what's going on everybody welcome back to another episode of passionate profession brought to you by my good friends at ebay we are diving into another story going into the entrepreneurial journey of my guest today matt who owns nine four one sportscards i'm excited about this conversation because i don't think we've talked much about the in store experience and the online experience and how those two work together and we'll be talking about things like allocation and management of time resources money all those things but without further ado matt welcome man how are you awesome i'm great brett super excited to be on here man great for the opportunity let's start i mean i feel like most of these conversations you gotta get some context and background on you as a hobby participant we're gonna spend most of the time talking about you as the kinda owner and operator and what you're dealing with but maybe shed some context on just you and the hobby like what's your experience what drew you into collecting yeah so i mean i'm a i'm a nineties baby i think a lot of us in the nineties we were we were collecting or ripping some type of cards i hear it all the time like oh i was collecting baseball cards or football cards i mean feel like packs back then were like a dollar or something because i feel like we all had them and i was into pokemon and it was just something you know i liked when i was growing up and then kinda phased out you know you get older and it was around end of twenty twenty one into early twenty twenty two i kinda got i kinda like got i i forget exactly how i came across it but just saw like sports cards kinda like coming back on the map right and i mean everybody if you listen to this didn't know like covid kinda just exploded the whole thing again right and so i was i had a different business just just for fun i would like buy some boxes i'd rip a couple and i like turn around and go and try to sell the rest it was kinda like crazy where it was like you know some of these blasters would like double in value at that time that's it's not how it is today but it was like you know it's unique once i you know get to open a couple have some fun then and i'm so i met a guy locally actually on like offerup where i'd sell them just for you know and and he one day every time i dropped off these boxes he was telling me about breaks he's like dude you gotta get in this facebook group you gotta check this thing out and i was like i don't know what this guy's talking about and eventually i was like alright yeah man i'll check it out and like you know when i went when i when i joined the facebook group i was like dude this is awesome like i love sports you know kinda when i was just kinda getting back to ripping some cars myself right it's funny i just the other day i found my binder like like from twenty twenty one i had to start like collecting don russ twenty twenty one just for fun and yeah anyways i was like dude this would be great i mean i've always been business minded i've been self employed since i was twenty one i'm thirty three now and so i just saw it as like a side fun thing to try and that's how that's how it kinda all started for me i love it the it's amazing i love the reference point of covid so many of us got back into this space i am a product of that i had no idea i'd be running my own business around sports cards sounds like you're right there with me which is fun and exciting and we're in this boom period now so one thing you said that i wanna dig into which is i think it it takes a certain type of person especially getting out of the gates but you said you've been you know you've been self employed since you were twenty one what what what is the reason for that like were you like i don't wanna work for everyone anyone else i wanna be in control of my own destiny maybe talk about like your makeup in terms of your entrepreneurial mindset yeah yeah absolutely so i think just at a very young age like i've always been like i like sales like i i i didn't see it as you some people are very turned off by it and and it can get a little weird sometimes right but you know i just always love talking to people meeting the peep meeting people helping people so like you know there's tons of industries where you can do that where you have a good product a good service i wanna share that with you less of like a car salesman you know that's kinda where it gets the bad rap my mom i don't remember but she always told me that i was like selling my toys on the bus like when i was in like elementary school so i guess it's just been hardwired into me i'm i'm very i'm i'm very risk oriented you know i'll i i will take risks i've had a lot of things pan out i've had a lot of things not pan out even in this four years of my card journey i've had a lot of ups and downs so yeah i think it's just i i think anybody can do it i do think we're some have more god given abilities maybe to steer that direction more but yeah i just like to serve and i feel like i'm i'm a little more in control of that when i'm running my my thing what what do you think makes up a good salesperson because you're right like sales gets a bad rap and everyone feels like they're being no one wants to be sold to but i've always found like the best salespeople have a specific process that they follow that make people feel comfortable enough to start with a converse everything starts with a conversation so like be willing to have a conversation but i'd be curious like you like sales like how do you think about sales in a way that's not only going to help you but then help your customers yeah that's a great question i always like the phrase people don't care until they know how much you care right so i think you know people start on the front with with too much of a sale as before they've even developed the relationship so if you truly believe in your product your service whatever that is you know that that's gonna be a natural byproduct that you're gonna wanna share with this person it's not gonna be salesy it's not gonna be like a pitch that you know you have to practice and practice and then don't get me wrong this does come with practice over time you know what your services or product how you're gonna talk about it you know but you know there should be some you should truly be passionate about what it is you should you should care about what it is that you're selling and i think that's where a lot of people there's like a misalignment you know it's just oh it's some it's some great opportunity that somebody sold them on to go sell but they're not fully bought in and you know it's just more about like let me just tell say my pitch and then i don't really care about the person you may even start talking to the person get to know them and realize they're not gonna benefit from whatever product or service you have and now i'm going to move on