease and we're gonna try this out january twelfth of twenty twelve we opened our doors on that day and again luckily i had some people from youtube we started our youtube channel in o seven so we're five years in the making as rbi crew seven so we had people some people traveling for the midwest to be there for the grand opening but we opened up fourteen plus years ago and it was it's nine day what it is now man you you prayed somebody would walk in that door you get excited to see somebody walk in that door we opened up our first shop in forest at missouri which is in saint louis county it's about ten minutes from the airport and we were in a thousand square foot building we paid four hundred dollars a month rent for our first two or three years and then went to like five and then six or whatever but we were there from twenty twelve until the end of twenty nineteen so about eight years stretch we were in force in missouri praying and hoping and as years went on things got better you know but it was a struggle and i it it taught me a lot it taught us all a lot did was there anything specifically like making that decision to open the store that you felt like you had to sacrifice at the time and obviously it looks like it's all worked itself out but what kind of sacrifices did you have to make in those early days my mind my body my soul my hours everything you know it's one of the things where it worked out where my wife she was my girlfriend at the time she got promoted with the company finish line and moved to marion illinois at the same time i was opening my store so we had a long distance relationship per se where i would go see her one day then she would come see me another but i gave away like you know i was grinding seven days a week unless i was spending time with her and it was like from sun up to sun well well past sun now sometimes sun up to sun up you know i would run the shop and then i would go on like blog tv and make money you know we had to do whatever we could to survive back then you know it was not you just didn't have people spending money like they are now we still were doing ebay and check out my cards and everything but it was whatever i could do to make money i mean there was months i four hundred bucks a month there was months i struggled to to cover rent you know we did we were never late but i mean there's times that account got really scary low and you just knew that you had to do whatever you had to do to survive to get through this and it was it was i don't know how many hours a week i worked back then it was unbelievable and i could have done it if i was a father and a husband back then there's no way we would ever be where we are today because there i would not take that much time away from my family i'm very involved in my family i'm very involved here my first baby is this obviously born in twenty twelve my first child was born in twenty sixteen this is my baby but my family is precedent all the time when i'm not working i'm you know with them doing stuff so i love the it sounds like you had to be super adaptable upfront there was no blueprint you're trying to figure this out as this industry is forming today you know if you wanna if you got a little bit of capital and you wanna start making money like there are several other people who you can just follow the what they've done in their path like what what has that been like for you as someone who kind of started early like showing people what's possible by grinding you got a store getting online like you you were trying to figure it out but and you kinda set that foundation that probably a lot of other people in your position or similar positions are doing today like what has that been like for you to see that through it's it's awesome to see some people take things that we did but back then you know i always say the reference you gotta have your eggs in a lot of baskets back then we we would host bimonthly trade nights those were a big hit our first one ever literally i remember the last guy and i were dealing and the sun was coming up in our first trade night my buddies from minnesota drove down and surprised me packed house those were big we were doing beckett grading submissions to make extra money you know we were doing blog tv we were doing ebay we were going to shows i was still traveling when i could and having somebody else run the shop you know it was in everything i could do to keep the money flowing in but it was going out as fast as it was coming in and it's just like i wasn't taking a paycheck i mean literally i was like i just need to eat and then i would get clothes on my birthday and christmas for my wife or my my girlfriend at the time my family like i didn't go shopping i i barely do what i need to do to survive on very low budget to continue to keep the business going but it's great to see we sparked a what i understand a lot of people call us the pillars of what that they followed us from the beginning up and it's great to hear us call us like a pillar of this industry to many other people to see that them them doing trade nights them doing other aspects that we did taking ideas from us but we took ideas from other shops we we're so close to other shops in this community some of my best friends own card shops and we're all working together with one another we're not working against each other if you're working against each other then you're in this for the wrong reasons you're in this for you this is a hobby this is a community we should be building this together so watching a lot of these guys from afar was huge for me because i'm like well that's work that's cool i wanna do that and then people say that about us so it's really cool to see that resonate to other people in this industry and that they really say that you know your passion what you guys did really sparked me to finally open my own store and i love that that means the world to me i have never been in the position you are in but i'm always curious like the method to the madness and you touched on that like investing in money in money out like it's a lot of what i understand and gather from listening to other owners it's a lot of like placing bets and hoping that correct know these work out like how do you how do you think about like throughout the history of you running your business like placing those bets and making sure that more times a night not you're placing bets in the right area that's going to net you a return that you can then and pay your employees pay yourself like buy more product like how do you make sense of all of it nothing of madness is is what we like to say i i mean the the knee now is a lot more wiser about this and i kinda have a good idea especially when we our distributors for years off who always gave us like pre buys meaning like you get allocated a preorder and then you'd be able to buy more at x new price significantly higher usually and i would have to make a guesstimate like how's this product gonna perform and but i could buy extensive volumes of it so i would say i'm like ninety five percent out of a hundred ninety five times out of a hundred i did i made money i was right on but sometimes those five times could hurt but i've done this long enough to know like this should perform here's why it should perform and then sometimes i backed off something and it performed great i mean i'm not always gonna get this right but doing this as long as i have and just studying everything i mean to be honest i couldn't study for crap in college high school i i mean like i was like a c student but when you bring me to here i i am like a study guru i am like