alright we are back with another episode of passionate profession brought to you by my good friends at ebay excited for today's conversation i am joined by ethan at tombstone collectibles their brand is very cool they have a whole lot going on i'm excited to dig into the operations all the services they're offering the store the streams the cards of course but without further ado ethan welcome how are you oh i'm doing great man thank you for having me on excited to talk about tombstone the hobby a little bit of everything ebay live yes shout out ebay live let's maybe not something i was planning on but just enjoying the branding being a marketing guy tombstone like where does the name come from what's the origin story so funny enough it was one of the biggest holdups in when we opened tombstone we just couldn't decide on the name so when i approached the owner about starting this braking company myself and the president of tombstone gavin hoover they first i believe they came out with kraken wax something about an octopus and coconut packs i told them i was like i think there's already another breaker doing that and i think they have like the same logo you're talking about and they came back about a month or two later and they said you know tombstone and there's kind of actually a lot of ties to the name tombstone so first off the movie the parent couple company of tombstone is named huckle huckleberry all from the actually the movie tombstone if you're not familiar with val kilmer so it kinda just worked perfectly it ended up being pretty cool branding you know you got the skull you got tombstone r i p s rips so it kinda just works that's awesome i i thought you might go there i was getting the movie vibes by digging through and i was wondering if there was a connection point so you you mentioned the owner gavin maybe talk about just like the structure and makeup like how did this business come to be what specifically is your role amongst this team and we'll talk about the team dynamics and more but maybe what's the relationship like between kinda you and owner and what you're responsible for yeah so when i admit him i was just breaking hourly at a different company and you know i admit him we hit him a lebron logo man card live on a a different app and he came into the shop i worked at at the time and you know he's just talking about idea after idea you know i wanna do this i can do this like so many opportunities that i think people weren't thinking about at the time and i was just trying to break cards i was just trying to open cards at the time and i was like i don't know about all that but you know if if we can get on fanatics live if we can get on ebay live if we can get on a couple other apps and build the right team like i know i can take this to another level for you so we started there we started with one stream within two months was two streams and pretty much what happened is i went from breaking to running the entire breaking operation and now we have a shop in miami our breaking headquarters are in las vegas and we're opening some new shops in vegas pretty pretty soon here so we're excited so this starts with you pulling a lebron logo man and then it turns into this whole business that's that's a unique story and maybe the lesson is hey everyone don't try to go pull a lebron logo man and this will happen to you but those are some unique circumstances yeah the the lebron logo man i think you know got me got me in the door got my foot in the door to open up some further communication so i think it's so different from you know when i was growing up and going to hobby shops and thinking about that vibe old dark dingy cases of cards you know the owner maybe wasn't very engaging and i think i look at a brand like tombstone and yeah you have a storefront but then you have this whole backbone of live selling you've got streamers and i think it's just it's incredible how quickly this is all transformed and this probably helps support the growth of the industry entirely when you think about tombstone and just like a modern hobby business doing what you're doing like what do you what does it actually look like like what are you seeing right now and what you're building and moving into the future it's moving very fast i mean you see you got cardvault from by tom brady mark wahlberg is opening some shops pretty soon you know you got all these celebrity and sports legends you know they're they're a part of the hobby but they're also your competition now and so really when you dip your toe in you're gonna get sucked into the wave and so you have to be prepared to move as fast as everybody else's and that's what it kinda feels like right now which is everybody wants a piece of it and it's how do you establish yourself how do you establish your branding how do you make yourself even visible because there's just so much content coming out you know topps is getting the license they're putting new stuff out so competition is number one and then i'd say number two is really finding the right people to to help build your brand because really breaking even though it's pretty well established now is still a new concept to most people as big as it seems like it is really that my mom and dad still don't know what i do that that sounds about right you know trying to tell my parents that this industry and the online sales and what was just tracked i just looked in cardladder and the march number was six hundred and five million in online sales which is absolutely incredible but it opens the doors for opportunities of business builders like you to do what you're doing and you mentioned differentiation and there's a lot undeniably like there's a lot of streamers there's a lot of breaking companies there's probably new ones popping up as we're having this conversation like yeah what what decisions did you make maybe early in that you think about now in order to like separate yourself and stand out in the sea of peoples doing