so i i'd be my best advice is just like really caring for people over just like pushing whatever you have it's it's it sounds so simple but it's hard in a lot of instances to execute you you mentioned the you know meeting individual on offerup making deals getting exposed to breaks like in that moment where all of us were trying to figure out the hobby and find out our our our our path in this space whether it was just being a collector or maybe a lot of us were entrepreneurial and wanted to start something for ourselves like talk to us about like that moment of getting exposed to breaks to like how how did you like how did you get to the place where you you opened up a store and yep you started operating online like what what are what's the nuts and bolts of how you got that off the ground yeah so that time that i came in i'll never forget it was twenty twenty two super bowl so it was the rams versus the bengals right and and that is right around when i i remember being in that facebook group and like getting into a break i'm like this is so cool i'm watching super bowl and like i got a chance to get some car you know what i mean so i remember starting like connecting the dots there so those boxes that i bought i had they were retail boxes blasters megas whatever i had like i didn't have a ton of them but i had a little bit for myself and then i tried to go sell so i i was like alright i got some boxes i got this guy who obviously loves this stuff he was he was just like on fire for it and i was like man we could just start well let's make our own facebook group and let's see if we can just start filling some breaks it was it's the old school facebook style i don't know if people are familiar with it but you throw a post out there you'd list all the teams with the price people would comment which one they want you know and then you would once you sell it all you go live in the facebook group and open the boxes right and we were we were doing that out of my like a little a little room in my house right and that's how it started and we were like closing them and then i remember the first hobby box i bought was like a spectra hobby box off ebay like twenty twenty one spectra and in this time i if if anybody in here has been there here long enough this is when boxes everything was like insane like prices were just going bonkers right this is our mac jones trevor lawrence trey lance era which probably needs its own podcast but yeah so started with that and we were closing and people liked us people like you know we were getting new customers people were joining our facebook group friend friends were telling them about us and yeah it just started there and then i remember one one day my buddy was like hey and he he goes i i see people streaming like tiktok like and this was before tiktok shop this was just tiktok live and they do their film breaks too like that and i was like well this is different we just do it with you know a a hard fill and then tiktok's like a live fill i was like let's give it a shot you know and at that point right around that time i had rented us a little itty bitty office in sarasota it was like i don't know was like eight hundred bucks a month or something very tiny like very risk like like not risky in my opinion i was like and and i still had my other business stuff going on so this is a little side thing i go go and do my work and this guy would be this is more of his full time thing so i was i'm the sole owner but like i i employed him like he was getting paid very well he was kinda like running the ship right and yeah so we start we we had this little office space and like tiktok was working out great all of a sudden we started finding ourselves filling like national treasures breaks and that's when national treasures was like four four to five thousand dollars a box you know immaculate like these new releases and i was like man dude this is we we would like fill some of it on facebook and then we fill some of it in the live and then we put up our website and then it was in the it was in the again that peak season and that just started ramping that way i mean i could go on a whole spiel of how where the lives went from there and where we are today but fast forward you know the lives were were a lot of ups and downs with the lives lot of ups and downs and i could share more on that but in twenty twenty three i move or right before that i us into a little we're like in an industrial park area right now kinda like a hybrid garage with a it's not a retail area but moved into a unit and i was like well we could like carve out a little card space in here could just knock down this wall we got enough to put some showcases i get enough product the wholesaler is like let's just try this because i was like dude this live thing is like man it it it it's like boom or bust and i can go in more details with that but anyway so that was what led me to was like dude storefront i have a retail experience i feel like this can create a solid floor for us and yeah we i i did we did that very humble beginnings it's very small right now like literally our operation is like max capacity but we're we just signed a seven year lease on a forty eight hundred square foot space where it's gonna have live streaming rooms that are visible like an event area and it's got the card stock card store which is the card store itself is gonna be almost two thousand square feet and then the whole right side of the store is like all watch parties tournaments watching live streams so yeah that's kind of the the nuts and bolts i think of where we got to and how we got there i love it the talk to us about that era of grinding with platforms that weren't necessarily meant to be breaking or streaming platforms like facebook groups and tiktok before the store like how did you obviously we're gonna get into the ebay live of it all we're gonna hit that but how did you manage all that madness because i'm just thinking about the operations behind that just obviously like there's customer info that you've got to get product out to these people you gotta make sure you don't forget like how did you manage all of that because when i when i think about it now and i think back to that like covid era and people doing breaks everywhere i'm just like how did how did people get their cards like everyone wanted a break but like a lot of these breakers were it was all start up like people were trying to figure it out like how did you manage that yeah yeah that's a great question i mean and to your point like there's lot of people that were like fly by night right it was like they were breaking one day and weren't here the next because it is it's an operation and mean i always took it very seriously from the beginning and i think that's probably where a lot of people trip up like or did trip up you know it's a hobby so they were kinda like