everything i can study i'm i'm watching i'm absorbing everything to just to continue to learn i'm learning every day i mean i'm learning and learning and learning and i wanna absorb because i love this space because i wanna be better i wanna see what we could do better i wanna continue to grow that's the biggest thing is like my wife's like okay you got your shop you got your family you got this you got to hang out with randy orton what's the next goal you know and i'm like i don't know maybe get seth rollins to look at my collection no i wanna continue to grow the business you know we wanna continue to grow it more locally than anything and build more relationships in every way i can meeting new people making somebody in this hobby for a lifelong collector not just for the next three months so they can ruin their credit how important is that like obviously like with what you're doing you're super passionate about it you're very interested in it you talked about being a c student but like in this arena it's like you're super curious and you're just wanting to willing wanting to take on more and more and the more you take on the more you understand like the better you can be at being a shop owner in this space you can see and set the vision like how how important has like that like deep down interest and curiosity you have for not only sports cards but building a business how important has that been to kind of driving you to continue to do what you do it's it's everything and the thing is i think the passion that i have resonates to my team here that are unbelievable and they see that day in and day out but most of them are all passionate about this too so them watching me i'd like to think that they're learning from me but i've been able to teach them things that hey like this is how i think things should be done but then they pitch ideas to me and i'm open minded like always open minded for anything like we could be doing something right and what are we doing wrong if we're doing something wrong that's saying bad but like if it's not working fix it we gotta continue to make adjustments to adapt this is the most adaptable thing i've ever been in if you're not gonna adapt in this industry and it's changed tremendously in the past ten years but really in the past five six now you know then again you're gonna die i worked in minor league baseball for the memphis redbirds there's a little story and the i got really close to the gm of the memphis redbirds dave chase back then and he was so savvy on this cell phone this is two thousand nine this guy is in his fifties and i'm twenty what is it two thousand nine twenty six years old at this time or something and i have just some basic phone and i'm like how are you this quick and stuff he goes ryan turns to me i remember sitting in stands he goes i hate it go well you're really good at i guess i absolutely hate it it's not fun i don't enjoy it but the one thing i'll tell you if you're not gonna adapt to anything in life you're gonna die and that's and people say that it's it's not a cliche it would literally is true like this man did not enjoy it there's things that we have to adapt to i don't like but we have to adapt or we're gonna fall behind or we're gonna die and you gotta continue to adapt your business to adapt you as a human being and just life in general but really in this space more than anything that i know you mentioned it the hobby has changed and i can't even imagine in your seat what you've seen since when you started the business to what we're seeing now what are maybe some of those biggest shifts you've seen over the years and if you've had to adapt to them feel free to talk about that obviously the biggest shifts is the amount of collectors that we continue to see in this space is incredible we've seen profit margins at times be amazing and other times not you know back then we couldn't really afford a lot of product and back then like chances are you bought on release day you might have paid sixty five bucks it might have been trending at sixty bucks online you know you were losing money versus now it's like well you're not gonna lose but some profit margins are gonna be great and some aren't some are gonna be a breakeven that's the biggest thing i've seen but just the way that we continue to grow and the more people that come into this space every day every week it's growing it's like it's wildfire it's spreading like wildfire it's everywhere i watched your video the other day with like social media and how it's picking up and it's a lot cooler to see you're seeing more cool cards when cards are hot and you're not versus when like where's the cards at i love that that's a good point because we're seeing more cards walk in just when we moved into this building in june of last year tyson's buying since june of last year he's probably about more in less than a year than he bought in all five years that we were in that previous location in saint peter's it's insane the amount of parts that we're seeing day in and day out but i kudos to obviously the accessibility of it easier to get between it's not just ebay anymore there's ebay commsi amazon whatnot fanatics i mean everything facebook twitter instagram more people can grab it they can buy boxes they can buy singles we're seeing more people bring in but also like kudos to hey what did we buy today get a video out show people what we bought and we gotta process it faster than ever that's probably been the craziest number i could tell you i'm telling you in five years at one location and less than one we bought more spent more and bought more in less than one year than we did in five years in a previous location that's nuts i i want this is i wanna wanna think you're talking through the buying and i know you've got a buyer on your team help us understand like what is the mindset because i think a lot of collectors who are listening to this and business owners like they don't quite understand like the strategy like how do you think about buying like what is the buying strategy at rbi crew seven because like obviously like you're getting dms people are coming into your shop you're setting up at shows like how do you think about buying buying is everything we opened our doors in twenty twelve i was a singles guy again i borrowed six thousand dollars from one of my best friends who's still one of my best friends who stayed since high school by the day i opened i had like a thousand dollars in our account that was buying clay cases everything product but we were like we knew we could put our money into singles and singles is where we could survive i guess is what i should say now it's like okay well we're very diverse we carry a lot of product because we can financially afford to do this but i am still tyson spend as much as you want you and my wife spend my money like it's nothing they're making a joke of my wife but i make jokes all the time i'm like he's like ed ed we just had a rip night at one point tyson calls me over and he's like hey so this guy's got a bray wyatt to three here i'm gonna negotiate he goes i go okay we agree on a number he goes pay the guy he goes i can't what do you mean he goes i've already spent all the money you gave me today i was like give me a minute i'll go back here but i always tell him like you know we wanna buy we have to have cash ready at all times we're it's huge we've gotta buy but what we gotta get better at is processing we're so backed up what pop people don't realize is how much we had on back stock i told one of my guys yesterday nathan go back in our baseball auto see if you could find me in