similar adjacent stuff as tombstone yeah that's a really good question i mean a lot of people don't realize it's not as easy as it looks you know if you get a couple cases from target or walmart or online and you go on a stream and try to break them there's a ninety percent chance you're not gonna make a sell or you're just gonna lose a bunch of money the number one thing is you have to have a breaker who's established in the industry who has relationships with some of the buyers because a big part of the buying on these apps is word-of-mouth if people don't know who you are if they don't trust you if they just don't like the way know you looked on the stream that day they might have to buy into the break and it's a hard thing to gauge you have a lot of different reasons why people buy it could be your pricing it you know it could be the layout of your stream they like the pyt the auctions the pyp or they just wanna do personals so you kinda have to choose one or two of them and really go all in and make sure you're doing it right because if you go i'm gonna do auctions today that doesn't really work well i'm gonna do a pyt today that doesn't really work you just lose whatever crowd you're trying to build in the first place so from the jump i'd say you know we emphasize pick your pick your players large scale we do twenty thirty forty fifty cases max so far of you know maybe the break cost two hundred thousand dollars but there's some spots in there that are nineteen twenty nine dollars then you have your twenty thousand dollar players so you have literally ranging from the entry level guy who just wants his pc to the guy who wants to hit you know the next million dollar card out there so yeah we really emphasize those how do you know how did you know that i guess what you mentioned you know you can do auctions you can do pyt you can do there's a variety of types of ways you can set up your streams like how did you make sure you had a pulse on the variety of options and what was working and maybe what wasn't in those early days you know it's it's funny because when i first started breaking it was really small mixers three four five boxes at a time and i did a lot of personals like that's what i really specialized then was building relationships with high end customers who simply wanted their own boxes and cases you know they didn't wanna partake in a pyt that may take two days to fill and then not hit anything mhmm you know they're definitely bigger spenders with expendable income and that's really where i had my customer base was in that so going into it i was pretty new to pick your players in these giant breaks you see running today these things didn't exist two three years ago i mean people would do case breaks two case breaks now it's thirty forty fifty and the number seems to keep getting bigger and and when that number gets bigger you gotta build your back end like the shipping department bigger so right right away early on we realized okay we went into the pick your players and now we don't have the shippers to actually move these brakes for us so we were having to after the stream we'd have to pack up make sure everything's sorted and you you know you have three hundred fifty buyers in one break and then you still have to get all the personals out so a part of it is just learning as you go along and trying not to screw up while that happens one thing we did to improve that process is we got i mean around our office i'm not in the office right now but we have about fifty four k cameras over every shipping and braking area so if anything goes missing we can actually like zoom in on the card the actual second we opened it and then track it to wherever it went so that's probably saved us thirty times already that so it sounds like obviously the growth was happening and you were maybe growing faster than your former infrastructure could mhmm could be supported and it seems like in this time where the hobby's booming there's more interest business owners and operators like you it's like you're trying to fly a plane and change the engine at the same time it sounds like that where the shipping like you're like oh we need to do something here like how do you make those decisions in real time and a decision as big as like we need to get serious in investing in like a not only maybe someone who does shipping but like a department around this to make sure that our customers get their cards back when we say they're they should get it back like how do you make those decisions in real time so luckily the the companies that our parent company operated before were large in scale mostly retail so we have some experienced people like gavin we brought in our shipping manager his name's kenny and we just had to bring him in on the fly we were like hey we've been talking about bringing you in for a while we found the perfect opportunity we need somebody to lead this department we didn't think was gonna exist you know a month ago and so having the experience just in any professional field i think is key and i think that's why maybe a lot of mom and pop shops like older hobby shops kinda struggle to get into the breaking in the first place is because it becomes about logistics and then analytics on saving on shipping cost and then you're partnering with insurance companies to cover your cards and it it becomes a litany of other things that have nothing to do with breaking and the worst thing you can do with breaking is bring in all these kinda boring quantifiable shipping issues that just bog you down so you really need experienced people to run that prior to working at tombstone kenny was operating an entire costco facility so just to give you an example of how kinda those fields translate into breaking what what's your perspective on like talent and people and domain expertise like this person knows cards versus like this person has the career experience and skill set that even if they don't know anything about cards that they