what's going on everybody welcome back to passion to profession brought to you by my good friends at ebay another exciting chat here this week i was just telling today's guest it feels like i am seeing his brand pop up in more places each and every week whether it's content on socials at shows and wanna talk about how he and his team has made that possible today i'm joined by karn rai who is at slab sharks and part of the founding team at slab sharks we're gonna dig into his story the business and everything in between but karn welcome how are you i'm good good how are you brett it's a it's a an honor to be on your show i've i've kinda followed along in the shadows so it's very exciting to to be here i'm i'm glad you're excited i'm excited we have not spoken so it's always so much fun for me to learn from business owners and operators like you and the approaches you've taken and hopefully we can tell your story and kinda understand your passion but maybe just out of the gates you know typically how we kinda dig into these is you know before we talk business let's talk cards you i gather just a lot of passion from just the research that i've done and everything i've read about you maybe talk about your just like history in cards and collectibles like start from an early age like what's your background with cards yeah look i love i love cards right i've been i've been in cards for for a long long time my first time at the sports card expo which is the national of of canada was when i was ten years old and i'm thirty three now so it's been twenty three years since i've been a a true true collector and purveyor of of just sports cards and trading cards so i started off obviously my first kind of forte in in into sports cards just through my older brother he collected a a hockey hockey cards which is you know the the predominant space in in canada and i would actually you know rip up his cards like i would take when when he was in school i was a young kid i would go through his binders and like rip them and throw them around and and he would come back from school and and just be irate at me and and yell at me and i i think that's kinda where i first learned the emotional connection and attachment to cards because he would get so angry when i was like six seven years old messing with his cards and then you know i kept on just kinda seeing them everywhere and then slowly i started reading the stats on the back and then slowly i started getting my own pack packs of cards and obviously i'm i'm a nineties baby so pokemon was a big thing too i remember my first fossil pack in ninety nine we had a a convenience store around the corner and and i would pick up pokemon cards there and then there was a what we call a max milk in in canada there was one around the corner where where i lived and i would pick up back in the day hockey packs some packs that you know people probably don't even remember anymore like piece of history which was an unprotected product in the early two thousands they would always have that pack available for sale i would like you know do little errands around the house get like six seven bucks and and open the packs and then slowly in my basement my brother had his man cave and i had my little room and i would start putting up cardboard with the pieces of tape on the wall and and then i would listen to the nhl radio on nhl dot com listen to my favorite team at the time which was i was a lease fan and a colorado avalanche fan and the adshot dot com used to have radio broadcasting at the time for free and i was this little you know nine year old ten year old eleven year old kid and i remember i used to just listen to the radio listen to the avalanche which is the era of like peter forsberg hey duke and alex tange and i would just go through my cards and that's what i would do every every every day literally and my brother left me with thousands and thousands of cards which he moved on from so it was me kinda rediscovering it all and then it was kinda just like my parents knew i i loved cards and my aunts they would never buy me cards though i would have to buy buy myself cards in they thought it was a waste of money honestly so they would never do it but my aunt would come she lived in montreal and i'm in toronto she'd come once a year and she'd give me fifty bucks and it was like the greatest thing ever a local flea market i'd go buy a bunch of packs and that's kinda where my story pretty much started just the same story that a bunch of other people have and i remember even being on ebay when i was in grade six and i used to look at cards and be like wow jersey card is only a dollar fifty on ebay and like i didn't have a credit card and my parents didn't believe in it and i i would always like envision the day where i get a credit card and and i can like hop on ebay and and start buying things and i eventually ended up doing that in like grade six or seven was my first ebay account so i was kind of like that kid that has been in this industry even moving online trading since i was a young kid so that's kinda where the the journey started on a passion level and then when it became you know something i started really seriously investing into was in twenty sixteen or twenty fifteen when connor mcdavid and and austin matthews in in the hockey world had their key rookie cards released had a little bit of money at that point i was you know in university so i started you know kinda grinding away to pick up on on their carts you know driving two hours to go pick up a a twenty dollar deal on kijiji and then i started you know flipping a little bit to to create a collection for myself and then slowly i started building one of the you know more impressive i'd say hockey collections here in canada and and slowly that that builds up your reputation in the space and started doing other pieces of business and got to a point where where we got pretty sizable so yeah that's kind of the origin story i love it let's maybe talk about hockey and hockey cards before we dive into the slabshark's build it is so fun for me to talk with canadians and the way canadians talk about hockey cards and hockey is this is this is us this is what we collect this is our primary collection and you know in the states you know there's basketball football you know all these other sports that primarily have the attention and entrance of the consumer base but you talk about the expo and i see the social from the expo and it's like you go through all the showcases and it's primarily hockey cards because