hi everybody we are back another episode of passionate profession unlocking a brand new character on this episode excited to dig into the build with brian of black gold sports cards there is a lot going on and i've already sensed that just from a few minutes of conversation before we hit record with black gold sports cards and we'll dig into the journey but without further ado brian welcome how are you good good thank you for having me on your podcast i very much appreciate it absolutely so there is tremendous growth going on in the industry and that obviously has a ripple effect to businesses like yours and we're going to talk about a lot of different topics just all the different things you have in motion at black gold talk about scale employees the build all of that but before we get into your business let's start with you and your connection into the hobby just trying to get some understanding of how long has cards been a part of your life yeah yeah i mean i'm just a normal person i'll be honest with you like i was born and raised with my dad was a machinist my mom was a nurse so neither of them had a bachelor's degree my mom went back to get her when i was growing up so i think she got her bachelor's from uw milwaukee when i was like sixteen so that gives that gives people understanding like i don't come from like a rich family a lot of people probably think brian you come from a rich family no i didn't okay i promise you i did not i was just a normal kid alright my parents were worked very hard to so so the does that does that motivate you has that been a motivating factor for you i think yeah so like i've been into cards right and and my parents would buy me like tubs they couldn't afford the boxes back when i was little so they would buy me the tubs and i was always the kid i i have two other brothers i was always the the child that was organizing those tubs putting them in so my mom was like oh you're gonna do something in sports one day and obviously as you get older everybody went through that phase not everybody but a lot of people did where you stop sports cards right and then i went to college i graduated with a business degree at saint norbert college played college baseball very athletic anyways i come back after college and i i'm a tax accountant at the us bank wealth management downtown milwaukee big tower doing it you know like how i had imagined i would do it when i was a kid and that wasn't really fun i'll be honest with you but i worked there for ten and a half years and i was really good at that i was a really good accountant i was like oh it's not even easy to get to a level three i was a manager i knew what i was doing and anyways covid hit and boom i saw my tubs from when i was a kid i was told my mom never to like get rid of them and i started going through them and i started looking up these graded cards were going for so much money in twenty twenty i was like this can't be real like this can't be real and i'm like looking at sold prices like no it's real and that led to me i was so good at my job i was able to do two jobs at once so i started like looking through my collection getting ungraded learning how to inspect and grade my cards and so many new people were getting to the hobby i started spending a lot of money it's kind of taking up a lot of time and i like i said i'm not wealthy so i spent a lot of my money in my savings account my wife's like dude like are you doing and i'm like just wait alright just i promise you it will come back just let these cards get graded next thing you know paying off my car i'm paying off my wife's car i'm paying off my mortgage i paid my entire student loans forty five k i didn't plan on i'm still i'm still pc a whole bunch of stuff like stuff this is stuff that i've i've kept so i haven't sold it all there's no way i'm gonna sell it all there's pc items from when i was a kid there's no way i've i i did this the right way i just spent a lot of money which then led into oh i gotta sell something i didn't plan on me creating a business it just happened so the the business side obviously so many of us got back into the hobby or returned to the hobby during the covid time whatever the headlines or whatever the experience we had in our childhood rooms of seeing our old cards that pulled us back in we were all looking for something but many of the people started collecting but you know not everyone started a a business obviously you it sounds like you were making real money when was that moment where you said you were kinda working two jobs at once like what were you doing to generate the reoccurring revenue where you looked at it where you're like this might be something that i can turn into a business and leave my job as an accountant yeah so i started the the the platforms weren't around yet i was before the platforms like whatnot kinetic live ebay live i was before this so i started inspecting my own cards and i was in all these facebook groups in these live streams that were getting hundred to five hundred to a thousand people and i got to know those live streamers so i marketed myself to them and i told them hey if you send customers my way for inspection and grading i can get you a discount to the guy i'll i'll give you free wipe downs i will give you really the my price on psa which was super cheap back then holy crap it's like ten dollars a card you know for value people started sending me packages i started out at a dollar a card for wipe down which is insane insane so i started doing dude eventually was getting like fifty packages a day and my wife's like you can't tell these people to send packages to our home address like what if they just showed up one day i don't wanna so i was like yeah good point so i was like let's get a po box and just like dude i was always a few steps ahead of everybody and i continued that because eventually psa got shut down and that impacted every single group sub