i'm just gonna have fun with it and and but and then they didn't like live up to the expectations of what people thought they were because there's lot of money involved man people pay a lot of money you gotta do stuff right so you know very early on you know i've just started hiring more people i was like okay we we're shipping this person needs to be in charge of sorting and shipping you know this this person's streaming and it's just like started to build out some type of structure but yeah to your like we did dabble and whatnot a little bit but i was always on the platforms that were like not breaking platforms facebook and the tiktok what what really took everything off was tiktok shop so tiktok went through this phase where it started like banning people for all kinds of random stuff and then that's right around when they made shop and then i got connected with a guy who got us in like the beta of shop basically and it was like mid twenty twenty three and it was just insane i mean like it was like they were feeding people to your room it was kinda hard though because they had all these like violations and weird things you had to navigate i can remember our account like getting terminated multiple times like a glitch and so it was kinda weird and it was like like the gold mine rush or something was going on man and it was crazy but but you know to your point like well how did you i just again i started trying to hire people find more people you know delegate i mean that's always how i've envisioned running a business i mean it can't all be ran by you like it's you're you're limited and i'd rather pay people give them an opportunity right and now i went some i made some bad decisions with people and and partnerships outside of my own like try new things and some great learning experiences but yeah i mean that that that was kind of the so the tiktok shop at at one point on tiktok shop we had five tiktok channels going had different friends in different states that i trusted and i like send them stuff and like i had our local one here too at that point we're employing like fourteen to fifteen people i think a lot of it was mostly streaming and then they had to ship it that was not the wisest because again it wasn't all in house which is how we are today but yeah then shop kinda like just just went sideways after the beta honeymoon phase and eventually we got down to one shop and that's where we were rolling it was it was our storefront and one tiktok shop and then then we got involved in ebay and that's been our main home now so yeah to answer your question about the the waze yeah yes that that that is a really good context before we hit ebay live i i wanna maybe get some understanding i love what you said about like it it takes more than just me to build the business you know time allocation like you putting your energy in the right direction in order to build the business sounds like you've been doing this pre sports card business like how do you think about that and thinking about like you specializing your time you scaling with people hiring like what's your mindset like when you get down to it like how do you offload what you're working on or what's been your baby to someone else and like trust that it's going to continue not only at the level that you were running it at but at a much higher clip because you're setting maybe higher expectations for yourself and the business yeah i mean i think i think it has everything to do with and it's it's easier said than done right you're gonna go through a lot of learning curves here of like who the right fit is and and why and i mean it has everything to do with like time and and our priority we're all given the same twenty four hours in a day seven days a week you know i've got a wife now three kids at the time when i started all this i had two and you know i got a a great community that i'm a part of of of and it's like okay don't get me wrong i mean i gotta provide for my family i gotta work hard and i gotta you know do what i need to but if i'm if if every if the buck stops with me and i am it all the time like it's very hard to be free for the other things in life i think you know like you're you're if you're a business owner your brain never stops because you are you are it right but if you can develop the systems and the processes to elevate people and and you know have them become responsible i mean it's so freeing so for me my time is so valuable you know like and it's it's helped me to just be more involved in other things that i really wanna be involved in and and also like that's the biggest bottleneck in people's businesses is themselves right like if you have more people good people the vision gets bigger the you know the they come with better ideas than me a lot of the times like i'm i'm happy to say that like i don't need to be having all the ideas you know so i don't need all the money man like it's such a i mean for me too i mean i it's it's so rewarding and empowering to know that man i can pay someone really well to come to come be a part of this because of how well we're doing and like this is a game changing role for them in their life and their family's life and you know like that's that's awesome to me so i think it's just priorities and money isn't the main objective how do you know where to invest and from the standpoint of how do you know to invest in more more product or more more people like how do you make that decision that's tough i mean i think i think i've always gone about it a way where it's like alright dude if we're streaming and we're just crushing it like we need more streamers to keep crushing it this guy cannot stream twenty four hours a day seven days a week that's not healthy for the human body so like i gotta go find another streamer and i gotta go find another streamer i think you know a lot of people suffer on the analysis paralysis thing where they analyze get paralyzed and it's like it's very simple i think at least hey is that working that's working we need more people to make that work better right we want three ebay livestreams we need more people to make three ebay livestreams product is is that's a byproduct of i need more product i mean in the beginning you you gotta buy some product because you gotta rip the product so it's like hey let me get some stuff but it's like it kinda like just goes in unison i would say right like have to have it so and then you know if you're just full steam ahead well then yeah you gotta buy more of it and so they kind of align in my opinion i love it the i i wanna get some understanding and this is one of the things i was most excited to talk with you about because i don't think we've really talked about this in this series before but i wanna get some understanding and it sounds like super unique just based on how you have your setup structure knowing you're like going