a connor griffin auto found me three connor griffin's just sitting in a box waiting one was a one zero one leaf auto one was a usa sergeant tribes game used jersey auto those will be gone this weekend but we buy all the time and our goal is process what's hot right now like when drake may was hot we gotta get every drake may out we've gotta get anything albert pujols out because we're local but we gotta get aaron judge ohtani we've gotta get better at processing this stuff faster because we're spinning it but we're we're spinning it at a faster rate than we're selling this stuff and our singles is what we started based on in twenty twelve and we're going back to our grassroots yes we're still gonna carry a product we're gonna have this the and stephanie put it best here she goes i've never seen so much wax in one shop this is just insane and i wanna grab every collector i can in that door but we also want people to come up like oh they have singles but we have singles as low as a dollar as high as thousands of dollars you know and they could we wanna grab every collector we can and that's huge and we can't do that if ryan continue only thing ryan likes to rip is star wars and wwe but we gotta carry the other stuff so we have to buy that stuff but we gotta get it processed faster than ever and we do we got three guys that list on the website five to six days a week and if it's on the website it's in our pos system it gets out in the shop it's available to anybody locally and not locally you mentioned bray wyatt to three in that situation with tyson and i think you know obviously this is an opportunity for me to talk wrestling a little is this the wrestling podcast weaned you into it look at that he's waiting for it people people listening to this probably know wyatt langford but they might not know who bray wyatt is obviously like we're wrestling nerds and and we have a podcast about wrestling cards and wrestling cards is such a big part of your brand like how how do you like how do you think about that decision where it's like very niche and it's expanding it's growing but like you have the confidence to buy that bray wyatt out of three in that moment is that is that because like you know your network of customers or potential customers are wrestling fans like you so you have that audience and you know that if it's a national or if it's someone coming into the shop like you know you can sell that piece to someone else because that that's like a a decision that if you don't have like the category knowledge or the the product knowledge like you could end up buying something and you it would just be sitting collecting dust but obviously like you had enough confidence to encourage your buyer to say like we need to get this now like talk a little bit about that we had to get it a nine year old at my house had the one zero one and he had the number three that's the reason why we we had to get it and i think he had a five so that that's a card for my son but you know we we see it we're because we've been so vocal and out there with our love for wrestling and how we want to be i i said this years ago not how many years ago i turned and neil's got a background in wrestling his dad used to wrestle with glenn jacobs kane his dad's character was me mark stone obviously this is before glenn jacobs went up but him and i both come from wrestling passion backgrounds we love wrestling why are we not transitioning this and getting more in the landscape of the scope of wrestling my son got me back into it so but we said years ago there's nobody branding this like why is nobody being vocal like i don't care if wrestling's cool or not cool i love it you know we want to we love the cards we love seeing it but we also love people come in saying i love the fact that you could you have like everything i want you know for the most part you grab me at so we're big on buying the wrestling but yes you know when we have to decide on other things we're not the best knowledge i mean i'll say the weakest sport we are is soccer but i mean we it it's not hard for my guy to do his homework and use cardladder or terapeak or ebay to look up and say hey you know obviously we wanna get every lionel messi we can out erling howlin kylian mbappe but there's guys i've never heard of them and tyson like this guy sells for a hundred bucks well i'm not gonna sell it so we'll send that to mc sports cards mike we can sign with mike a lot on ebay mike and i go way way back he calls me pops i call him son that's how we're back we go you know i'm i don't think i got them by that many years but i got about like ten at least ten to twelve but so but again the things that we don't think we'll sell in our shop or sell online it's either going to commsi it's going to ebay you know to mike it's it's spreading out i have other avenues i'm moving into because we're like we know what works and what doesn't work and then we're like hey let's try this let's see if this works in our shop and if we don't i make notes two weeks still there let's let's get rid of it let's let's continue to flip the things that don't meet our clientele demand versus things that hey i can throw our pool's autograph out and it's going to sell instantly or a week or two or three it's going to sell i know what we'll sell here online and here we sell a ton of wrestling online wrestling singles are flying because we're getting a ton on because i hoard and i rip a lot but i'd said i focused we have to focus on getting as much wrestling cards out from january one through april and after that because we are on the road to wrestlemania and right now you're seeing the hype behind it everybody wants it and it's great that we'll see like an order come in there's a hundred wrestling singles on one order starting at five bucks as high as a hundred and these guys are happy to get it may it be they're putting in a show or putting on a whatnot or they're collecting we're we're happy to provide that stuff for you i think about my return into the hobby you know seven or so years ago and i think you know top heavy by the goats i know you're a longtime lumberon collector but it's like lebron jordan babe ruth brady like all these collect like that's where people gravitated to which is they're the goats like they they should be the magnet but what i've seen kind of over this course of time is it's been more the the hobbies become more segmented and there's been more category focus right you're getting soccer card collectors focusing on soccer there's content around it wrestling card collectors content around it i that's just one of the observations i've i've seen is just more interest like more interest in non sports stuff it's it's fun to see the hobby grow i'm i'm curious like through your seat like what have you seen in terms of like the segmentation and just overall like the customer behavior like how that has evolved and changed over the last few years yeah i mean it used to be cut and dry it used to be people only read football baseball basketball hockey for the longest time that was the main four things that people always read it was it was what was out there and readily available now we're seeing more and more like you mentioned wrestling but then you've got ufc's taken off you have star wars marvel you're grabbing to so many people that either collect it or don't and they're like wait you have star wars boxes star wars cards yeah it's it's a thing it's cool to see that because it's the entry way to get in somebody may walk in because just use top series one baseball for example everybody's like hey i'm not an avid card collector anymore