company in the whole world and no group sub company was not affected i don't even care if you're sappi sportscards or if you're you know lake countrycards or if you're kk sportscards your psa grading group submission was affected and it was never it's still not the same think about it like i did i i started live streaming it was just all booming i got into whatnot and i was an accountant so i was able to really set up like excel sheets track everything we use the same excel sheets today that i created five years ago i can see profit loss on every single break from any single employee at any time of the night and if they're not doing it they're not doing their jobs correct because that's a part of like if you wanna be a a a group or if you wanna be a live streamer and do breaks with me and this is with probably any of the big companies that do live streaming for breaks you have to do things you know it's a real job so you have to know excel a little bit you need to know how to use a computer you need to know how to determine like oh it's a new product well how do you look at the checklist so it was just teaching people started coming out of my team taught them and we just kept on building like it was it was awesome we created a family it's different here though we're a culture you know but that's sort of my story through the years when was the moment obviously you were very the moment yeah operational focused building systems when was when was the moment that you sat down i don't know if it was with your wife and you just said i i think i can leave my job and do this full time like when was that moment yeah so that was that was in twenty twenty two i had a customer from my from my inspection services and group subs he reached out to me and he was really intrigued about how i did business and he is a silent investor he bought into the company he got a crazy like it's crazy how if i look back then holy crap he bought into the company and that's when me and my wife started having those serious discussions and i'm being completely honest i mean some people might share that information some people might not but like i said i don't come from wealth i needed some sort of backing in order to take this to a full time job so how how essential i guess was it for you to have that backing and then not only like the confidence in just the industry itself as something that you were gonna go all in on like like did that did that confidence happen instantly when you got back in the cards or was this something that gradually built up into a point where you said i feel very very comfortable there might be some risk but i feel very very comfortable with with how i'm operating and and the the opportunity that i see like how much confidence did you did you have just in the industry during that that moment yeah that's a really good question and i think it wasn't an immediate definitely wasn't something immediate because i mean when i got back in i mean we all know they're just sports cards right they're just cardboard my wife would always tell me that i'm like oh it's not just cardboard like no it's not it's just cardboard it's a piece of cardboard that sells for twenty thousand dollars i guess if that's what you wanna say believe it or not it's still selling for a million or whatever it took me a couple years because i didn't know and and nobody truly knew if the market would ever really go back to what it was in the early two thousands and late nineties or even early nineties we don't we still don't know today i mean there has to be some i mean with the prices that things are selling at did i think that there would be some sort of correction back in twenty twenty one twenty twenty two yes there's just no way that we could continue to sell kobe white prism based psa tens for three hundred dollars apiece i feel bad for those that him to be completely honest so yes there were there was some sort of correction and there there was and ever since that correction and i think everybody that's been in this for the last five years knows exactly what i'm talking about it's still stable though that was a good healthy correction we have not had a correction like that ever since then you know like since then everything actually has been kind of increasing steadily but just not as much like not as fast as it did which was super unhealthy you know so if if you look at it i i guess that's what made me i you know doing it for two years being as successful as i was getting an investor it all played a part of me moving in full so let's maybe talk about all of the different service lines of black gold because you've talked about a lot already you've talked about grading prep group submissions breaking obviously you've gotta shop how did you how do you manage that madness like the steps and the confidence of saying okay we're doing this one thing we're doing it well let's move into the other like how did you make those decisions to kind of expand the portfolio of what you offered at black gold yeah i mean so yeah we started with group subs inspection we still offer that today okay we are now actually a verified dealer with psa we're a verified dealer with cgc that is not easy to do especially at age thirty three seriously i didn't do it from anybody else seriously i i had no influencer tell hey black gold needs this that and get me it no that's not how it works so i had to fight for this it's not easy then we do breaks started on whatnot i was in it before they opened up it to the entire world so i was application only i had a very strong group sub business very strong inspection business and that led that led to me being accepted in early backyard was doing football basketball pole wax was very strong at that time a lot stronger than they are today they were doing football basketball nobody was doing baseball it was just being smart like guys anybody could start this up who's doing f one not many people today