into a bigger space but how do you think about the the the in in store experience like what you dedicate from a people product perspective and then the online experience like how do you think about the separation of those two things how do they work together like what are the what is the purpose of your storefront like top like give us the whole lowdown on just like your strategy in managing those two sides yeah so you know i mean there's obviously different customer profile profiles right like who's on a livestream is probably a different person that's walking through the door although anyone in the hobby probably likes to participate in both in some capacity i'm sure but the the live streams you know being transparent like that's at this moment in time just with our setup before we get into the new space i think this will shift a little bit but that's eighty percent of our of our business right now is live streaming and i mean i think that just has a unique element of a fun fast paced exciting environment new releases every day or not every day but you know we have every new release out there we'd have a single show where people are just getting these stacks of cards you know mailed to them where they're having a ton of fun so you know i think i think a lot of people especially in this day and age like like to interact like to chat you know what i mean like to be on their computer be on their phone watch something like that's how they interact and and and entertain themselves and then so so that element what we bring there our energy our enthusiasm we really we really take a lot of pride in like being engaged right because it dude it's hard to breakers may look make it look easy but to like look at a camera where there's nobody actually there and you're just going off a chat like to keep good energy and and know invite people to talk and know you get your weird people sometimes as you gotta mute and so you know there's things you gotta navigate but just just really pride ourselves and i'm just super proud of all of our breakers of like keeping it fun positive good environment nobody's like cussing up a storm or like you know getting mad if we're getting crushed it's all dollar auction at the end of the day for us right now you know it's it's sometimes people win sometimes we win it's just a good time all around right so i think that is is great and like again that's our main probably that's where a lot of our revenue is coming right now but the shop to me personally and this is big for us is my my big vision is like a place for community a place where people can come and they're they're safe they have fun i mean it's for all ages right we get all ages in the store and my big vision and why i wanna have such a big space is man this is a safe place for a lot of people i i just feel like there's a lot of people in this hobby and just like in general in the in in the world that's just isolation man is just rampant especially for males and it's not good it's not how god designed us to live and especially in the hobby feel like it's like there's a lot of money people don't trust anybody everybody's a scammer who can i talk to and it doesn't have to be like that you know and i feel like with a storefront like physically going somewhere man like that's a lot of what we've missed out on over the years covid you know people working at home just a lot of things have changed right and and a really thoughtful a really thoughtful and and big vision of where we want the store to be is just a place man where people like man i wanna be there like and there's unique things that can only happen there right like you only do so much on a livestream but there's so much you can do in a physical place with physical people and just so the connections that i hope get made relationships friendships you know i love to i would love to see people like i mean i came from you know minnesota like i planned my vacation to come because i was gonna i wanna come just to key beach but then i wanna come to your store you know so that that's what i think i i really envision for the store i really would like for that to be just a place that just brings a lot of joy for people and community awesome awesome vision you touched on the breakers and you know having to have you know some charisma because at the end of the day you're talking in front of a phone or maybe a room that's just you i i you know i i'd love to get your perspective because breakers are such a big part of this industry at this point and i feel like when one breaker makes a mistake or does something bad it kinda gives the bad reputation to all breakers because the one clip goes viral and you're just like oh my god how how do you think about that profile of the breaker that you want to have as a part of your business obviously they're an extension of your brand they are your brand right for and i just wanna get some maybe understanding of like what are those qualities and attributes that are like requirements for you in order to bring someone in to work as a breaker for nine four one sports cards yeah yeah it's tough man because you're right i mean like one bad apple just ruins the bunch right or people get a bad taste or maybe that breaker's having a bad day says something dumb someone in the chat gets mad all of a sudden you know it goes viral and you're the that's you know it's scary i mean for us like just some just some like protocols that go on on the backside anybody we bring on automatically has to have a background check so it's pretty thorough like i mean i'm not saying that we have grace with some things but it's like so if we see certain things like you're not i'm sorry you can't like we can't do it it's just there's too much involved here and too much on the line so that i think kinda helps set a tone you know and and that being said like we you you when you do background check you see if something happened to someone a long time ago nothing's ever happened again it's like people change so we're like i'm all for that right but someone's got stuff that keeps coming up you know back to back to back not good so so we start there pride ourselves in that and then i think man we just look for like high integrity people i mean people that don't cut corners people that care about what they're doing i mean i think you can see that pretty quickly man people are good there's a lot of good talkers out there and i've been duped you know like you can see or like they talk a good game and they might not even be like a scammer necessarily but like they're just they're just not of their about their word they they they make these promises they do these things you know they're showing up late all the time they're starting their streams late they cut them off early they get you know they do say something not very nice to someone in chat like you can you can sniff it out pretty quick