can apply to cards like how do you evaluate those two worlds when you're bringing someone new in yeah that that's honestly one of the tough toughest parts because i came from food and beverage i have a degree in hospitality management and i've never used it a day in my life and when i found breaking you know i think the customer relationships came naturally to me i was collecting at a young age so i got lucky with that with the parallels i just understood what was happening what people were chasing kind of the mindset behind it but a lot of people come in from media a lot of people come in from even cells themselves and the primary difference is gonna be this isn't door to door you're not seeing this person in front of you it's through a computer screen and so that's very hard for some people to understand is that you have to be the same in your approach online as you are to a person you've just met in person so that's a hard distinction to make and you usually don't know for about a month or two until they get behind the camera they get comfortable and even then it's just like there there's a magic to it and i i feel like genuinely you have it or you don't and you know you can't it's just like sports sometimes you just can't train the athleticism well you can't train the the customer relationships this is so fun like i think about you know let's say for instance and you've got the draft coming up and you've got quarterbacks that are being drafted and you know there's analysis on a guy like fernando mendoza and one of the things people keep going back to is just like his mental toughness in his state and like while that might not jump off the page during like a pro day or workout that's the thing those are like the types of traits that are going to lead to wins which are the most important things when it comes to a game of football what have you learned about building the operation and bringing in people to be in front of the customer on camera like what are those traits that are essential in order to continue to have successful streams and have customers continue to come back surprisingly you know one thing i really look for is like a high level high level of neuroticism a lot of fields don't like that but when somebody's very peculiar they need their spreadsheets laid out in a certain way you know the way they talk to you the way they talk about you know people they've met like those things go into that hand in hand and you know it's kinda like a real estate agent where you need to have a black book of clients where it's like i remember you bought from me a year ago you write that person down you get their instagram their phone number so i really look for people's persons but not in the way of oh i just like talking to you it's like this person is motivated to make connections this person is genuinely interested in you know building this as as big as it can go so you have to build it for scale in the long run you have to hire people who really understand what it takes to build a book of business that's interesting and i was looking at the website and just clicked into kinda the meet the team and was just blown away by the volume like streamers dedicated to categories streamers dedicated to platforms it's right it it just you can just look at your team and realize like how vast the hobby and from a category's perspective really is like when did you reach the point when you were like we need to get very specific with the types of people that we're bringing in to be breaking and talking about specific types of cards and products yeah so really our first two streams were multi sport so soccer we had baseball football basketball and then when these marvel cards and star wars really started taking off and people realize you can hit fifty thousand dollar cards in a star wars product well that's a whole you know customer base now and so you have people chasing specific characters and inserts like a nineteen seventy luke skywalker versus a pixar character from a film that came out in two thousand four and they want that character only well when that happens you get down to that level of definition you have to open up a channel just for star wars and disney because the you know football guys like us we're not gonna translate well to that crowd so it's a whole different beast the way they run that we have josh on our entertainment channel he's one of our breakers that was on since day one with us and he started in sports and then you know he just kinda gravitated towards that and we're like you're the perfect guy for this he was on the football channels and he just you know wasn't the right breaker for that but he moves over there and it's like he can build a whole community so it's super interesting to see the kinda different customers you bring in different walks of life you have a lot more soccer moms than the disney field no surprise there but then you also have guys our age who are buying in that that just have no interest in football and baseball so it's it's like a different hangout area almost i've you know i've been being a like communications geek and junkie i've always been fascinated with how hobby businesses approach their communication strategy and a lot of the times it feels like the business is just talking to the hobby as a whole but the hobby is so diverse it has many different categories obviously you've built your team around like the the variety how important do you think communication is in like being very specific being able to talk the talk and walk the walk for the certain type of collector that might be buying into to breaks on tombstone like how important is the the language and using language to connect with your audience that's a very good quote i've never been asked that question before the the the main thing i would say is you know if the customer knows the product better than you that's not a great sign so you know if you're ripping f one and you don't know that the top driver's verstappen