that's the market and that's what people who are attending that show want like what's like what is that dynamic like being in toronto being in a country that hockey is the number one sport but then looking across at the us market and understanding like hockey's big but hockey is not you know first second third maybe fourth like what's that dynamic like for you as a lover of hockey and hockey cards yeah it's it's it's interesting because hockey cards are like huge in in canada there was a real real market ever since i was twenty fifth ever since twenty fifteen when i really got into it it's always been this kinda hidden market it's not a new or emerging market it's been big for a long time a lot of transactions just didn't happen in the public sphere so there wasn't a lot of data and i think americans kind of thought it to be a lot smaller than it actually is and even today it's a lot bigger than it looks like there's actually a lot of huge cards transacting on on a daily basis and you can see that with the toronto sports card expo when you go there there's thousands and thousands of people and it's second to the national and and that's a kinda that's kinda big deal but in general just it was more of a close knit community right so there's a lot more trading a lot a lot more you know everyone knows each other everyone understands what each other is looking for so being that little brother to to american collectors it's it's always been a nice little you know pond to play in because it was easier to you know collect some of the bigger pieces and grails it wasn't as expensive to be you know a top ten collector in in the space it was easier to to build a name for yourself as well in the hockey card world but there's so many grails locked away and that had never been publicly seen never been publicly transacted and that was the opportunity i saw with slapshark so i think there was a liquidity issue in the sense that no one really wanted to ship their cards no one really wanted to auction their cards with american consignment services or auction houses and so you didn't see a lot of action or data when you went on cardladder or whatever resource tool you went went to look at and due to that lack of data despite all these transactions having having happening privately people were worried about buying hockey cards because there was no comp to make you feel comfortable or confident in a purchase because a comp might have been six months old or two years old so people didn't really know how to track the pricing and that actually suppressed card values as well because if the last sale if there was one sale six months ago at six hundred dollars now you're you're scared to go to six ten you're you're gonna offer five eighty or or six six zero five for that card that data wasn't there wasn't enough velocity in that data to really increase the prices as much but that resulted in a lot of people being able to build some impressive collections that still exist today in canada and i think slapshark has now provided hockey data to the market and there's a lot more velocity due to that hockey data and you're now able to chart cards and and and trends and and people are more comfortable transacting because of it let's go back to the twenty sixteen when you said mcdavid matthews like you were on a pursuit of getting their grails and best cards and so there's this desire i would imagine like you're you've told your story you're passionate about hockey cards and you reach this level where you're like okay i have the ability probably based on just professional background you know income level to be go chase some of these bigger cards that i wasn't able to as a kid so in your pursuit of these you're meeting people you're trying to understand how the market works finding out where all the grails are and so you notice probably this opportunity to create something that doesn't exist maybe tell tell us the story of karn as the collector going out and trying to find these grails and then this idea popping into your head where you realize like canada isn't serviced the same way as the us market or maybe another market and this is where an opportunity might be for an entrepreneur like yourself yeah well one i think in terms of the pursuit of grails and collecting there was so much arbitrage earlier on right just social arbitrage as well i used to there used to i used to tell a little joke like in in the earlier days you could go into us facebook groups buy a card and go into a canadian facebook group and and sell the card on the same day or the day after and no one would know that that card was on sale in the facebook us group because there was no globalization at that point of of of the communities everyone was very segmented and segregated and that was the same thing with social arbitrage right there was a lot of people that didn't know how to enter auctions even pwcc auctions on ebay there was a lot of issues in terms of a canadian going after and bidding on those cards maybe even a golden auction maybe even heritage or memory lane there are so many different auction houses that were existing and had grail hockey cards show up because there are american collectors of hockey cards that had grail pieces and they would use american facebook groups or american auction companies and if you didn't have the ability to sign up for those auction companies or you didn't know you were able to acquire grilz for an extremely low price and there was a lack of information exchange to to really have that to a mass market which is completely different today right so now everyone knows everything every canadian knows to go check golden auctions or a fanatics collect auction every canadian is a part of all us groups so that arbitrage has has minimized to a point where there is no you know leg up if you have more information even relationships for someone like myself i was going to the national since twenty sixteen twenty seventeen so i had american relationships i had relationships with consignment companies and and brokers in the the american space and i was the canadian hockey card guy so anytime that a big hockey card came in their direction there was only a few places you go to to contact to to sell that card to and i was one of those guys so i was able to you know have that premium level information exchange for from americans to canadians as well and i i saw that i saw that there was a huge kinda gap in information between the two countries and that and then that there was a liquidity problem in canada people