you know so little we like try to really pick up on little things pretty fast and then you know i i i stream sometimes like you know my director of operations stream sometimes you know like we try to always make sure we're setting the standard too on how we're talking our energy excuse me our excitement so you know i think there's just like i think once and again i think it comes with experience right like start to just see like okay this is a really good person high integrity good work ethic cares you know the way they present themselves and then you can also see like pretty quickly even if someone's a good talker you can you can smell it pretty quickly if i guess isn't gonna be a good fit so that's been why my process of navigating and i say all that because i've had like not good people work for me that i've had to like let go and gone through situations and i think i one thing i learned very quickly too is like you can't i mean you i can give more chances right but like there's certain things like once the lines cross like they're gone and i'm not talking about like oh they stole something of course if they stole something they're gone like that's an immediate but little like like alright this one guy like decided to go in another breaker's room and like talk crap to to that company for some reason who knows why gone like know what i mean like this we're not we're not doing that you know so things like that i think you just have to be be really really aware of and focus on i wanna talk allocation and how you think about it i am always just fascinated by individuals who have these operations and are managing like inventory allocation having to decide what goes where like you can't just like have cases of cards from a bunch of different products show up and then that day decide okay this is what we're doing today with this i feel like in order to be successful you have to have like a a strategy you have to have operations behind it like how do you think about the allocation you're getting from your either if it's direct from distributors like how do you think about that and like what's coming in and then how that gets delivered on the front end whether it's at the shop level or at the online level like what's what's the method to your madness yeah so we we yeah we go the wholesaler route so we're we gts is who i've been with for a while and love those guys i have a really great relationship with my rep and everyone there is great and so you know people think that with allocation you get like this infinite supply or something at like a really crazy low cost and it's just like not like that you know we we get you you build your allocation which is all about to change right now which i'm sure you're aware of and it's probably a whole other story but you know you you basically new releases are are the bread and butter of breaking right we all know that something new fun like awesome has a has a small window where you can just everybody's excited about it and then usually eight times out of ten it's probably dipping in value after that sometimes it goes up but it's it's in this recent era it hasn't really been but for us like breaking i mean breaking new releases is like immediately where it goes we keep some for the shelf like very small amount i'm talking like maybe a case but like if i've got six cases you know five of it's going to breaking and like one of it's probably going on the shelf and then like if it's sitting on the shelf for a while and it's not selling out it's probably getting thrown into breaks in the next week or so and then we'll buy some restock and that whole game of restock and and having to you have to buy you know you get your allocated which is a pretty good price but you only get so much of it let's say two three cases and then you gotta buy i need another three cases i don't have a choice if i'm going to run my stream and we're gonna do well and we're gonna put on a good show we need six right now right at minimum so i have to go to the aftermarket or from my wholesaler and pay that aftermarket price so now it's a cost average game right so yeah that's kind of the flow but again like i'm talking to you now in march where we haven't stepped into our new place yet but we envision a lot of a lot of stuff to pick up once we're in a new place with a better location but yeah that's that's that's currently how we do it it's it's probably mostly put towards breaking so how do you decide like obviously you get a feel you've been doing this for long enough when a product's hot when they've got whether it's rookie they've got certain case hits whatever it is but you know like if i keep getting it back in like i'm gonna keep you know giving my audience something that they want because it's what the industry wants right now so you you you blow through you know six cases and you're like okay like we need to do more like how how do you make those decisions like when do you make those decisions that like we need we need more allocation because this is what people want right now as opposed to maybe like going in a direction you thought you were like how do you think about like making those moves in real time yeah great question i mean the allocation the the hard part with that is like it's a six month cycle with these wholesalers or at least with gts where it's like it's all dictated on spend right so it's like i mean if you if i want ten cases allocated that's a ton of spend like i'm not there yet like i mean we average three to four cases usually like even some of this new stuff coming out here in this last month i'm getting like two cases because apparently it's a shorter run but i know i gotta go out and get at least four more in the aftermarket to have enough to sustain us right to keep this ship going so the allocate and that and again this whole allocate what i'm sharing right now is like the whole thing's about to change i mean panini's still gonna have basketball and you know there's still gonna be wnba and there's still pokemon and all the stuff that we get but football is like kind of the bread and butter right it's what everybody's the biggest thing but so the allocation one tough to tough to like i mean we've been working on that growing that steadily but again i think the majority comes in the aftermarket but a great example here of like seeing a hot product restocking it because it's so well we're doing it and seeing it well i just had this select select twenty twenty five just came out right fun product really cool there's no xrcs this year but great price point in my opinion for a hobby box people still love it great case hits you mean the the autos are sweet you know you can get some really really good cards out of there at this point in time we've we have i just got five more cases which will it came out what like two weeks ago i think maybe maybe two and a half weeks ago this