and nobody likes valteri bottas well you're gonna have a tough time in that field because if you pull a one zero one of valteri and then the guy who bought verstappen for nine thousand dollars he's gonna be very upset with you so you you really have to know the product and you don't have to know the sport through in and throughout but you have to know the language you have to understand the difference between a manager and a player you have to understand the difference between you know the top rookie chase and then a fifth year guy so the the nuance that goes into is really important and nobody knows everything including myself but you really have to understand the case hits the parallels and the top end talent so once you get into that kinda nuanced then you take it to the next level which is selling to people on those specifics and you know that's where most people get lost in the sauce that's where a lot of people are just like alright i'm tuning out so i try and keep it fun and friendly in general and then for the specific guys you know maybe like yourself who go into that depth of collecting then you get to really you know express yourself with that but for the for most people if you start off your sales pitch like that or you know you start off your stream like that it's gonna just tune a lot of people up i i love this and this is me maybe getting nerdy asking a follow-up but like how import how important is like being adaptable in the moment right because you don't necessarily know who's gonna show up in that room and who's gonna be a part of stream it could be a lot of people buying into a break for the first time it could be someone who is just looking for that one card who knows everything about the product everything about the sport like how when you're on camera and you're selling breaking cards like how do you kinda toggle back and forth between like servicing the individual who knows maybe more than you versus like making sure you're appealing to the masses which might be a majority of people in the room man and that's a great question the just great question after great great question man the the the main thing i would say is this is usually generally the larger buyers the guys who are in there every day looking for the best deal on the best the best player or driver or character are gonna be the ones that you're gonna have to have those conversations with and some of these apps now have like a little tag for their name so it has a little check mark kinda like a verified user and only we see that on the back end so when that pops up usually you'll know what to expect like okay this guy is gonna know his stuff like you better know the answer if not you better pull the checklist up on the computer right next to you so we you kinda brace yourself for impact there and a lot of them already know what they're looking for so they won't ask the question but generally they'll ask for a deal and they'll be like well three other breakers have them at this price and you're up here so you either have to come down to that level or you have to kinda explain you know well we dropped the price of another guy we raised the price of them then you have the general collector they might come in and just say why is i mean you're a colts fan right yes you got it alright so why is you know jonathan taylor three hundred dollars more than philip rivers even though he's a quarterback or something and you gotta explain to him well jonathan taylor's got ten more years in the league he might be the best running back whereas you know philip rivers had he's past his prime he kinda tanked last season the market's down on him so there's a lot of explanations in that in that kind of vicinity and then the number one thing i would just say is if the person is a casual collector you wanna keep it fun and light for them you just wanna get them into collecting and that's where the kind of passion comes from which is it's not all about the biggest hit it's not all about if you're gonna hit or not you know we give skunk packs to every customer no matter what if they miss on a break if you buy some big spots in our breaks we're gonna throw you a case hit repack or we're gonna hit throw you a hobby box like we're gonna make sure no matter what you're gonna feel like you had a good experience and not just well i'm i'm out three hundred dollars you know i i love the depth of dialogue that we're getting into i feel like you know for in like it just feels like there's a certain perception sometimes and there's on you know a breaker who can't pronounce someone's name and then it get gets clipped and gets spent sent around but then there's operations like tombstone taking kind of what you're doing very seriously and understanding that you know not only are the categories customized but there's customization around each conversation you're having based on the maturity of each buyer that's entering each of the streams which is wild to consider yeah there's so many like sub dialogues underneath it all you can have and then you can talk about psa grading and then you can talk about consignment and it's just like and like that that's i'd honestly say is the best part about this business is that there's always something new happening there's always innovative idea ingenuity and at any point in time everything you're doing can times two because somebody just came out with the next you know innovation in this field and you can just adapt it to your business so you know psa grading obviously that's one of the ones that's been around for a long time but then you have things like card cleaning you know you have things like inspecting fees and it's it's things that a lot of people prefer to use because at the end of the day you are dealing with high end collectibles and that's something i think you shouldn't lose sight of which is this might be a life changing card for somebody or a life changing part of their collection you wanna take care of it you wanna make