didn't really have an option to go auction their cards there was always the you know rhetoric of why would i sell in canada when there's a huge company in the states but ninety nine percent of the the hobby in canada wasn't being serviced with that ideology so that's kinda where i saw the the gap to be filled and there was also other reasoning you know behind a consignment service not operating in canada and that was you know some legal problems as well that pertains to ebay for example prior to twenty twenty two if you were a business it's consignment service you had to charge sales tax hst which is thirteen percent in ontario and canada to anyone buying from your service but if you were an individual selling on ebay you'd have to charge sales tax so up until twenty twenty two the playing field wasn't even so there would be no reason to start a consignment service because no one would wanna buy from a consignment business where you would have to pay thirteen percent more to enter that auction you would just buy from you know you know an individual selling instead but in twenty twenty two obviously the canadian government kind of hunkered down on ebay and and started making them charge sales tax to every purchaser and that even the playing field for a business to enter the space and me and my team we saw that coming so we were first to market we started our business three four three or four months prior to this law change and we're we were kinda able to to make ourselves kind of the the premier consignment service in the in the country or very very early on so that's kind of where it all transitioned from simply you gotta love it when government regulation gets lifted and opens the door for business operators to cook so it sounds like that's where you stepped in and i wanna get to that but you said something when you were talking about your reputation and building your brand in this space as being a individual in canada which people would turn to for big card that they knew you as a big big card hockey guy and so i think that's just something that just is important to call out and certainly something that doesn't just happen overnight i would love for you to maybe obviously you're buying big cards and i don't know if you had social and you're posting them but what were the things that you did during that time to earn the reputation with so many different people businesses and sources that gave you the confidence that when you know the government regulations got lifted you felt ready to go like you felt ready to start slab sharks what what were those maybe foundational or fundamental things that you did to kinda build that reputation yeah just doing good business right always doing good business trying your best to you know do what is required in a in a deal so that's you know in a in a in a area where that scales to thousands and thousands and thousands of deals like quite literally i was selling thousands of cards on a on a yearly basis and you start having you know purchasers that vouch for you and and and trust in you and then i obviously had my own facebook group in canada as well that i ran and i ran it in a in a professional manner you know modded it really well dealt with you know situations publicly and and i think my reputation grew from there and then also all the status that comes from being a collector as well and and people seeing your journey in developing a collection people you know start seeing that to be trustworthy and just treat everyone with you know respect and make sure that you know everyone that is dealing with you would trust to give you a thousand dollar card and expect to be paid for it so at the end of the day that's what consignment service is we have cards here that are intaked and our consignors are waiting to be paid after the auction is over that requires a level of trust and integrity that you know is hard to buy or obtain without years and years of experience in the space and understanding that this person is serious cares about his professional reputation and knows how to handle situations that could be spin negatively as well there's obviously when you're dealing with a lot of personalities in this space you're gonna find yourself especially at scale where people are gonna be you know unhappy with a scenario whether it's in your control or not so even being able to navigate those situations they're a little tougher people are able to see that and see how you're able to operate in in good times and bad times and being in this space for for ten years i think i've shown that people can be confident in the way that i i operate and and my business and the fact that i'm in this in the for the long term and i believe in cards in general and i actually love and have passion for cards and i understand this space in so many different angles i i get why people collect lower end cards i get why people collect certain players or obscure collectibles and that stuff matters because i think emotional connection is extremely important in this space and when you when you kind of detract away from that and think it's just financial even though i'm in a financial services kind of service our business is about liquidation it's also understanding that sometimes people are giving away a piece of themselves when they're selling a collection and you have to understand that it's not just a widget it's not just something that's fungible for for a consignor it's something that matters to their lives and something that they're gonna keep caring about even after a sale is over so then you end up becoming a little bit of a a therapist at the end of the day too being a a business person in this in this space and i think it comes with comes with the fact that we're we're dealing with emotions that's what we're buying and selling and and it's important to to showcase that you understand that so i think that's where where i was able to kinda really separate myself i love this the these are things that i think about all the time i'm just curious and this is me getting ultra nerdy on the psychology with of business and people do you find as someone who is i'm sure you're never you're never not building relationships and connections do you do you find that you are when you are talking to a prospective slabsharks customer and you understand that you this might be a business or this might be a individual who you want obviously to continue to send submissions to you do you find that you are having to maybe adapt the way you communicate with them based on this is a long