would be a total of eighteen cases that we have yeah gone like are going through you know i just restocked the five we already ran through thirteen the five other landed yesterday i think so that to answer your question it's like wow we're doing really well with it we're still getting requests for it there hasn't been a new release until today for football which is prism f o t l black which we got we had a case of that like this will do great to keep holding us down in the middle are everybody's still liking it we're still doing well with it so to answer your question it's like is the demand still there like like we can you could tell are are you getting crushed on it it's like well people are probably getting tired of this but if we're still doing doing well on some doing not that well on some but but people are like in our room really enjoying this yeah we're gonna take take more of it so that's kind of the the barometer i use for when when to grab more of something especially after release because that's the trickiest part i think for breakers they get like they like a product they get excited about it they keep buying it and then it just flatlines and they're stuck with it and then they lose a bunch of money the there's been so many changes you know since the covid boom when you know your business was starting to now help us understand from your your seat like what has changed the most you think from a demand perspective in the hobby like when you started to where you're at today you mentioned football and like you i think you said like this is what people want we you know when when the covid happened it was like i mean people people weren't talking about football i'm a football fan but it was crazy to me it's like everyone was latching on to these you know prism basketball rookies and mhmm oh you're right yeah that's what the conversation was and now it's like football's been such a big part of the hobby or it's grown but maybe that's one i don't know if there's others but like what are some of those changes you've seen in in customer demand over the last four or five years yeah yeah so i came in like twenty twenty two and that was the twenty twenty one rookie class of trevor lawrence mac jones justin fields trey lance so i think that's when like football is really hitting its ramp right but i i think i think at least for us football is still like kind of the main i saw basketball kinda take like that kind of kinda fall off a little bit like because your zion never became anything and your john moran got in trouble and like all those rookies that they had in that time ant man doing good now has been helping out a lot for older stuff but i think one of the biggest things that that i see is like the wnba craze is nuts i mean we're talking about like it was like last year where i was looking at like dude these wnba boxes are costing more than the football boxes like who would have thought that and you know so to see that i think was was big and i mean we've actually it's crazy we're talking about this we were just talking about this we've been having a lot of internal discussions with some of this you know top stuff changing football and all this allocation stuff i have is with is with my whole story which is panini stuff right and we we have a tops direct account for our store but it's like it's it's you don't get anything close to what we're doing for this but we're having discussions about wnba panini still has a licensing it's hot like people love this stuff and we're like oh maybe we're gonna start breaking some of that and we we do break everything so if it's a new basketball release we're doing that if it's we were doing bowman's best yesterday if it's a new baseball release we're doing that but wnba is just like man maybe that's something we need to be more excited about because and i would say that's the biggest shift i've seen like i that had when i was in twenty twenty two twenty twenty they didn't hear anything about wnba i mean they made it but it was like nothing and then all of a sudden man twenty twenty late twenty twenty four into twenty twenty five think it was caitlin clark's rookie year just insane what i was seeing for that kind of stuff the it's it's funny you bring up wnba i remember when i first started this podcast like my second conversation i was talking to a breaker this is like twenty twenty i and he was talking he a hob a hobby shop owner who also was doing breaks and he had made mention about the importance of like building and developing relationships with the manufacturer or with the distributor and taking on stuff that like might not sell in order to get when the big releases came out i just remember him referencing like taking on wnba cards because no one no no one wanted them but like he he took them on to build and develop the relationship and then like you look at it now and it's just like one of the most in demand products there is and i mean i i literally we're i'm recording this two miles from where caitlin clark plays and it's dude it's taken over my city it's insane so the demand there is real and i i love the call out there i i you know as we kinda move into this i wanna maybe understand like the transition from the facebook tiktok live to then and and there being a bunch of other options but ending up on like ebay live like how that decision was made and like having that struck infrastructure in place like what's that been like for you and your business yeah so i mean i think it was like kinda like what i was saying where you just you start i mean you get a feel right you see what's working what's not working i mean so so yeah facebook tiktok live with no tiktok shop then we started getting these weird bands like you couldn't i don't i don't know exactly sure it's basically that's why tiktok came out with the shop they were trying to monetize and get the money going through them than on a website they didn't want you selling through a website so i we went back to like just selling on our website and kind of facebook groups and then i again i got connected with the guy and he got us into shop beta which at the time was in beta mode and yeah you could just immediately see like we were the pyts were just snap filling we're putting like all these like random breaks together it didn't matter it was just filling and i was like oh this is great and then we got involved a little bit like memorabilia adding that into our breaks and yeah i just saw the opportunity kind of expanded on there at one point we had like an office in florida texas and california and that was just because i had people that i knew and trusted and i was like alright that that those were the three main tiktok streaming channels and we tried to add like a pokemon one and looking back at that i'm like that was really unwise i'm not exactly sure why i did that i think it was because i had my other