but i've ripped the box of tops since i was a kid i gotta come by series one and then they come in and are like there's this there's that you have halo cards you have there's just so many things that they used to not be able to do and if they did they didn't perform well versus now where you're seeing that change where people can gravitate towards something else and they're like i'd rather rip this because i love it it's fun that's why i rip wrestling and star wars a because we collect people in it my son and i but b i don't care if i get kicked in the butt you know i'm like i don't really care i enjoyed it and if i do it just give me another one but i don't look at it from a monetary standpoint versus somebody going i've gotta rip topsicle basketball i gotta pull the next cooper flag or congynappel i'm trying to make money yes those people are there and that's that's always been there but don't get me wrong i'll divulge in that every now and then but i don't enjoy it i mean i'm ripping it for the rush to hopefully i hit that big card to to make some money but it's not me anymore and more and more people are shifting that way you know people it's hard for somebody to swallow and spend let's just say seven hundred and fifty bucks on a tops chrome box and get back say they had a bad box get back three hundred bucks i mean that's that's a lot you know some people can do that but what if they pull that big ten thousand dollar card chances are to do that they're gonna sell and probably spend it back with us or elsewhere so that's the difference is we're seeing people that want to gamble and people want to collect and we're here to educate any type of collector and that's what we are huge on here is education we want you to walk in the door you may not know something hey leaf has multi sport you could pull curry autos you could pull you know aaron judge autos now you could pull griffey autos you can pull patrick mahomes people are like wait you can potentially get that yeah try it it's a hundred and fifty bucks give it a go you know sometimes it's getting the to people to be diverse and try other things and and price points are huge help me understand with all the channels you've and you've talked about this a little bit with the your your you rely on your team and your people you've got buyer you've got breakers you got people managing online like how do you how do you think about that as the business owner from like what goes up on the shelf the singles what goes online what what we're breaking like how do you think about managing all of that and i know we talked we led with like managing the madness but how do you think about all of those things taking place and also with the responsibility that you have to make money and to make rbi crew seven profitable so not only you know you can support your family but the people who are working for you can support theirs like how do you think about all that i i i think day in and day out and the one thing i would say i'm i'm really good is i'm a people person i'm i'm really i try to see the strengths and weaknesses in people as a human being especially with with our shop and i've learned over the years to go you're really strong at this i want you to put your focus here to this part of what we're doing and you're not so smart here but this guy is you're not smart but strong there i want you to come over here and manage this it's it's like a spider web you know we're trying to do everything we can you know we're a hobby shop first but then we sell online we break online we're you know doing consignment sending stuff off to consignment so it's it's really finding who is the best to delegate that position and finding out what works and what doesn't work and that comes with the people skills the people my staff but again i think you know we continue to grow i continue to make sure that my staff is taken care of with bonuses with raises i think about i'll be at cresembler of the future my goal one day is for my kids to take it over or have neil's kid or matt's kid work here whatever it is i don't want when i'm said and done i would love to see it continue to go but that comes if my family has the passion desire will and they're gonna have to learn what it takes to go to the next level but maybe by then they learn things better than me and i mean there's probably things i'm not utilizing that i should be to make my life easy but you know i don't there's not a day i don't think about the people in my life and it's just not my family it's the people that work here and i have an obligation to make sure that they continue to stay happy here they want to be here but they also wanna be i wanna reward them you know we've grown we continue to grow we're not slowing down but that doesn't mean i'll be ryan bannister takes more money i i mean i don't like to pay myself more i'm like i'd rather continue to put it back into the business and invest in the people that are here because they're what runs us day in and day out we're open right now i don't have to go out there and help anybody because i've got three guys in the four ready to go to help everybody and it's great you know we've trained them all but they're all former customers or family or friends and they get it they're here because they wanna be here they love to be here that's awesome i wanna talk a little bit about an observation i've had of rbi cruise seven and i was thinking about this in just the landscape it's i think i can confidently say that rbi cruise seven while you're positioned in your local community as a local shop and that attracts many different collectors like you also have this national brand where you say rbi cruise seven people know you people know the brand because they saw you at the national or another show or just interacted with you online over the years i think about like andy any card exchange who i know is a friend i think about like ryan card collector too like these are like local shops and local communities but they have national brands like i'm i'm curious like when did you realize that your brand had kind of that national gravity i i still don't realize it i think neil and i talk about this all the time i think we're just like in our head we're still the two guys that started youtube in o seven and we try to stay as humble as we can but it's crazy to hear that people talk about us nationally and like if i'm not at a west coast show and i'm getting hit up by al waxhaw he's like dude you gotta get out here everybody's asking talking about you i see people talking and again all from what i understand all positive which is amazing it does not feel like that it still feels like a dream that we're living to do what we do and what we're focused on is here the customer service you know if you can't buy from us here you're buying from us online we're processing your order if during store hours or maybe a little before within five to ten minutes if that's sometimes less you know we're getting it pulled checked off boxed up your label email and then it's ready to go out the door that day our goal is to give you a hundred and ten percent customer service if you're local or not local and i think that resonates to people who wanna continue to support us but i think they could see from afar like you're afar that what we're building here in a community family fun environment positivity you know i think that's huge and resonates to a lot of other people so it's it's crazy to hear what you're saying but the two names you mentioned ryan johnson andy albert are very close to me we've been friends for a very long time well before ryan opened his doors