time collector and they're probably sending me stuff because they just bought a grail and they're consolidating versus this person's just here to make a bunch of money which is totally fine but they don't really care about the cards they're just using my service to to liquidate like there's so many different types of people doing a lot of different things in this space do you are you constantly like trying to understand the motivations of the people who you're working with on a regular basis yeah you know i i try i try my best to protect my piece at the same time i think that's extremely important i don't want to you know get too emotionally involved with every every consignor we have thousands right so that's that's the honest answer is i want to create you know a structure in our business that my employees and my my staff they they are able to go in and provide you know more of a a a emotional connection with our consignors on my end i do sift through it and i see okay if this is a consignor this happened at at the expo there's a consignor that consigned close to a million dollars of cards with us and that's a circumstance where one of my employees called me and said hey this is something that i think you need to deal with or or handle call the boss man yeah yeah i came over and i got to speaking with with the gentleman and i i learned his story and i understood what what he was doing with his collection why he needed to sell it why he wanted to sell it and that definitely plays a role so in that circumstance i i felt you know i could see it in his eyes like as he was giving giving his collection to us he was going through each card one by one before handing it over to me and you could see that he was going through his memories as he was kinda giving them up and at that point you for sure one hundred percent feel connected to that collection as well you wanna you know pervade in in the best way possible and and you wanna be sure that you know you're keeping in touch and in contact with the gentleman and and not to say that's just because it was such a large collection and we don't do that for everyone that's the point you try to be as emotionally disengaged to the consignment element but emotionally engaged with the consignor anytime they have you know a question or a concern so it's a fine balance of trying to balancing both but definitely you wanna i think it's you know when you do understand what your consignor's angle is it helps with the business it helps how to navigate and speak to them how to how to treat the conversation are you talking more about hey what do you think this card's gonna go for or are you talking more about hey this is how i'm gonna care for your collection and how i'm gonna you know make sure that people specifically know about this card that you really care about maybe we make a special video on that card for example one of the cards that we received was the out of four titleist gretzky cup from o five zero six and that's a card we made a video for because it's a card that i understand a lot of people don't get or fully understand the significance and history of the card and the consignor you know gave me his story and and kind of emotions about that card and i wanna convey those emotions to the public so we made a nice video on it explained why it's so special and and that's kinda what what happens when you when you speak to and understand the angles of of a of a person consigning and on the flip side if it's just someone who who bought it for twenty grand he's bought and he's trying to get it for twenty five and the comp's at twenty five you just give them the confidence that yeah you're you're gonna get close to that comp you know so i think you just the speaking is a little bit different on on each consignor for sure how important do you think content and storytelling has become to cards and cards through consignment and auctions i think i mean you we just look at the card ladder monthly totals every you know every month it's just insane the numbers the industry's doing which it's not just big cards it's volume like it's not just ebay it's everywhere it's just there's cards on top of cards and even me as someone who's like very habitual with my saved searches and looking across platforms i miss cards and cards slip through the cracks but you get cards from you know consignors that mean a lot to them and probably mean a lot to the market because they've just never been sold before and people because they've never been sold before might not have any context like the gretzky on why they matter and why they're important like and so this is where i think there's an opportunity for content and people to tell stories of of those cards to to educate and to kinda maybe turn the light bulb on to anyone who's not super nerdy and in the weeds and doesn't have any context for why certain cards matter so maybe just like share some perspective there like it's evolved a lot over the last three years and just like how do you think about like that storytelling component when there's big cards that come through slab sharks yeah absolutely i think it's extremely important i think that's what snaptricks does really well as a canadian company especially we do engage with american influencers we do engage with canadian influencers we to tell stories on on on cards that we have and of course when you have ten thousand eleven thousand items in an auction you're not able to tell a story on each each card right so that's the the that's the hard part i wish there was a way to tell a story on each card imagine you know clicking an audio button on each card and and someone's the ai is telling you how special each card and the whole auction is that'd be great but at the same time there are certain cards that are not special and certain cards that are right so there's per there's but every card is special to a consignor right so that's why it's extremely you know hard to to balance but we try our best and we do that by you know engaging with influencers engaging with a level of marketing and and doing our best as a company to care about socials right to care about the followers on instagram to care about how our auctions are relayed to the market because in at the end of the day we can't market and tell a story about each card but what we can do is make our auctions really easy to find really easy to funnel through really easy to to to see on this on socials and that allows buyers to then have you know a focused vision on on the flapstrek's auction knowing that our