Alright. We are back with another episode of Passion to Profession. Really excited about this conversation. I am joined today by Brent from the Mill Creek sports team.

If you are unfamiliar with Mill Creek sports, one of the biggest memorabilia, shops in the country, one of the coolest, locations that I've seen on the memorabilia side, and we're gonna get into just the business, the operation, and everything in between.

But without further ado, Brent, welcome. How are you?

I'm excellent. Thanks for having me on, Brett. So let's dive into you and the business. I know from my research, I think I read that you've maybe been involved with Mill Creek Sports for twenty plus years, twenty five years.

Maybe help us understand how you got involved, in the early days and, maybe just the the ride you've been on, since joining the team.

Sure. So, basically, like a lot of people that are in this business, I started out as a collector. When I was younger, you know, growing up I I remember buying baseball cards at the little league, stand there and and things like that.

And and then I kinda gave up collecting for a while through high school to, you know, just kinda wasn't the cool thing to do, I guess.

And then in college, I went to college and and started kinda hustling in college a little bit with with buying and trading cards and kinda getting back into it, you know, trying to earn a little bit of extra cash, you know, for for a college kid.

I I remember roofing, super, super hard job. My summers in college, the first two summers in college, I I'm like, man, this is hard work, this roofing, you know.

And so the third year, I started working in in in the summer at a at a local car shop, you know, and just started helping out around there and and kinda, you know, reignited my passion for that.

And that's actually when I met Scott, and he's the owner of Mill Creek Sports and has been since 1991. He opened it straight out of college. I met him at some shows and things like that, and we just kinda hit it off.

And we got into business together in the in the early nineties. We opened a store together, that we ultimately sold. So we were partners for a while, for, you know, five or six years.

And it actually was kind of a weird situation where the bar in our strip mall burnt down, and they rebuilt the store, and we got an offer on the store that we couldn't reduce.

So we just kinda did that. Then we were kinda just working not I wasn't working for him.

We were just kinda working together. I was doing my own thing. And this was like the this is how old we are. This is like the infancy of, of eBay and the Internet and the explosion of that, you know.

And so he always had that perspective, when he when people came into his store and they would talk about eBay or the Internet, he would kinda, you know, say, get, you know, basically get out of my store, you know, and that's not really what what, you know, if you like it on eBay, go buy it on eBay kind of thing.

Where I kinda, like, embraced it. I embraced the Internet. I, I started selling my stuff on eBay and online, and he saw the power of that, and he had all the inventory. I didn't I just had my own little inventory.

He had a a big inventory. And so I started selling his products for him on kind of on my side, you know, and and he saw how powerful that was, to the point where he hired me, you know, to run his online presence full time.

And he then embraced the Internet and saw the power of eBay. And from there, it just it just took off.

Between that and the other thing I think really that has helped Mill Creek Sports kind of really propel themselves was the, like, twenty years ago, the authentication process and the technology of the authentication process.

Instead of just giving somebody a piece of paper saying, this Ken Griffey junior baseball is real and it and it and it doesn't match the ball to the point where the authentication company started putting their sticker right on the ball saying, we witnessed it being signed on this day and this time and this place.

And now people can come into our store, take a phone out, put it up to a hologram, a QR code pops up, tells you when and where it was signed.

So that's really, I think, was what set us aside. All of his real inventory over the years that became authenticated, real nice, authenticated inventory, is basically how I think we really, propelled ourself as a business.

That's incredible. Appreciate all the context and background and you digging into kinda online and how that's maybe getting on board early helped the business, get to where it is today.

I would love for, you to describe for any listeners who maybe haven't been out in your region or neck of the woods. Describe your place of business. From what I understand, there's retail, there's office space, and there's a warehouse.

Maybe talk through how the operation works and what you're responsible for on a day to day basis. Sure. So I run all the daily operations for for the entire building. Scott is a he's, he does all the buying, almost all the buying.

We work on deals together to get athlete signings, things like that. As far as the footprint of the building, eight years ago, may I guess ten years ago now, I guess, we opened the building about eight years ago.