and you're talking about guys that we all bounce things off one another and andy albert is have been a huge mentor for me i've looked up to andy for years rba cruise seven wouldn't be what it is without andy albert taking me under his wing to teach me not just about this industry but about the way you treat human beings way you take care of your staff the everything andy albert is is the goat in my opinion he and again rob veras is up there as well with burbank i i've got to know rob i've watched him from before rob is doing some incredible things in california and i wanna get out there one day but again we look up to these other people and we're taking things that they're doing and seeing what they're building out of communities and we need to be doing that you know that's something great we don't turn down any kid who comes in or parent that supports us and hey can you sponsor our son's little league baseball team as long as you support us i will do the bare like two hundred dollar two fifty silver whatever and some teams i do full sponsorships based on how much if the whole team's in here you know we're always happy to do that and i don't turn a single kid down as long as you are supporting us i'm happy to support you and i don't know how many lowly kids teams we support year in and year out but it's it's a lot more than i could probably add but i just love it it's way for me to get back and obviously our logo's out there locally but again just hearing the the world that the worldwide but the national level is huge we we put ourselves out there every year at the national i literally build for a whole year to be ready my goal every year at the national is how do i beat last year's goal and every year i'm like there's no way we're gonna be able to do it but i'm gonna try and every year we somehow beat it last year we beat it by twenty percent in sales but again people come to see us once a year they know ryan's gonna have some stuff that he's held back ton of wrestling ton of game used bet knobs bet relics logo man stuff that a lot of times i try not to share everything because what happens is everybody's like will you sell will you sell and i'm like i will come see me at the national you know we wanna we wanna continue to make people say i wait once a year to go to the national and deal with indy card exchange rbi cruce seven sports card junction guys that do the national and have done it forever that's huge to me and it's it's challenging it ties up a lot of your money and a lot of time but i literally love it i live for it every year i've got a couple nephews that are in middle school and every time i see them the first thing the the start of every first story we talk about is hey uncle brett look at what i got at indy card exchange every time and love it and i think about them telling me that every time and then i just think about how many kids that are their age in this community who are doing the same thing and it's kinda like you're building this network and this audience and i think like knowing you knowing andy like there's a a similar mentality just in terms of like coming from a place of abundance like trading notes sharing information and i think like my perception is the most successful owners in this space all come from a place of abundance like you're not trying to like one up someone or do better or take advantage like it's you're you're thinking about it as a community which i think is like from a business perspective it's not something that a lot of people in business are used to like how important is that like sharing of information and that mindset with other people across the country that are doing similar things like you are it's honestly i i mean i'm not saying what we're doing is right or wrong but what we're doing is working and it's making an impact like you mentioned your nephews talk about going to any card exchange same thing happens here with kids when they talk to my my son at school or my wife's out oh you're i went to your husband's shop actually i went to lunch yesterday and the crazy thing was the girl at the lunch we go there about once every couple months she's like i drove by your shop the other day it was like the first time what was going on there was like cards everywhere i go well the funny thing was we look up randy orton's getting interviewed by pat mcafee and i just go to her and i go that guy on the tv was there she goes randy orton i was like yeah you know so it it's cool to hear that but it's massive in my opinion and it's great the shops that want to build the community work together talk to one another you know we all should be working together this is obviously a cutthroat business especially if you're going on whatnot and apps like that but when it comes to a hobby shop and the community and what you can offer versus what somebody that's behind a screen is face to face interaction true conversations getting to know them i mean it's hard when you got a hundred people in your room and you gotta engage with you can't really just engage one on one but when you walk in our shop we're open from ten to six tuesday through friday ten to five saturday and sunday my staff is here to just engage and build relationships we want you to walk in we don't want you to walk out we want you to go you wanna rip here go over there we'll give you all the supplies you need you pull something good we'll maggots you know we'll take care of you free supplies while you rip here it it's huge to build that community and i love seeing it from so many other shops doing it because in my opinion it's the right way to do things you know we're all trying to make a living we're all trying to continue to grow i would think for the most part but if you could do it in a healthy great way by changing somebody's life to make them engage to make them love this more then i think you're you're checking off as many boxes as you can to build a lifelong true collector as you've grown the business how have relationships maybe open some doors for you or how do you think about building and nurturing relationships in this space we've obviously you you mentioned like you know you you knowing ryan and helping ryan as he got up and going and andy doing the same for you like how do you think about just relationships like that you have now and just relationships to be in this space i i relationships are everything and again i i go back to what i was saying we would not be who we are today if it wasn't my relationship with andy albert again that man has taught me so much and i could write a novel on this and i hate to write but i could write a novel on this but you know getting to know these people and i wanna continue to build relationships we've got the tops conference coming up in a couple months in arizona i love going there it's so fun it's so positive but i love the time i spend and get to meet somebody new every year that resonates to a lifelong friendship it's not about oh we're in the same space what can we do to benefit our businesses no it's about what can we do to become friends become just who we are you know and and i look forward and i think of those memories and the time i get to have some man sodas and just be me you know i'm not you know i'm not tied to a computer i got my phone on my pocket i can just just be who i am and who i've been majority of my life you know i'm one of those guys where in high school i got along with everybody i didn't out anybody because they were this or that i mean heck i love baseball cards i was a nerd you know but i played sports i was i was pretty athletic in in high school and college but until