auctions are every thursday knowing that we have an apex auction that's highly curated and then you always have you know personal conversations as well so i have people texting me you know on every thursday or wednesday hey karn like what kind of cool cards are in your auction this week and it's easy for me to let them know to download our app slapshirks on the app app store and that's an easy way to funnel that kind of personal narrative building on our own auctions and then when people have personal questions on a certain card i'm i'm always there to kinda let them know my my thoughts on it and and that's through just relationships and and creating stories with individuals and not just the mass market so i think that's a a key component in ensuring that you know the narrative is brought to the entire auction the story is brought to everyone's cards rather than just individual cards we still do that but i wanna get to a place to where where you can build as much as you can a a narrative and storyline behind each card and that's why we we've launched that apex auction which is our highly curated five thousand dollar plus auction that we do once every four months that auction has a three d video for each card it's it's especially placed on our website there's a ability to you know rotate the card with a click and drag feature so people can really dig deeper into each card and and really you know tell their own story about why they wanna bid on it or not so it's it's extremely important for sure so the apex auction this there's this competition where you've got other consignment shops doing big auctions on ebay you've got all the other marketplaces we as collectors have more options than ever before on where we send our cards to sell like how do you think about attracting the right cards for an apex auction and build the confidence and build the trust with those consignors to send their cards to slabsharks like what's your mindset and mentality to you know attract yeah bigger cards and new collectors i think it's people see our you know our ability to be really refined and actually care about our options right and they understand what our business is good at they understand how intuitive our app is to use in our portal system they have a lot of trust in the payment process and the fact that you know our app works so well you're able to see where your cards are at in in a real time you're able to see scheduled items you're able to make changes to the listing our customer service i used to be wearing all the hats of of this company and i used to be the one replying to every message i used to be shipping out the cards i used to be pit i used to pick pack i've done kinda every element of of its business and as we've grown we are at about forty two employees now i've made sure that each kind of employee that's trained and and taken over my old positions deal and handle things the same way that i did as i was doing this as we were growing and that is making sure that all emails are are replied back to you extremely quickly like twelve hour twelve hours maximum phone calls we have a phone line so we have customer service where people call we have twenty thirty phone calls every single day and we have a receptionist that actually picks up the phone call and through time she now is able to you know answer a lot of questions on cards knows our process perfectly and and that's an experience that i don't think a lot of auction house and consignment companies offer is the fact that you can just call us and and see what's up and that that's a great way to kind of connect with the customer we also have you know appointment drop offs people are able to actually come into our office and drop off their items and they they know exactly how our process works and what our standards are if you drop off an item on tuesday it's gonna go up on the same thursday and that allows you know for that customer connection to really get what we're all about and what separates us from others i think at the end of the day it's being hyper focused on customer service and we we wanna continue to do that and and and we have always looked at our long term strategy and our business plans to be as hyper focused on customers as much as possible and i think sometimes it's a hard thing to do in the collectible space and i do feel for the other companies in the space who i don't i have great relationships with like i'm not competitive at all with any of them i think it's it's a struggle because of that emotionality that is in sports cards whether or at trading cards whether it you have remorse selling a card you might be mid auction and and you we might get a call like the cards are too too low can we end the auction like and then you have to provide customer service to calm the situation down and and explain hey it's not the right thing to do to end an auction in the middle of an auction because think about the buyers the bidders you gotta respect the process of how it all goes and the fact that bids come in the end and then maybe you have a call like hey my card ended too low and you have to walk through that and and make a a consignor consignor feel okay about that situation that's something that we directly talk to our consignors about and a variety of other scenarios that occur but there's a person there to vent to and i think that's important we get yelled at we get positive remarks we get nice conversations we have conversations where we learn we're there's conversations that my day sucks afterwards there's conversations that my receptionist gets angry there's conversations she gets happy there's conversations the point is there is conversations right we we take it on full face value we hear everyone out and we try our best to be as transparent and make the right decision each time and you know you wanna bat as close to a hundred percent as much as possible and sometimes that gives you gray hairs in this industry but you try your best to do it and i think people see it and i think that's what our our core competency is you mentioned that you know you've worked almost every role within the company which i love getting your hands on each function and refining and operationalizing it and seeing how it works like how did you like how did you get in the mindset of that i need to bring other people on and i need to take the money that we're making and invest it back into the company so that we can scale instead instead of a trap that so many business owners and operators fall into where they just wanna make more