So about ten years ago, we started the design process, and Scott and I are not architects by any means.

You know, we're selling baseball cards. So we kinda we bought a piece of property and we designed a building and we put it up to the best of our ability.

The way it worked out for us was you had to have about less than 3,000 square feet above in order to not have an elevator. We didn't want an elevator, so we put 3,000 feet above.

We put the 3,000 square foot retail below that, and that consists of about a quarter of the footprint of the entire building. The other three quarters of the building is high ceiling warehouse. Just racks and bins and things like that.

We have an upstairs shipping center that we ship the light stuff, baseballs, slab cards, you know, eight by 10 photo, things like that, small light things that can ship upstairs and be stored upstairs.

That and then we also have a meeting room that I'm in now.

Scott's office, my office, and then some cubicles for workstations. Downstairs in the warehouse, there's also a shipping station. It's where we store all the bigger stuff, helmets.

Example, I think right now in the building there's we have over 14,000 autographed full size helmets in the building. So we have many helmets, jerseys, bigger frame pieces, things like that are all downstairs.

I do a daily pick based on all the orders coming in from different places. So different people within our company will gather those order orders based on where they're coming from, eBay or wherever else.

And And they all kinda go into one big one big Google Doc spreadsheet, the big thing. We spit out a daily pick. It comes out in an upstairs pick, a downstairs pick.

It's how you would walk the building exactly in order. So the downstairs people, they have carts or what have you, and they go up and down the aisles and they they everything's exactly in order.

It'll say if it's a restock or if it needs to be restock or if it's a dead SKU. And then after that, they go and they box it up and ship it.

I don't know. We ship on average days four to 500 packages a day. We don't run any auctions, so everything's buy it now, fixed price. And we may have, like, encounter number of mischief we have in a year on one hand.

Everything is pretty organized. I'm pretty I'm pretty, protective of the inventory and very protective of how everything's organized in this building. So you mentioned 14,000 signed helmets alone and just multiply all the other items.

How do you maybe, like, getting into the weeds a little bit, how have you been able to manage kind of, the what sells in person through the retail operation versus what sells online through either the website or an eBay store?

Like, how do you make sure that everything is on track, like, systems are in place and everything gets to where it needs to be, when it sells?

Well, I yeah. It's a great question because sometimes, how it works is you other companies use our products.

There's a there's a bunch of them. There's and and we don't mind. Right? Like, hey, if you wanna go try to sell our products for us and we you wanna pay us for our products, go advertise them, go sell them.

But they realize that if they do sell that product, they're at risk of us already have sold it earlier that day. But we do daily inventory updates for every one of our drop shipping accounts.

If if we leave the building at night before we leave, we run a quick tomorrow's early orders. And if it's something that's sold on our website or one of our other accounts, we'll take it off of eBay and Amazon and all the other places.

So we have we have checks and balances to make sure that we don't double sell or sell things because that's the worst when somebody buys something they can't get it.

That being said, our inventory is set up in a way where it's either a one of a kind item, and it's the only one we have.

So if we check-in, from a signing, if we check-in a bunch of inventory and one of them smudged or smeared, it gets kicked aside and sold as is kind of.

Or if you have a Babe Ruth signed baseball, that, you know, that's it. That's the one you're getting. And of those, I think there's about 25,000 usually on any given time, unique onesy, twosy things out there.

The rest of the inventory and there's, I think, about 7,000 stock items. We call them stock, and there's inventory numbers behind them. And so we may have, I think our highest stock items, like, in the thousands.

We'll have some number of thousands of one unit. And it might be like, Pete Rose signed baseball that signed hit king that's Becca authenticated, and it's, you know and that's different than a JSA authenticated one.

So there might be a ton of different skews, but everyone we we wanna make sure when people order something, they get exactly what they're expecting.

Yeah. So you have been doing this even pre Mill Creek Sports, been in the space, been in this industry, saw probably so many different trends and shifts in the hobby since the nineties to today.