business thing going on and like i kinda like trusted some of these guys and i was like okay i can't be physically in this place as much as i'd like to be so maybe i can just outsource i guess was kind of the the thought process but ended up burning me bad some people stole stuff mhmm i mean just you don't have control like you should very unfortunate i mean and i had to i had to shut down the california i had to like break a had to pay out and break a massive no it wasn't massive it was a three year lease four thousand dollars a month didn't even make it past a year had to like pay it the texas one we had to go to i mean it was just because a fall so i say all of that started falling out because shop started to just like maybe dude we were going we were having days where we were just doing we remember one time it was around black friday we streamed for three days straight like we didn't turn off like people just came in and filled the chair and like a guy was there till six am the next guy came in it was insane like everything you put up there is sold it didn't matter and then out of nowhere it was like march twenty twenty four march april twenty twenty four it's like a light switch just flipped like we went from hundreds of people in our room to like ten and and you know our tiktok rep is like hey you just gotta be more exciting you just gotta be more fun you're just not you're not you know and i was like dude you sit in a room with ten people and try it like you're talking to a wall like this is not working and they gave me all these reasons and i was like dude i'm not gonna sit here and say like we're what's that word that people say shadow banned or you know whatever and you know but it was it was like clear as day and we weren't the only ones too so i knew it was like i guess it was maybe like there was a lot more people that got on shop so they got more competitive and but something happened where and it was like to all the channels they just started all just like so had to start consolidating so that's where i eventually dropped it down to the one tiktok channel which was here locally and that's where a lot of the fallout came from as i had to like basically just restructure and was able to kinda keep a couple of them going for a while and then kind of the turning point was i hadn't even closed everything down yet the the turning point was like early twenty twenty five i was still trying to keep everything going because you know when i employ people i'm like man these are my people like i'm not trying to if something's going bad like we're gonna weather the storm guys i'm not just gonna alright it's going bad we're just gonna we could see the numbers going down but we were still maintaining i was like we can still do this guys you know and one one individual just decided to basically steal like twenty thousand dollars worth of product like that was in a different state like it was confirmed like without a doubt said they were having some some family problems but like all of a sudden we started seeing like certain cards for sale in a facebook group that were products that we knew they had that they hadn't ripped yet and so it was like dude i gotta i i can't have people out of state like this is just not i don't know what i'm doing here so that was when that's what kinda like was when actually a huge blessing because it was like everybody that was a part it understood things were already not going too hot and so we can once we got to the one tiktok channel we were kinda like doing enough like we're like alright we we we're consolidated when we're focused you know it's here where we're doing this trying that and and while that was going on i had got on ebay this was before they had a lot of the features that they had now they had just ramped all on ebay live and we were able to get in and it was very beta at that point too like they didn't have the live auction feature where the payment came directly it was like every all the auctions had to be paid for at the end which was very hard for team breaking random teams and but we were like trying to do it we would we would feel the break on the native side come rip it on the live side you know this this and that and it was like summertime of twenty twenty five a good friend of mine called me and he's like hey are are you still on ebay live and i like well we we did have a guy but it wasn't going too well like because we weren't we those features weren't there yet right and it was like the livestream was harder and he's like dude we got on and it's going great like you should definitely and we had been talking about it he's like man this tiktok thing man i just don't know and it was around all this like government stuff i don't remember all the government tiktok stuff yeah so it was like we gotta find an alternative man and so we we we were like alright and then he's like they just got that feature fixed where you can like i was like alright dude that that's a game changer man like that is what was missing and so yeah we went on and we're and then we we just we well at that time we were doing some singles on whatnot too like kinda just trying some things and we just we just got on there and i've always liked ebay like love the platform love the people the people we're talking to us internally were always awesome a lot of help a lot harder on tiktok to get help and we just started the break and we were still doing it on tiktok and then it was like you know what man we're liking this let's just move a little bit before here you know what the singles let's try it over here did a little bit better like you know what let's just let's just try this over here more let's try the singles over here and then before you know it like our it was going really well so that question a long time ago like how do you know i was like dude these streams are working like this is great i mean we're getting great a great audience like our customers our customers that we brought with us were really enjoying the platform they were very pleased with it we just started pouring into that i think we went at that time internally from like maybe five employees total at the shop i had director of operations me a couple streamers and like a shipper to now like we're about seventeen in the past what like six months or so probably summertime also maybe eight nine months now when i it all out spread out i had like fourteen fifteen consolidated down we had like five or six and then now we're back out to seventeen like locally all here what talk about it sounds like you've learned some lessons here and i think we as owners operators anyone who's trying to grow a business everyone wants to grow everyone wants to scale sounds like like you try to grow and scale really fast out of the gates and you learned your lesson from that like what sort of advice maybe just based on your experience would