money for themselves and they try to do everything all the time at which they end up spreading themselves too thin and the company never performs at the level for which it could have been if the business owner would have just invested more in the business by bringing on smart people to help like what was that moment for you where you realized like i can't just do this for myself i need to build a team to help make this company grow to the level that i envision it can grow to yeah i think one for me it was i don't wanna give myself all the credit in the sense that i was able to you know say hey i don't wanna work i don't wanna pay myself in the company for example i was collecting on the side i was i focused on you know i did buy and sell i i i did was a part of this i didn't just go into the business and forget about cards right like i was still on the card world i was collecting grill pieces so and the card market has gone up like crazy so it you know like that was always kind of this supportive element on the side that i can go and reinvest all this money in in in slabsharks because i was doing okay on the the buying and selling side for my personal collection that being said that that was just more of a caveat to to my support in myself from from that side of the business that being said i've always been okay and good with delegation right you cannot think that you're the best at everything you can pretend to be for investors or you could pretend to be for you know podcasts and you could say that you know you're able to do everything in the best way the truth is even if you are the best at it in in a vacuum you're not the best at it if you have two or twenty other things to do you wanna be able to delegate you wanna be able to have confidence in your employees you wanna build a structure in your business and a hierarchy that's the only way to really create consistent procedures you will need to have sops you need to have standard operating procedures where people are able to fulfill tasks when others are not there you need to be able to have skill in mind and understand that if growth does occur how badly backed up will we be you need to have corporate governance in place you need to have you know salaries in place too employee hr and human resources in place you need to build a real structure and a a real company to truly succeed or else it's just a lifestyle business that's gonna result in how much work you put in and how much you get out and it's based on one guy but since the start my founders and i i've always made that commitment to them that i'm not gonna pay myself a salary you guys are not gonna get paid a salary too but you have to trust that the the savings that we're gonna generate from this are gonna go towards you know investment in the infrastructure invest investment in technology we're a technology company we truly are we we do invest heavily in making our processes as as precise as possible using as much technology as possible we made that investment in the app and portal infrastructure one year into our business we didn't have enough money to do it but we did it anyways we were working on our you know every dollar of cash flow coming in was building that part of that business and then slowly as you get more successful no we're not gonna pay ourselves still we're we're gonna actually hire another manager to create you know mid management team so now that they they can train new staff and and employees no we're gonna actually hire a graphic designer so that we have you know a supply of of social graphics that are getting produced and distributed across our socials we're gonna invest in you know ebay live so we're gonna go invest in the studio and and cameras and the the hope is that this business is gonna get big enough and the the infrastructure is there that it's gonna be all worthwhile in the end and i did ask you know i was a lawyer by by profession which ended very early in my career i'd say even before it started and a few of my cofounders were also lawyers as well so i made a commitment to them that i'm gonna work my hardest to to build this business up as much as possibly can and to trust that i'm gonna do my best to to build it up as much as i can and that's kind of where we're at now so now we have you know an app a portal infrastructure we have employees we have hr we have accountants we have bookkeeping we have other arms of the business as well we we operate the grading side of our business the buying and selling side of the business the live streaming side of our business a repack side of our business so there's all these you know other revenue streams that are all now coming together we also have an affiliate portal and and and a pretty intricate system where affiliates across the country like jeremy is a director of affiliates in a certain province in canada he gets you know commissions based on every client that he brings in from from that province and he gets those for life like that client is attached to him so if that client comes and drops off a card at the sports card expo or he took a trip down to toronto and decided to drop it off here in office that client is attached to jeremy and jeremy keeps on getting this recycled revenue from from that consignor and what that does is it creates passion and and for our business and that's a hard thing to develop too in infrastructure across the country we have seven or eight different directors across the country and there's representatives that work underneath each one of those directors and they all have you know a a kickback from each consignment and this is all built out in with technology like it's infrastructure that's not done manually it's happened it happens all through our portal and that's something that my cto that is is develops through you know meetings that we have every monday and and we talk about those are all things that is reinvestment whether it's knowledge reinvestment or cash with capital reinvestment we're always reinvesting in ways to innovate and next is ai do we do we have you know the the level of you know ai that's necessary in today's space and the ai is a you know buzzword but what i mean is growth agents i wanna have you know the ability to to have a report each day to to see where you know things are performing on the back end side of the business and the front end what clients like what consignors consign certain things who are pokemon consignors who are our one piece consignors who our lakanda consignors who ships in to slapsharks who goes to shows