How would you describe, like, the ride you've been on?

And and then also, like, how important has it been to be adaptable, as an individual and as a, you know, someone working inside one of these businesses throughout all these chapters and iterations, of the hobby and the the the buying and selling of sports memorabilia?

Well, yeah. Obviously, everybody knows that the the industry's changed. Right?

Like, the one advantage I think I had and Scott had having stores in the early nineties and sitting there at the counter watching people open boxes of cards throughout the nineties and February, it gave us the ability to identify collections that are coming in now, and it really makes it to where there's ten ten employees here and there's really only two of us that can do that.

Right? Like, we other people would have to look up every single card and take time and time and and and it it's just something you can't teach.

It's something that, you know, it's a we were there. We saw it. We spent years behind the counter at these at these local card shops, and and you can't really replace that, you know, knowledge.

And as far as your question about adaptability, I mean, I think that's the number one reason Scott and I have gotten along all these years and been friends.

And, you know, we vacationed together, his wife and my wife, and we've just we've just got along so well is because we both identified that this is a dynamic business.

Things are always changing, and we realize we need to change with the times.

We need if there's things that we need to do as far as, you know, website approval or, you know, podcast or anything that we need to do, we realize that from thirty years ago to now, things are always changing, and and that's really the reason I think me and him both realize that.

And that's a big part of why we get along so well, and we've been working well so well together for all these years.

Awesome. The maybe you're in a area of the country which, I would love maybe to understand interest of athletes and what's in the most demand.

I'll go out and venture on a guest and say, Ken Griffey junior probably sells wear well in your, neck of the woods, but maybe talk about that, like, the a regional business, and the importance of not only regional athletes, but, you know, nationally known athletes to help drive kind of the success of of what you're doing year over year?

Yeah. So we we've been really blessed here, to have even though our, like, our Seattle Mariners baseball team is is is horrible.

Right? I mean, it it never wins anything and but we've been blessed to have superstar after superstar, you know, from Alex Rodriguez, Ken Griffey Junior, Randy Johnson, Ichiro Suzuki. So we represent Ichiro exclusively.

We do all the autograph signings with him. He was just here, and so we'll be going out to the Hall Of Fame with him. We do all the signings with Ken Griffey junior, and Scott and Scott has been friends.

I would call him friends with Griffey since '89. And we've we've done signings with Griffey. We've been we he took us to Michael Jordan's golf course last year, and we golfed with Griffey.

He's just been a great asset to our company. I mean, he he makes it difficult sometimes to get a hold of him and to do some business with him, but when he does, he's been he's been awesome.

Right? He's one of our he's one of the the the keystones to our business really over the last thirty thirty five years.

Same with Ichiro. Ichiro has been the same way. So we've really put our emphasis on local athletes as far as, like, exclusive deals and putting, you know, our faith in them because we can we can cater to them.

They're, you know, they're mostly here. Each row still lives here. We can we can have him come to the store and do signings.

We also do signings with players and athletes all over the country, but to a lesser extent. Right? Like, we're we'll do we'll have a signing with Drew Brees. We brought Drew Brees here or Bo Jackson players like that.

Not necessarily exclusive. We kinda stick to our own local, you know, Seattle based athletes for that. You mentioned, Griffey signings in '89, which instantly brings me to the 89 upper deck.

How many 89 upper deck Griffey's have you seen signed over the years? I don't know if I should tell you that. Do you want me to tell you how many signed at the last signing?

I would love to. Yeah. Let's hear it. Hundreds. Yeah. Hundreds. I bought I bought 700 of them at last year's national convention. A customer that I knew, had 700 of them. Wanna know if I wanted to buy them.

I said, sure. He brought them up. I bought them, and they're they're all signed. That's incredible. The demand for that card, though, is astronomical. It's an iconic card, and it's it's it's crazy. It's crazy.

We sell we sell a lot of them. That's for sure. The, maybe those early days of those signings, maybe help us understand what that looked like in startup mode, like getting athletes in, trying to manage expectations, promotion.