you share with anyone out there who is like in the in the middle of trying to grow a business in this space or is aspiring to grow a business in this space yeah that that's that's a great question man i mean i think one of the biggest things man was when you're so i own my own thing right and i didn't have like strong community of of people that i could trust and like outside of the work right like close friends that i trusted their advice and i'm not necessarily saying like mastermind groups or anything but i mean that could be helpful too but you know i didn't really have anybody like speaking into what i was doing or like like i would just kinda make the decisions and like process it and i had some people i'd run some stuff by right or maybe i'd say something to my wife that had no idea what was going on but i wouldn't you know what i mean but like i just think it's just so crucial man to be getting good mentorship good leadership like sharing working through those problems like part of that was how i was able to like really i kinda got the blanket pulled back on like all those things i was sharing i had a close friend that i that does a lot of consulting and stuff that i that started like i started talking stuff out with him he's like well why this well why that and i was like dude i don't know why this or why i'm doing that like you just kinda find yourself like decision making decision making decision making decision making here we are and you never really like sought counsel or like or you're like kinda compartmentalizing seeking counsel i'll tell you all the good things that are going on but i'm not gonna really tell you about the bad stuff going on so i think that's been monumental for better decisions moving forward right and then so that would be my first advice is like dude really be open and that's i think it's hard as men too especially if you're your own guy it's easier i guess in a partnership because it's like alright we're in this together we gotta figure this out but if you're your own dude it's like pride kicks in i might you know i'm the leader here i don't need anybody telling me what to do i got this and it's like man you gotta be talking to somebody dude like it's so important to work through those ideas process get get a second opinion for someone you trust right don't just go to anybody and then i think you know i this sounds obviously extremely simple and and it's like again i don't even how i got myself in that position but it's like dude you gotta everything you're doing has gotta be like within like you can drive there or like locally or like you know where you can be in complete control of knowing what's going on like this whole out of state stuff like this stuff's too expensive to be sending out of state and i got even that story i said with that guy i had other ones of little infractions that eventually got paid back and stuff like that that were probably warning signs that i should have paid attention to that before i got to where i had to end up getting to doing all that stuff but yeah it's it's just you just have to be you just have to know what's going on and not like like a paranoid like you know all worrying all the time type thing you know fear could dominate you so i'm not saying like you need to be like in there all the time counting every box counting every pack counting all your pennies to make sure everything's right but you just really gotta be aware and like in in the know and like i highly recommend everything being like where you can physically go so i think in this online world it's very easy to like trust like all over the world and you know like oh i chat with this guy you know i talk to this guy on the phone i really trust him sounds good you know and it's it's it's easy like it's we all wanna trust everybody but it's just yeah i would not recommend that this has been a great conversation as we close this out matt i think a lot of what you mentioned today resonates with me you were working in another industry you stumbled into sports cards and now you've gone all in on this business what has this experience been like for you like is what what is the kind of the best lesson you've you've learned from this experience there's a lot of people out there listening who either are running their own business or aspiring to start their own like what what sort of advice would you leave people with oh man there's a there's a lot i mean i i you're talking specifically for the guy that wants to jump into the industry yeah or yeah i mean i think it's my biggest advice would be like get clear on on what exactly it's this is meant this is gonna be for you i'm not i'm i'm not one of those guys that has like the next one three five year plan like this is how much i need to make by month and i wanna be here like if you would ask me back then i was like dude we're just having fun breaking things in a facebook group that was literally it like i remember setting the sorting tray on top of my cat's litter box as i was trying to like i didn't have enough space in the room to like sort everything the cards were fine guys just so you know it was like but i think it's just like at the end of the day if this the the sports card industry is a lot of us is a is a hobby right like we call we call it the hobby mhmm so man if you're hopping in and you love the hobby and you wanna make this your business like take it seriously but and and you know yeah come up with a plan but like dude it's a hobby let's have fun right like that's rule number one now if if this is gonna be your new like thing you're providing for your entire family and like you're going all in and all that like hey dude more power to you there like that's that's awesome like i'm all for entrepreneurship and and taking that route but i would just highly recommend it it it coming as like a as like a hobby like a side thing that you can kinda work into and grow and have fun in and take seriously and and see where you can go from there i've heard a lot of of horror stories it's not just even in this industry i think it happens all the time in business but massive loans taken out like massive debt like all in buying ten cases of something because they think it's gonna be the hottest you know whatever and and you know i really feel like the more the more of those stories i hear like the more of them don't work out than do right so i i would just encourage people like it's a i mean we all love the hobby we all love sports like you know treat it like that grow it like that take it seriously but at the end of the day keep make sure you're having fun and just be open to where where you can go in that like where the journey might take you great feedback this is matt nine four one sports cards really appreciate it man looking forward to doing this again down the road yeah absolutely thanks brett for having me really appreciate it