are they who's doing soccer not many people today seriously if you're trying to attack a market even today there's opportunity it's things that you might not wanna do but once you start doing that for a year i'll tell you what people will start buying your football breaks people will start buying your baseball breaks because you're gonna see a conversion so it's things like that see did you even think about it like that it's about being a step ahead so now we're doing single show we have one show diversify right it's important to diversify so if you're gonna do that might as well have one show be a singles channel too start everything at a dollar buy collections have a worker sell every single thing at a dollar on top of that hey why don't you get a shop okay you have a lot of problems with the shop because how are you gonna get mvp status right well the more you do this the more your name gets out there there's a possibility because i didn't have an mvp shop right away and to have a mvp shop today says something that is not easy that's only there's only five hundred and four mvp shops in the whole world so obviously all these things play out we have a marketing team now too i have two full time marketing people we need to have our feet our foot in the door on every area because somebody else is gonna start doing something that you aren't doing and they're gonna take the they're gonna get the spotlight because of it i wanna hit on that what you said about doing something or starting something that no one else or a few others are doing and you mentioned it based on categories obviously with baseball in the early days no one's doing it people are focused on basketball and football so much of the industry is people just rinse and repeat try to copycat what other people are doing and what other people have had success doing you're saying okay i'm i'm kinda moving the other direction i'm trying to move into something and be the first or one of the first where did that maybe mindset or mentality come from because you know that startup phase on something new or something unproven is more risky or perceived risky by others but it sounds like it's something that you're you see a tremendous opportunity in and have used that to build kind of black gold to what it is today yeah so i mean obviously everything is a little bit of a risk but if you buy a case of something let's just say you buy a case of f one for three thousand six hundred dollars let's just say you buy twenty twenty five hops chrome f one hobby case at three thousand six hundred okay market price is about five thousand give or take alright right around that so you have some room okay even if you lose on that now you learned don't maybe not buy maybe you're taking the step in the wrong but you gotta understand your tracking system so this is now where it comes in my accounting background has helped me prove like whether things are good or bad whether to stick with it or don't stick with it it's not hard for anybody to just track their breaks how much did you sell this case for and what did you pay if you lost big don't redo yours like obviously you gotta nope baby bad idea right but you got most of your money back so you just got is it really worth a lot yeah was worth it man because if it works you're gonna do it again and you're gonna buy five cases now and if it works again you're gonna buy ten cases and you're just gonna keep going dude and and then you're gonna buy the next product that comes out for that product and it's gonna keep going and now you have momentum where everybody else is still not doing it and you're like wow now in a year think about it you do all those you think that there's a conversion with those people for f one into football or basketball or baseball absolutely so now you just actually got yourself into the market now you gotta find a now you gotta find a platform so i wanna talk about kind of you've mentioned a few different platforms and i wanna hit that but i wanna dig into your kind of professional skill set and it sounds like a couple things that i'm hearing you lean into that accounting background to make sure that you are building a sustainable business and you're holding yourself and your team accountable for what you're selling and and that is i think a a a tremendous unlock is when people take their previous skill sets and apply it to their hobby businesses and then you've also built like systems like you've mentioned the spreadsheet and look tracking has there been any moments in your build as you continue to climb and scale where what you have built from like a systems perspective broke down or you've had to reconfigure the operation maybe talk a little bit about that yeah i've been stolen from before by employees and i had gaps i didn't have an inventory check-in system now i do i created it too so every time we get a case in i have literally a website dedicated to black gold sports cards sealed cases sealed boxes check-in if it's not checked in i will know i've been stolen from and it sucked i'll be honest with you people can say oh brian idiot you know okay dude you would have gotten stolen from too it wasn't just like oh i'm lucky i caught him you know what i'm saying and i'm lucky i got him out but everybody that builds a business is gonna make mistakes it's about how you recover from those mistakes that's it the the you know part of it right you're you're it can't be all through you you have to build and grow and scale this this team hiring becomes a strategy and it sounds like you're currently going through that i know your team size is i think doubled in a in a year which is nuts like how do you maybe talk about like your hiring process in the early days and like how that has evolved and what kind of team you're working with currently at black gold for sure so i started out i was running a livestream on whatnot i had a hundred and twenty people in my room and there was