who mails in their product or drops them off in person i wanna know each part of these fragments in our in our company and and develop you know streamlined solutions for each party maybe i can easily understand that there's a a hotspot in alberta that ships in a bunch of card to slapsharks so maybe i have special marketing towards that area and maybe i provide free shipping labels because it makes sense and maybe we provide an easy solution for free shipping labels through our website so these are all things that only happen if you reinvest and have the mindset that's not about just making cash it's about building i'm addicted to the like the building the fun the game the the infrastructure building i'm not addicted to the the profits which you know i think you have to balance you obviously have to be profitable and you have to make as much as you can over a long term period but you also want to be addicted to building something cool and i think building something cool is all based on not me it's about the customer that engages with slap sharks and they say oh that was cool that was a good experience and they walk out the door that's all i'm looking for you're a recovering lawyer building a a scaling business in the sports card industry i am a former b to b marketer in the technology space building a media company in the industry every new conversation i have is someone from a previous professional background who's jumping in and taking their professional skill sets and applying it to an idea a business that they wanna build this is a lot different than you know when i jumped back into the hobby you know seven eight years ago where it just seemed like it was being run by card people just institutional card people who've been here forever which isn't a bad thing but it has evolved into the space where it's becoming professionalized it we're getting new ideas it's becoming more creative than ever before the infrastructure around the entire industry is forming as we're having this conversation right now like what are your observations on that just as like a bill a builder in this space looking outside like what are you seeing like in the conversations with other owners or operators you're interacting with like i'd love to get some of your perspective on just like the current state of the sports card industry yeah i think i think it's as challenging as ever to to make a a name for yourself in this space right i think as i alluded to earlier it was a lot easier to be you know a big fish in a small pond when we were all collectors in twenty fifteen sixteen seventeen now in in twenty twenty six and moving into twenty twenty seven there's real capital coming into the space there's real innovation there's immensely large teams that are developing you know software or technology new you know tools and resources you're seeing a lot of competition in the repack space in the braking space there's just a lot more noise so it's harder to cut through that noise and i think that's why it's so important for a company like ourselves who i'm speaking like i'm running this massive technology company but we sell cards on ebay right that's where our platform is but it's to not subjugate ourselves to thinking that small and this and selling on ebay is not a small thing but you can build a huge infrastructure that coexists with selling on ebay and i think ebay is an amazing platform and and i i think it's gonna continue to be a leader in the space but we can build an ecosystem around ebay and be a serious company at the same time it doesn't have to just be we're an ebay seller we can have technology on the back end that supports being the ebay seller it used to be just hey you're a garage guy you you go to you know garage you go into your garage you see something you haven't seen in a while and you can make a a buck on it you list it on ebay and that's it that's kind of the connotation we have as an ebay seller but now that's not it people are building real companies around being ebay sellers and and i think when you're when i'm talking about we need to add you know artificial intelligence capabilities and technology infrastructure it's like wait hold on you're just an ebay company but no not you're just an ebay seller but no it's not it's not like that anymore this is a it's serious and for us to be future proof we have to understand that mind share is important and you to cut through the mind short share you have to provide something new to the market or do it better than the others to to get those customers and with the elements of you know vibe coding as well now where you know every single person is able to go and and develop an app of some certain functionality maybe it's not you know a complex functionality but anyone could go and make an app now we spent almost you know i think more than six figures on our website and back end people can do that for a fraction of the cost now so you need to be you know aware and alert that the the rules of the game are changing on on a on a business end of things and you gotta keep being forward thinking and tech driven and not be scared to kinda get out of your comfort zone and you cannot be complacent it's moving so fast it's it's incredible how many new companies are coming to the space and i get emails all the time of a of a new kind of product or service that's coming out and i'm always looking at ways hey how do i integrate this person's product into my product how do i you know use this person's service there's in canada even the card show space like there used to be one two card shows every two three months now there's four every weekend that's and they're full every single every single one of them so how do you make sure that people are better entering the space know who you are yes the guys that have been here for five ten years know who sakshirek is sakshirek is but how about that guy that's just going to his car show for the first time you gotta be you know quick to sponsor a show you have to get your brand out there as much as possible so i think those are the kind of elements that are changing there's less laziness i think there's more more you have to be on your on your game every single day you need to have a pulse of the hobby every single day you need to know what topps is doing or frenatics is doing you need to know everything just to make small decisions now it used to be you go learn something new every four months and you make a change not anymore if you wanna be at at the top you gotta just keep pushing and it's a lot of work