sure they get the best experience rather than just oh you hit this big card ship it out done you know no doubt we've spent a majority of the time talking about streaming but i wanna they talk about the storefront and how the how why the storefront exists and how the storefront maybe interacts with what's happening online yeah we have a great manager out there his name is cam and originally he was running the loop shop which is one of the platforms we stream on so he was running their shop and they were closing down in miami and we kinda bought out their allocation and instead of moving into their building we chose a nice spot in coconut grove so cam and gavin were really the masterminds behind that and if you haven't checked out the shop in coconut grove florida i mean it's amazing like we have a four layer tv jumbotron that kinda you walk in there we have like a breaking table kinda looks like a pool table with a velvet top we host trade nights we had a top strip night with you know tyler harrow there we've had we're gonna have miguel cabrera on this last top strip night which was unfortunate we didn't get him it was a last minute pullout but we have some some pretty big guys lined up over there the storefront is just nice having it's like the physical representation of your business so as many streams as you have you gotta have kinda the hangout spot for people to go and be like this is tombstone let's talk about the inventory it seems like any business owner or operator who i'm talking with one of the conversations is around inventory and a lot of the times is this market is ripping so much i can't keep up i can't get enough like how do like what's the inventory strategy that you have at tombstone like how are you sourcing inventory like what are maybe creative ways you're working to make sure that you get the right products on your streams to keep your customers happy yeah so inventory is probably the the the biggest thing behind the whole machine that a lot of people don't realize is also your biggest headache if you don't have the allocation and you know it's changed so much so before you had panini but panini used you know companies like gts and peach and southern hobby and a couple other ones and they essentially bought the wholesale sold it to the breakers the breakers then released it to the customers okay well now panini sort of phased out now we're into the topps era topps goes direct to breakers and direct to a couple other businesses so you know originally you could kinda get a topps account just by having a hobby shop well now that's not the case so you go into breaking okay well can i get a breaking account if i'm on you know if i'm just a streamer in my garage there's no chance right so you kinda had to get in early and i'm hoping that the allocation opens up over time as the hobby grows but right now it seems like it's stretched to its limit so you kinda source outside of tops and fanatics after even after the allocation the allocation is never enough so you go to damon adams you go to blowout and you go through maybe people who have old wax collections so it's kinda just a culmination of relationships and knowing what product to buy because you can buy secondary at any point let's use transcendent that just came out as an example right it's a twenty five thousand dollar box but if you know there's only five hundred cases available okay well if i buy fifty to a hundred of them i just took one fourth of the market cap there's a good chance that box is gonna rise even if i don't sell it all so i think a big part about inventory that isn't spoken about is just the willingness to hold and being able to hold on to product we had you know roughly sixty seventy cases of twenty three twenty four tops chrome uefa yamal rookie year for over a year and then the price doubles one day so i think that's a a really really big aspect that kinda goes into the collecting right where you're like i think yamal's gonna be the next big suit soccer superstar so i'm gonna hold on to his cards well you can do that with sealed wax you don't have to sell it but you know at the end of the day we're looking for the big hits so we'll hold on to the wax if it doesn't sell but we always try and sell on day one even if we think the product's gonna go up because we wanna pull the one zero one we wanna pull the crazy card right and make our buyers happy but i'll be honest a lot of times people don't realize day one pricing is also the cheapest you're ever gonna get it because that's when the allocation comes out and they're like well you know i i just don't see the value and then in two weeks it's you know as we know eight nine hundred dollars more and you're like well i can't buy it now yeah it's it's nuts and i wanted to maybe walk through maybe a a hypothetical example that's actually probably gonna be real in your overall soon if it's not already going on but saw the news today about just like the we're seeing the promotion around topscrumb football for the first time i would imagine you know you have put in your orders and whatever like the max button you can receive you want of topgolf football with a product like that that you know is going to be widely popular you know just look at what the basketball product did like you're gonna want as much as you can like how do you think about your strategy around a product like that that you know the demand's gonna be there but like likely and i'd i'm just guessing likely whatever you receive from tops is probably only gonna be like a small percentage of what you really want in order to like really go to market and do breaks around it yeah the top football with it being such a big release i mean it's been over a decade since they had top scrum licensed football cards and even the unlicensed cards sold really well so i think a lot of people are expecting this to be times to that you know luckily they started their fdi auctions so anybody can participate in those which i think is great