people started finding out back then it was kinda like oh ryan does youtube channel then my whole fraternity like flaming for it and i was like yeah but you all struggle to to have money to go out and i'm doing just fine you know and they're like well how do you make money at them i'm like yeah i thought so you know so again i think it's just me being who as i am you know who i am as a person to just get along with everybody you know some of the people in this industry of people don't like and i'm not gonna say names but they see them do something content wise and i don't think they're doing wrong maybe they're not holding themselves correctly but i know that person is individual they mean well they're trying to do the right things you know and a lot of times you put yourself out there on social media you could be scrutinized by anybody i mean we posted that kevin nash turnbuckle and man the negativity on this video it's got hundreds and thousands of views and neil's like every day i wanna pull this video down i'm like leave it leave it who cares who cares like don't think what people think like if you're doing the right things then those people who don't like you don't a know you or b are jealous or just are negative human beings you know like and i try to surround myself with the most positive people i can in my life and that's where these relationships come in andy albert is one of the most upbeat positive guys i know literally i have to sometimes get him to turn a little heel for me you know just i he you know real quick he with getting cooper flagged last week a lot of this happened twenty four hours before i got i'm not gonna go into details but andy wasn't there for the event he was in sarasota with his wife getting a four day getaway together i called him that morning didn't realize he was already there and he was stressing he was going up late last night working all this stuff i said andy do me a favor stop go get a drink you're on vacation he's like it's eleven in the morning i go it's five o'clock somewhere and you need one right now and about two hours later he had texted me he goes mister banash you'd be happy to hear i've had a couple of drinks i'm a lot more relaxed now and i go good enjoy your time with your wife like you need that i but i said andy here's the problem if i was in your position i would need somebody to put some common sense into me like this because i would not just go oh i need to get a drink i need somebody to tell me that and again that becomes the relationship that him and i have very close relationship he lets my family stay in sarasota his vacation anytime we want for next to nothing sometime most time it comes with baseball cards or cards he buys from me he's like that'll cover the rent for the week i'm like cool so again i i stand by relationships i think that's the one most important thing you could do not just building relationships here but around the world you know i think it's huge to build relationships and may it be a shop owner or a collector or an online retailer or a distributor or a manufacturer continue to build those relationship continue to want to meet more people because those people could go to bat for you and i i don't think randy orton would be here if enough people didn't go to bat for me and that's because of relationships that i have for just being who i am as a person and they could see what we're doing here and the passion that we have but i tried to do everything i think is right that's so many good nuggets in there and you mentioned this earlier when you're talking about your your staff but obviously you're in like growth mode you wanna continue to scale and i you know i think part of the reason why people continue to come in your doors right you've got great product and cards but like for the most part like we engage with brands because there's something about that brand that makes us feel good and like part of their foundation is like building a good culture and i think obviously like you're you've got camaraderie with your staff and you can see that just by watching videos online how do you how do you make sure like when you're bringing someone on board like that they're going to continue to be an extension of you or the rbi cruise seven brand that you're building like how do you scale without losing kind of your identity and your culture you talk about as far as staffing wise and family and building staff i have here yeah okay i mean essentially my goal is i'm not hiring you for a month two months a year i want you to be here as long as rba crew seven is is going and staying strong i wanna build a lifelong team member here family here employee whatever you wanna call it i wanna make sure that you're here and that your focus is not looking elsewhere ever i have my turnover rate is extremely small i think people get in here and they realize how fun this is but the behind the scenes can be stressful absolutely it's very stressful for me and some of my staff but i try to reward them as much as i can year round we've got smackdown coming here in april i rented out a suite we're taking everybody there instead of going to a cardinals game because let's be honest they're not putting much of a product on the field my staff majority loves wrestling so we go all out at wrestling you know christmas party we go big we also try to we did a blues game last year but we do things year round and i try to space it out because it's a good building thing that they all can get together and they're out of this space to get to hang out with one another but again my biggest focus is who i'm hiring most of the people work here are either a friend or a family member somebody i knew long or a lot longtime customer that had show interest or we said hey you ever want a part time gig we're actually hiring one of my employees john who's been a part timer for two and a half years he starts full time next month you know that would give us another full time i think we're up to sixteen employees and you know i don't think we need to grow anymore right now because i already said i cannot outgrow this building i will i can never do another move again i will i would rather sell retire which won't happen but that was the hardest week of my life but again you know my goal is to keep that person here because when people come in they come in and see that particular employee and if they're not here that may send a customer elsewhere well that's the reason why we came here was jeff jeff loves leaf you could see his passionate out tyson's great he buys you know everybody has a different personality but they're all great and that's huge to me you know we we wanna keep those people around we don't wanna lose that person because they have a relationship with all of us too you lose a part of the family you know and and that's huge but i've had to let some people go over the years not many but sometimes people overextend their welcome they sometimes change who they are and you have to make a business decision and you gotta think what's well-being for your staff and your growth but i i still am close to some of those people i still think hey this isn't working for you as a person but i think you need something else and that person was an important part of our business for many years and he's doing great in life we keep in touch i'm happy for him and you know it doesn't have to be here he'll pop in every now and then it's still how are you but i knew he just wasn't in it anymore it wasn't there there was just something else there and he needed something else so i was like i've known you a long time i'm gonna give you ample