but you gotta do it maybe as we're kinda rounding this out i'd be curious just canadian market i think you know there are individuals that are on the outside looking in who have their perception of what the canadian market is and i would imagine a lot of people are like oh it's just hockey but i think the market has changed quite a bit probably because businesses like slab sharks are in the space servicing canadians to help canadians sell their cards quicker and more efficiently than ever before maybe like what are some just big observations you've made maybe over the last twelve to eighteen months about the canadian market and and what's happening right now and where it's going it's maturing it's you're seeing a lot more entrants that were not around ten years ago five years ago hockey used to be ninety nine point nine percent of our business now it's sixty five percent so wow that over you know a span of probably the last twelve to sixteen months so that's a huge change in the in the demographic of of the country i think you're seeing a lot more tcg pokemon one piece lurkana yu gi oh you got you're starting to see a lot more of that even the sports card expo which was ninety nine point nine percent hockey cards maybe even five years ago is getting close to a fifty fifty split with hockey and and other items and as you see you know fanatics start partnering up with more canadian shops you start seeing more tops product f one was really big here a lot of huge f one cards were in canada the lewis hamilton superfractor auto that was pulled in canada so there was the the one zero one charles leclerc you know was in canada the magic the gathering the ring card the one zero one that's over two million dollars pulled in canada so that even builds up like the canadian ecosystem because people are seeing that stuff on the news like in toronto hits two million dollar hockey card or two million dollar magic card or man in toronto hits one million dollar f one card that's really built up an ecosystem that's not just hockey anymore you started when i used to go to the national ten years ago there was myself and like ten other canadians there now every single guy that's like serious in hockey cards in canada is going to the national so they're developing us relationships they're getting closer and closer to you know the bigger players and understanding the industry on in a on a full scale and they're bringing that stuff home so they're bringing the big brady cards and the mahomes cards and you're starting to see you know a tiny huge a tiny cards here so you're starting to see those hundred thousand dollar cards transact five hundred thousand dollar card transact i just saw a one point five million dollar michael jordan exquisite down the street from here that never used to be the case in canada so you're starting to see grails get here and with the grails coming to toronto you start seeing americans show up at our card shows and transact so now they're bringing american money to canadian space and now you're starting to see a hundred thousand dollar deals five hundred thousand dollar deals so i think it's just that the the the the the culture is is just colliding with the rest of the world and and i think canada's becoming a real space to pay attention to with real grails and real card shows and even the the the development of companies like tradable is a canadian company the biggest tcg app in the whole world collector is a canadian company based out of toronto so there's innovation in in the canadian space as well slapsharks who i feel is a a pretty you know big consignment companies in canada so you're you're seeing a change and and and really becoming a big part of the culture here in the country and i think it's gonna continue going that way as we close this out karn i'd love to get some perspective from you on where your head is at right now and just as you look forward down the road the next you know year or so for slab sharks for you and your team in the industry like where's your focus like what is what is on your mind when you wake up and you clock in and maybe not clock in because i'm sure you're probably always on but like what what are you thinking about like right now where do you wanna push this business yeah so our next iteration of our website and app is coming out soon we've been like working on that for the last year we're adding more features and and more customer service elements you know marketing a little bit more as well but my main kind of goal is to kinda connect all the elements of our business together so we do have a relationship with tag for example we we run the tag canadian operations here i wanna find a link between grading cards with tag and consigning them with slapshorts we are building our slapsharks live channel and live shopping as well so we're getting into the break environment we wanna be able to either have people that enter our live breaks or ripping ships be able to consign with slapsharks in real time how do i you know link those all together and then vice versa people can consign for our core auctions or consign with slapshark live as well so that's a a possibility we also have our our buy and sell arm which is called card finder which is more of a financial services financial product to broker cards or provide you know liquidity on more of a a financial instrument element how to bring that into slapsharks and create kind of this one slapsharks ecosystem that kinda covers a lot of portions of the industry and become you know you know an all in one kinda shop for for canadians and always focusing on ux and ui design always focusing on intuitiveness and and actually you know not cutting corners to make a product that's easy to use and i wanna build out our you know our structure a little bit more in terms of our management team so we can do all of these things in real time in person and and have that face to face coordination to develop all these new products that's what we're in the middle of doing right now i'd be laying down the brick bricks for each foundation of each company slowly and it's finally getting to a point where each thing is gonna you know live on its own and also connect with each other and excited for that it's gonna be it's gonna be a lot of work but a lot of fun you're an ambitious guy it was fun to hear your story and your insights it's karn at slab sharks hopefully this isn't the last time we talked i really enjoyed the conversation likewise brad appreciate you having me on stacking slabs it's it's been a pleasure