just like paninifotl that was one of the best parts is even if you never had an account you could make a business out of first off the line products or at least like a weekend stream so i would say if you're looking for top scrum football pay the extra couple bucks if you're not gonna get any boxes do the fdi auctions because those products you get them a couple days before the hobby anyway so if you are a streamer who doesn't have access to the allocation that's really a good way to get people in and for us i mean we're gonna make a strong offer you know we're gonna look to buy as much as we can of it and then once you get that you you kinda gotta go to the big retailers which is one of the downsides you know you're kind of competing against the big retailers and breaking and then also buying product from them at the same time so it kinda feels like david versus goliath but at the end of the day you know if if you can make a successful streaming business out of it it's it's a win win and i don't think the allocation process i don't think the distribution process is perfect but i think that you know it's gonna get better it's just right now it's chaos i mean if topps releases the product all to the public what we've noticed is before release date a lot of people who don't have tops direct accounts are breaking it early on platforms like whatnot or on facebook or something and then it's kinda ruining it for the well established businesses so i kinda see the the strictness behind it and then another you know areas i see kind of the gray area where it's like well is it right that this one breaker got a hundred fifty cases they that's a whole another topic obviously but yeah that's wild i think the perception that when people look into a successful streaming business is you know they get all this product they're making hand over fist and they're this is continuing to grow as the industry continues to grow and these companies are crushing it and i think a lot of that is true but it's one of those things that from my observations it like this didn't happen overnight and so i i'd love to maybe understand like in this build to get to where you are today with multiple streams and storefront like what are maybe some setbacks that you've had to deal with or faced along the way and maybe what did you learn for from those missteps or things that were outside of your control i think some of the early mistakes obviously was staffing issues you know if if you wanna grow in this hobby you have to go all in you can't dip your toe in so you either stay small and you run your weekend streams or your smaller streams including hobby shops you can stay small and you can have two or three employees but if you wanna grow if you wanna have your name known you really have to expand and do it fast and there's no ending to that expansion it just keeps getting bigger so the biggest thing early on we realized was talent and because it's such a new and growing industry there's just not a lot of breakers out there and the ones that are they're with the best breakers already so you go to these break and right now a lot of breakers are being poached from company to company believe it or not they're like free agents in the open market so you have offers being thrown around you make an offer and then the next day he gets a fifty thousand dollar bonus from his from his employer and it's just never ending so we realized you we have to have a talent development system we have to have a way to evaluate breakers on stream because you can't just put somebody out there to open these high end hobby boxes i mean these guys take it very serious and if you just put some joe schmo on there who doesn't know what he's talking about they're never gonna come back to your streaming business so that i'd say talent is number one and then you know we kinda talked about product sourcing and that stuff so i'd say number three would just be a solid customer service program you know if if you look at any successful business they have a vip rewards they have loyalty and a lot of places don't have that because you have to essentially have a third party process all this data from you and a lot of people don't have that data to back it up you know we have a whole inventory system in place we use ncr to process every transaction so let's say you check out three boxes of prism for your break today we have an inventory manager who scans that out puts it on their cart and then whatever they don't return is what they essentially sold that day right so it's kinda like checks and balances for that without having to go through every individual sell item because you might have seven hundred sells from a break and then it's just impossible to keep track of so that was the biggest hurdle and i think that's a big hurdle to a lot of people in this industry is not having the right inventory system in place and early on too because the problem just amplifies as you get bigger i mean i would be honest and i'd say probably about half the people in this industry who you know have a breaking or a shop don't know their actual take home pay each month i'd i'd i would i would say that number might be short too i was having a conversation with my wife just last night about how i have to pull myself out of this weird world that is working on the internet sometimes because i'm just constantly online and constantly having conversations like this and thinking about like the evolution of tech and where we're going and how this lifestyle of professional lifestyle of working online is becoming more and more normal and you said something there where you know talking about streamers move jumping ship and maintaining like making sure that you're you're you're managing them right and they feel good about being in your operation and i never like i just was saying like when our daughters go to college like the the traditional path that we were told like get a job out of college like it it's going to look very