these two usernames that popped up and said you're from like wisconsin waukesha milwaukee and i said yep and they're like dude i have to work for you i'm how can i reach how can i get in contact with you i said here's my instagram for blackhawk sports cards reach out to me there so they dm'd me they were in i'm gonna say this like a real damage on both of them and they quit their jobs immediately they didn't like dude they're they were done like they started working for me that next day and i just said ricky and kevin are still it's okay for that that company to loyalty that i've built as well the culture that isn't you walk into black gold sports cards you're gonna be like dude something's different something is different it's not a normal and i never want it to be that corporate structure because that's where you're gonna get sure you have to have a little bit of corporate stuff like so you don't get stolen from and all of that but this is a hobby this is supposed to be fun do you want your customers to think that this is just a business to you or do you want them to think black gold is a collector shop we're gonna shop with them because they're true collectors i'm shopping with black obeys they're true collectors how do you think about the the culture and building that culture that you i can it comes across as the way you're describing it as kind of a differentiator like how do you think about culture and and making sure that you're maintaining a culture that not only customers wanna come into but your employees wanna work for yeah i mean that that's the culture is the most important thing it's actually the hardest thing to build because obviously if you get it too out of hand like barstool it or something like that you could have like hr violations popping up everywhere so you have to have like some sort of lines you can't be like taking your shirt off during the stream or something crazy i mean i guess yeah you know what i'm saying like keep it stop don't swear twenty four seven just like if a couple slip whatever that's fine just watch it but yeah we've moved up we've we've we've got into thirty four employees today actually just hired another person right before i got on this call literally had five people in my office i just hired another full time streamer he's quitting his job two weeks put in we just hired we have one person training this week she first girl that we second girl first live streamer girl that we've hired so she and she's starting to she's really good sierra's amazing and last week we had another person in live training livestream training so charles charles was a customer for a long time and this one's special he had like he's he's he's amazing honestly it's just like everything that's it just all pans together what what what do you what what do you you mentioned some of those things that i think get clipped from a breaker perspective maybe swearing taking your shirt off those things that might make breaking not look like something that maybe certain demographics of the hobby wanna be a part of how how do you how do you think about like that culture of breaking that you have and i don't i i i sense that it's not like you're not looking for like buttoned up polished ultra professional but there's something there that you want to have on your streams and with your streamers that attracts people back and makes your customers feel comfortable continuing to break like what are those elements that you try to instill with your team when they're getting live and going on camera to sell product i mean obviously we're just looking for like good people alright just good human beings okay that's not easy to find but we're looking for good human beings obviously every single time i hire somebody i take a chance i do i'm being serious i take a chance good work ethic showing up at eight o'clock and getting live by eight fifteen or eight thirty or the night before just loading in your pyt if you're doing a pyt or loading in your auctions or being engaged in people's livestreams those are the things that we're looking for that we have that has turned us from hey that's my employee no that's my friend they're sure then you can call them all my employees i hate that word by the way i like i don't call anybody my employee even though they say that i'm the boss man whatever you know what i'm saying like i i i don't even like being called the boss because guess what we're friends this is a hobby this is fun anybody can do it as long as you love it the people that don't make it yeah you know what i'm saying yeah what's what's that level of responsibility that you have have in terms of you know you're you're you're you're supporting these people living they you've gone from you doing all the work to growing the team and now i know you don't want it to be over over corporatized and you don't wanna call them employees but like you have oversight over all these people because they're an extension of your brand like what's that level of what's that responsibility been like for you as the business continues to grow no i that's a good question and i actually had to train somebody to know all my responsibilities in order for me not to do everything so cody the person you just saw behind me like he's already drafting up emails right now for me because he i've like literally we work together all day we're literally connected like we i tell him everything that's on my mind he tells me if i'm off on something we restructure those are the things that you have to do if you're wanting to scale i have a marketing manager now and now i have a team manager are connected as well and he's connected with cody i have a stream manager as well so anything for the stream managers are handling the streams making sure all the the streams are loaded everybody has their assigned breaks for the night the who's running football basketball baseball f one or or whatever soccer anything you wanna