Maybe it's one athlete every month or whatever, and help us understand how that's evolved into kind of the operation you have today where there's multiple signings, exclusive, partnerships, what that all looks like in that that journey.

Sure. We'll even start a little earlier than that. So before Scott even opened his retail store in 1991, I I remember stories of him, and I wasn't involved, and I was still in school.

But I remember him saying, he came to the conclusion that going to spring training and asking somebody like Mark Maguire or any any athlete down there for one autograph was fine because you could get one or two autographs and you you were fine.

Right?

He realized early on that he could invite the athletes possibly to a conference room, his hotel, whatever it is, and say, mister Maguire, how about for a thousand dollars, you find 400 autographs or whatever it may be, and some athletes would partake, some wouldn't.

But that's how he scaled his business early on as a young as a young business person. And I remember that that's that's how he did it.

And that's how it worked with Griffey. You know, instead of everybody wanting onesie, twosies, he brought you know, he's like, hey. You come to the show. You need to sign 500 public, 500 private, but here's what we're gonna pay you.

And so those were the really early days. And then once he got his business established and opened the first brick and mortar in Mill Creek, he started bringing in, like, hall of fame type athletes.

You know, anywhere from Tom Seaver, Bob Gibson, and we ran the whole gamut. Anybody that we could find that we could get in there, we did. We had Barry Bonds in 2001 during the middle of his home run streak.

We had Willie Mays, Jerry Rice, to Bob Feller and Steve Carlton. All I mean, we just always had people on schedule, and it worked for us because nobody had done that in the Pacific Northwest and brought these athletes in really before.

So we would fly them out and we would draw hundreds of people for every athlete that we brought in.

We had a good advertising system and, it just kinda scaled on and on from there. Now it's a little bit tougher because most of these athletes, they'll go to a convention or something and they'll just do it a couple times a year.

They really don't need to fly out to these more remote locations. It doesn't make sense for them. And we can get inventory signed at those shows and have it shipped here.

So we're still partaking with a lot of those athletes. We're still doing a lot of business with them. We're just not necessarily bringing them here to our location in in Mill Creek.

We're always, excited to hear maybe a good story. Is there any what's maybe in all your years of doing this, maybe most memorable moments, most memorable signings, anything you wanna call out that might have a story along with it?

Man, there's a lot. I mean, there's a lot. When you start dealing with these athletes, you know, they it's crazy. I I I think one of the for me personally, I don't get too starstruck by these athletes and things like that.

Like, I've been blessed enough, like, Ichiro invited Scott and I to the hall of fame dinner on Saturday night before the induction.

Right? So and now I gotta buy a sports jacket. I don't own a sports jacket. And, you know, things like that, I get it's really, really cool.

But for me, Griffey's always been that guy that's just been super, super nice. So we're we're in Florida last year, and he signed he's a night owl. He signed for us until about 02:30, 03:00 in the morning.

We package up the stuff, put it in our hotel room, we go to bed. He calls me at about 08:00 in the morning. We'd only been asleep for a few hours. He goes, let's go golfing. And I'm like, oh, man.

I said, alright. I'll go. And he goes, where's Scott? And I go, well, Scott's three doors down. He goes, well, go wake him up and and, you know, we're going golfing. I said, okay. He goes, I'll pick you up in twenty minutes.

So I go down and I pound on Scott's door. He's barely awake. He comes, what's going on? I said, he wants to go golfing. And he goes, when? And he said, I said twenty minutes. Oh, jeez. So we decided to do it.

I run back to my hotel, sunscreen, shirts, find a nice, whatever, get out there. Twenty minutes, he picked us up. We drive ten minutes, fifteen minutes away. We pull into Grove 23, which is Michael Jordan's private golf course.

There's it's insane. It's insane. We pull up, and Michael Jordan's on the first tee. And so a little bit little bit starstruck there. I usually don't get too starstruck, but I was a little starstruck there.