different it already looks different from when i graduated where you got these tools platforms opportunities are endless to be an entrepreneur and make money whether it's on your own or inside a business like tombstone i i i think about like the the development of like your primary employee which i'm envisioning being a streamer it's like like i don't think anyone's ever talked about this but i would love to get your perspective on like what what is like the career pathing for someone who is interested or might be in the junior level wanting to get into streaming like how do you think about progressing that individual from like someone who is interested to someone who's like crushing it on a stream at tombstone right yeah so i'll give an example our our top streamer's name is mason he runs on fanatics live five days a week and he started in freight before this i he had this long drawn out story about how he got into cards it was sorta like mine but eventually he just kinda found it just found him and he just started streaming part time and then it became the passion and then it was full time and i think the career path is different for everybody because there's no breaking one zero one in college there's just no sports card collecting in schools maybe some entrepreneurship classes mentioned sports cards i don't know but i i was actually talking about that the other day which is how in the world is any kid gonna find out how to be a breaker because there's just no visibility for it in the workforce and that genuinely i think the person who can solve that will be you know a billionaire because if you can funnel the right people into this field that is how you're gonna definitely ten times it right whatever ruben said times ten this hobby that's how you do it you gotta get the right people in i love it so undeniably the industry's unlike it's ever been before it's fun to be building in this space what what opportunities are you seeing right now or are you thinking about that maybe aren't what everyone's doing like what where's your headspace at in order to keep tombstone up and running and growing at the level that you and your stakeholders want it to be yeah the interesting part is the lack of international presence for breaking i think a lot of people know that there is a lot of sports card soccer collectors in the uk maybe some basketball in china and japan but when you look worldwide there's just not a general sense of collecting like there is in america i believe and so i think the number one way is to break into those international avenues we just launched a new ebay livestream ebay live was awesome enough to get this up and running for us in two or three weeks by the way they it was the fastest we've ever got a stream up so it's called tumba rips tumba caccianables on ebay and it's i believe the first legitimate all latin speaking stream so you can go on there tonight they're gonna be live three to eleven pm and they're gonna be speaking spanish to you so if you go in there and speak english you're not gonna have any luck we've we've been talking to some guys who run the baseball leagues in mexico to try and increase that presence and really just get more people into collecting in general because there's only a finite amount of collectors there's only a finite amount of money each person can spend and at the end of the day there's a collection for everyone you don't have to be the guy who spends hundreds of thousands but to make you know the big operations and the high end products run itself is you have to have more collectors and the way to do that is just expand the community and i think breaking into that latin market is the first thing we're trying to do and then from there on you know we'd love to have soccer breakers from tombstone in the uk breaking soccer but there's just not a platform to do it yet so i think ebay live is ahead of the curve in that regard which is they have access to all those markets and with the right people in place you can really you know get people hooked on this much faster i love the call out on like global expansion i think it's one of those topics that is the conversation's just getting started around and is very important in order to sustain the level where we're at where the kinda industry is continuing to grow and thrive i i've learned so much about the the business side of streaming and breaking from you ethan you have a unique story too right we hospitality you you pull a massive grail for someone who then ends up kinda bringing you in to to run this operation which is awesome and i love stories like that there's probably there's there are people out there that are kinda working a traditional nine to five and are interested in breaking in and whether it's working you know for a a business like tombstone or if it's you know starting their own thing they wanna get into this space they wanna be working in this space it's it's exciting it's fun like what sort of advice do you have for individuals who kinda are looking to transition over into working in the sports card industry yeah find i would say find your niche you know find your space find your passion what you like to collect that's number one that's what i did i think that's what a lot of successful people in this industry did they started with a passion and so it's this this one's so unique because you can find your passion and then turn it into a career tomorrow right even if it's just a small ebay store or a local card show so you you find that and you take that as far as you can go with it and if you find that you can't stop doing it then this is the right path for you so whatever it may be there's a million things you can do in this hobby awesome feedback great conversation this was ethan from tombstone collectibles go check out their variety of streams especially on ebay live tons going on ethan fun conversation looking forward to doing this again down the road yes sir thank you so much brad this was a pleasure