amount of time to find something because i'm not just gonna say you're gone you know but this isn't working and you know it's not and i don't want this to be this me and you we go back twenty years you know i want you to be happy in life so whatever you gotta do find it and i think that's huge too is is if they're not if somebody's not doing something really wrong as far as stealing and theft and stuff you know i think you should keep those relationships unless things just go really south you should take a look at those people down the road and see how they're doing is there anything specifically that you think about just in your years all the moves all the ups and downs with the market like a moment or a season that really tested you and as an entrepreneur you really had to like reflect and consider like how you push on or move forward from whatever this instance was yeah when covid first happened we had moved into our shop we opened up in january of twenty twenty and we went from a six hundred dollar a month rent to sixteen hundred again big jump but we we're closer to home we got a bigger unit we've got we knew we could do more out this area versus where we were so we opened trade our first ever grand opening massive big hit like chris kelsey and wade rogers and nascar drove in for matt canaday and his wife katie from griffith i mean people are traveling from afar to be here for this grand opening it was awesome it was an amazing day we had this key master mini i'm like this is gonna be awesome and i'll never forget where i was when covid happened i'm driving to chicago for the chicago sports spectacular i'm going up even though hearing what could happen at this point the show is still on i went up there to do a deal to get the lebron james michael jordan exquisite dual patch auto from i can't remember what year but i gave up cash in like a twenty nineteen twenty prism basketball hobby case to get this card i said we're going up there and we're getting this card even if the show cancels long story short thursday drive our stuff up get a call an hour later show's canceled get your stuff thanks shane so then we come back we have two of my staff members are pregnant with sorry one of my staff members' wife's pregnant with a kid and my wife's pregnant with my son and we had to then go okay we gotta think of the well-being here covid's a new things we had to show her to shop down for two weeks and we neil and i were like we gotta make money our website's still selling not to what it is now so i had to come out of breaking retirement when we started rvacre seven zero seven neil and i were breaking we're breaking for years i did it forever i don't break anymore so i came out of retirement because i couldn't be around my staff neil and i were the only ones we we talked to our wife said as long as we're in there so i basically at this time didn't have a lot of full timers we were still kind of a part timer thing we had it crying to do what we could we had to go break live we had to do these things and it was scary you know and then i'm seeing this it's not doing this it's doing this for the first two to three weeks a month and then all of sudden it just started doing this and then boom it went like that and i kudos to being at the right place right time having allocation and investing back in the business but it was it was a scary month it was what's going on i just made a life decision i have a family at this time i have two two children a wife my wife was still working at this time she was the breadwinner at you know making all the money and i was making a little bit you know to where we could make my part but it was it was scary man you just didn't know what was gonna happen next and then we obviously the rest is history that's amazing are there are there any specific decisions you think about the course of your run here that you would say like i'm the most proud of doing this probably continuously investing and when people were getting a lot of money in the cards they never had it i know a lot of people were not spending their money wisely they weren't reinvesting they don't there's things they don't own anymore i'll leave it at that but i think i was like hey we come from the mindset that we started we had nothing and i would spend every penny i have to get to the next level and i still have that same mindset to this day i kudos to what i did before the blowup was investing in a lebron james autograph cards upper deck and at one point i had a hundred and twenty five different lebron james upper deck autograph cards back then was buying for two three four hundred bucks you were buying patch autos for less than a thousand exquisites ties were different but i did this and it was the best decision i ever did because the building we're in right now is paid off i own it i don't own a bank my other business i have two llcs i had mc sports cards mike and matt fang help sell off a lot of my not all my collection a good amount and a lot more lebron james autos to help fund this because i had raised a bunch of money consigning with him and i saved and then i was gonna get the bank funding for the next part well they wanted all this stuff right before the national and i was like i i was stressed out i'm like what am i doing like i was just on the phone with mike he goes well cash advance you he's like you got stuff for us so i was like okay it was the best decision i ever made because investing in that i enjoyed it for years now other people got to enjoy it obviously they've continuously gone up but it worked down the end something that i believed in it's my favorite basketball player of all time i collected because i wanted to collect him but it came to a point where i'm like do i need a hundred and twenty five i got my dream card years ago from mike the exquisite rpa i'm down on that one but i was able to just buy another one in january at dallas i have two now and i never thought i own one let alone two and now it's like woah i have three kids am i really really considering this like but again you know i i pivoted you know i made decisions i now invest in other things as much as lebron as i used to but that was huge for me man it was it was something where i wasn't sad to see a lot of it go i kept the ones i wanted to keep but if you could have told me i could have bought a building paid it off and still got a lebronx swiss rpa still have some ones i have i'm like done in a heartbeat and that's what happened you talk you talk through that story and and we're we're gonna round the corner on this chat soon but i i want you to like help us all understand because at me as a business owner in this space i do this and i get so much satisfaction out of it but like maybe talk about the fact that like you use cards as an opportunity to generate revenue to make business decisions for your business like how fun is like that like that side of taking like a part of your personal collection and saying you know what i love this card but it's time for it to go because i can then go use the proceeds of that to invest in something for the business like how much fun is that to me it's somebody told me this years ago he said you know he had he was a chiropractor he actually chiropractor for the saint louis cardinals still and it was mardi gras one year we're hanging out with him and he's getting his cards out he's having a party at his house he lived down there in saint louis in souillard and he gets his stuff out and you know and he's showing us and the only people in the room that care are neil and i you know he shows his cards and other guys are like why do you do that