So we were playing, like, two groups behind him. The place is immaculate. It's it's unbelievable. And, it it for me, that was a great experience because I like to golf, and it was with them, and it it was just pretty cool.

But, I mean, the stories with the athletes, there's a lot of them. I mean, they're almost every athlete that comes in, you know, has some sort of way that they conduct themselves and things like that.

So it's been it's been really fun doing this, and it goes fast. And all of a sudden, you know, thirty years in or whatever. Right? That's amazing.

I know we've got kind of a little bit of a time, constraint, but I wanna make sure that I ask I I I'm curious about just, like, in this line of business when so much, there's so much trust that's involved between what you're doing and, you know, the buyer of what you're selling.

Like, how over the years, you know, since 1991, since Mill Creek Sports has been open, like, how have you prioritized, like, building and developing trust with your audience of customers, especially in the memorabilia autograph space?

Right. So what we're going back to that that that authentication technology, I think, has been really, really great. I mean, that's the that's the number one thing.

So as far as, like, on online, presence and our return policies and guarantees and never, you know, and then just word-of-mouth gets out there that, hey, they are doing signings with these guys.

It's real stuff, you know, to all of a sudden now there's holograms on it that says it's real. And so it's just a matter of treating people right for a long time, and that's just how Scott and I felt like that was the way to build it.

Right? That, you know, just build it up with with good quality product at a reasonable price, and and we're not the one there's a lot there's a lot of different business models.

I and and I'm not saying any of them are incorrect. A lot of them just aren't the way that Scott and I feel are the right way to do it. And the right way we feel to do it is to put our products out at a fair price, based on the market.

We don't over inflate the price hoping for a small you know, like an offer or something like that. I mean, we really feel like the prices we set, you know, are are fair prices.

And then we also do our due diligence as far as, like, authentication and things like that. I mean, of course, you know, there's there's always gonna be forgers out there.

There's always gonna be fakes. There's gonna be fake, you know, certificates and holograms getting out, and there's always gonna be some sort of scandal or whatever in this business because there's a lot of money in this business.

But we always try to keep ourselves on the cutting edge of that, learning from that.

We work with Beckett, you know, anybody else that's got any news. Scott's always emailing, talking to people, talking about these holograms maybe that, you know, are bad or these things are good.

So we just try to keep ourselves informed the best that we can, and we kinda can pass that on to our customers as kind of a a form of protection for them, because we're out there doing all the work, making sure that they're that they're protected as well.

Awesome. Maybe before I let you go, you seem to be in a line of work that aligns with your passion.

You've been doing it for a long time. Anybody else out there who's kinda thinking about jumping into the industry, whether it's, you know, starting their own business, dealing some cards on the side, or maybe opening up their own store?

What sort of advice would you leave, any listener with who's thinking about that? Well, yeah. You know, the the number one thing is, like, for us as a business, and we built it for so long for so many years.

And I know I touched on it earlier about the adaptability of of our business, you know, being able to kinda go with the different trends.

I think that's the number one thing. You gotta you can't focus on just one part of this business. I don't think if you wanna be successful. Our retail store sells a ton of boxes of cards and trading cards. We sell Pokemon to sports.

We sell autographs and non auto I mean, we we we built it to where we kinda touch a little bit of all sports collectors across the board from the serious, you know, card collector that's putting their cards in the PSA set registries to people that are looking to hang a, you know, Michael Jordan jersey on their wall and just look at it and admire it.

And there's collectors in between. And so you kinda have to adapt and provide something for all collectors.

And it will take time and it will take growth. But I think the people or the companies that have had a tougher time, the companies I saw struggling throughout the years are ones that focused on just one thing.

They decided, here's what we're specializing in and didn't really veer any which way that this hobby kinda takes this.

Because it's kind of a roller coaster, what becomes popular and what's going on and what's trending. And I think adaptability is probably the number one advice I would give.

You heard Brent from Mill Creek Sports. This was a ton of fun. Brent, really appreciate the time and the conversation. Hopefully, we can do it again down the road. Thank you so much, Brett. Enjoy the rest of your day.