and he goes why do you play the stock he's like because i make money he goes well this is stock in the physical form and it resonated with me i was like light bulb like i would rather do this than put into stock i knew absolutely nothing about you know so it came to the point where i'm like i invest into things but again i started collecting kenny lofton then i collect a guy named sean king that didn't pan out i used to collect mean i made a lot of bad investment decisions i i still make collector decisions to things i'm like i don't wanna sell any of my ortons i don't wanna sell this but i make strategic good business decisions a lot to invest for a long term i think babe ruth is grossly undervalued i have been picking up babe ruth for about three years now i have an extensive amount of really iconic cards more or less memorabilia or cuts but it's nice to know that the investments i'm making for doing this so long the goats as you would say they seem to just continue to go up what i what i one thing i give people advice is nathan wanted this albert pua's diamond icons autograph he's like i have to have it i was like let me try to put on the shop he's like okay because if i don't sell it a couple weeks gonna be a better deal it's sold like first weekend and i put turn to him i go why did you need that he goes i i thought it looked good i go they're gonna make that car next year and the year after and the year after buy something unique buy something that you got it and you're like if i'm moving this i'm upgrading to something else and that's what i continue to do is what can i invest in that is not gonna be if it's gonna be made okay a babe ruth cut every year it's a babe ruth cut it there's one babe two three a year and how many pools autographs come out in a year you know i i think that's been the most fun is is seeing what i invested into it and the roi i bought last year i came in the national i bought it from my buddy brian he's a great friend of mine i set up in the national i had jordan rookies from a three to a nine in my case and i bought those three months prior and they shot up in the time that i threw them in a box here we are fast forward i'm doing the same thing but i bought a jordan eight in october for ninety five hundred at a show threw it in a box i moved it two weeks ago to a great guy named darius and they're doing like twelve k now you know and it's just but the goats like things like that it's like i think i've done this long enough as long as the industry is doing this the people coming into the space don't really understand the prospecting aspect let's be honest i used to prospect baseball prospects tell you stories about that quarterbacks i got yeah you know how that goes but most people coming in who have money that see all these peep big people like shine and all these other people buy these big go karts they don't wanna buy probably not wanting to invest in connor griffin even though he could be the next big thing they're just going straight to tom brady ohtani babe ruth michael jordan lebron james steph curry let's be honest messy we could keep going all day but those things most of those cards based on what they are the right ones are gonna continue to do this i mean this is what it is and it's great having that knowledge it's i call it an advantage because i'm like hey we're putting that back for the national well we could sell right now yeah we could sell right now but then we're gonna get we're gonna make twenty thirty forty hundred percent two hundred percent more by then you know we we know things that we're gonna sell to national i'd rather make more money down then and i have other things of that guy that i could sell right now that are gonna sell and shop so much wisdom before i let you get out of here ryan a lot of people listening to this show maybe have aspirations to go start a hobby business himself whether it's you know spend more time on the road setting up at shows maybe open up a hobby shop open up something online what what is like one key piece of advice that you'd share to anyone who's thinking about kind of taking what their side project or their side hustle and doing it full time i mean couple quick ones rinse and repeat you gotta have capital but you gotta put your if you're starting off put the collectability aside put the collector new inside if you gotta put the business first because if you go to invest into that card you're gonna keep you just took money out of your business unless it's something you're like hey i wanna invest this for down the road keep buying and flipping keep doing what you can to get to the next level that's how we started we started traveling shows that's our main crew seven was traveling shows then youtube then was a shop but still travels and dutch shows not as much as i used to but i think that's the biggest thing is you gotta keep the capital going because it go it goes out faster than it comes in trust me it goes out faster than it comes in but if you're just doing shows put that mindset you gotta grind you gotta be dedicated you don't look at your clock and go i don't wanna work today i don't wanna put the hours in man if i didn't have kids and a wife i i probably would just be a workaholic nonstop they ground me and i'm glad and it gives me a life outside of cards and i'm looking forward to this saturday we're having a big elimination chamber party it's gonna be seventy degrees outside we've got our back patio set up we're gonna i'm gonna throw bags of my neighbors have it on the tv out there people inside but not to get in a tangent but it it grounds me to help me but i think you have to put in everything you put out i gotta give a shout to ryan curtis sasquatch he's from a indy boy area and he is out there just grinding alex truss their army atc twenty two out there grinding doing stuff these are guys i've known a long time look at them look at what they're doing two great examples from watching these guys grinding across the country day in and day out weekends follow these guys one of my good friends jason sports car junction who's not as equipped on social media and has it man that guy is always on the road he's never home but again his wife his kids are older they're he's in his later forties you know he can do that get out there and grind go out there strategically find these shows the best shows i think you need to go to are the smaller ones i think that's where you you need i i you know what i love to do digging a bargain boxes i can't do it anymore i freaking love it i literally can dig through doubt you're talking to a guy who has a lot of things i i think there's nothing more exciting to dig in a dollar to five dollar bargain box like ryan johnson does and finding that oh my gosh this is this is like a hundred dollar card i just got it here for a dollar you know that that's a thrill i still have that mindset and it's not about the big like oh it's gotta be big gigantic cards it it every card has a value maybe some may be worthless some may be just donate or throw in the trash you know but everything has a value and you gotta get out there and try to utilize your opportunity while you're out there on the road you have the show you're at you have this chance to go out there take full advantage of it and just continue to grind this is ryan bannister rbi crew seven awesome chat man i'm sure we'll be talking wrestling but looking forward to maybe doing another one of these again down the road absolutely no this is a lot of fun man i i really appreciate the opportunity and it's woke me up thank god i need to wake up today so take care man you too man