run they're they already already have it scheduled and if they have a problem they're coming to me and cody if i'm not available cody's having to take it and he understands that because i labeled him general manager and he gets paid as a general manager and he knows the better that we do that i'm to my word that he will get paid more and more and more and that goes along with every single other person in this company so i always tell them listen you might think i'm the owner i'm a sixty percent owner brian's sixty percent no y'all own this in a way and that's the difference between corporate and black old sports cards corporate you walk in there you think you own it heck no i'm just letting you know president whatever is he thinks that he might be the owner growing small business into a big business and with that i need people to know that what what they own because i will will share the wealth i'm not here i'm here to create something long term not short term i love it when you think about the various places that you know you have hosted your streams obviously there's a lot of different options you know ebay is a sponsor of this podcast i know you're you're streaming on ebay live maybe talk about that kind of movement and migration over to ebay and and where you host your stream like what what are the advantages that you've seen in in working on ebay live yeah absolutely so yeah i i transfer so we started streaming in october of twenty twenty five i was there actually accepted in in a year before that i met clint and aaron fitzner on on a plane from detroit to cleveland for the twenty twenty three or twenty twenty four national something like that yeah it sounds about right right twenty twenty four national in cleveland met them and they're like dude i know who you are i had my hat on backwards or something and they saw black gold and we talked the entire plane flight and it my company wasn't clicking at that time and i had some rough patches in here and i just couldn't i said hey get me on there i'm gonna start streaming didn't work out year later reconnected with them at the national in twenty twenty five in chicago or yeah in twenty twenty five in chicago restarted that and by october we were fully through the training it's a little bit different and it's a newer app so that's one thing i've learned being on what not from the beginning that not every app is built you work through whatever kink it is you like they always do just work through it if the app goes down or whatever it's been great though because the communication that i've been receiving from ebay is the communication that i received from whatnot when i was back in the early days of whatnot and look where whatnot is today i'm telling you i'm i'm already predicting this i took all my streams off every single platform and put them all on ebay i don't have another streamer streaming on another platform that's the level of predictability that i am gonna call right now that ebay is the place to stream from now until i don't even know i i obviously there i can't predict that it's gonna be forever but you as a streamer if you get onto ebay congratulations how do you think about obviously you said you know predictability how do you think about just this business in this market we're in and trying to layer in some level of predictability in everything you're doing while also trying to mitigate risk as an owner and operator in a scaling business like how how do you think about those things because it's it's almost impossible to be able to predict everything but i don't know like your mindset your background like how do you put those things in place oh that's a tough question i i really that's a really tough question i mean the more streams that you got going on the lower the risk for your business to fail all you need is a couple livestreams to be profitable like very profitable and if you have some streams that are close to zero or negative well it doesn't matter because you were luckily running all the sports that now since like two of those sports were super profitable and they were just clicking that day now you don't need to worry like dude your worry is gone like take it away you know like literally that's the most important is to diversify and if you can build something obviously i'm not not everybody can build as like build this in a day this is not gonna get built in a day you're not building this in a day and you also have to have the operation standpoint of like hey does brian ever not work no i always work dude i don't even care if i'm finally relaxing guess who's hit somebody's hitting me up somebody or i'm getting hit up by i do there's always somebody and so like that's the level that you need to know though if you're going into this thinking like i don't need to work weekends i don't i can work nine to five and do this streaming good luck bro good luck i wish you the best b z you are literally setting up yourself up for failure you need to act you need to get to the place that other people are getting at and if you don't even come close you have a failed business so either you're gonna do it or i don't know it's just a work ethic honestly no doubt what along this build along the way or the journey what maybe have been some of the biggest surprises for you like whether it it can be anything it can be products categories types of streams that worked this decisions you've made like what have been some of the biggest surprises for you along the way yeah sorry my headphones keep on bugging alright can you hear me right now yep yep alright perfect so some of the biggest surprises honestly the stuff that's the hardest i would just rather focus on hey what's the hardest for brian and it's honestly it's the politics people don't understand and and i'm understanding more i played this very it's very political like i'm telling you guys like people don't understand the politics behind this business and unfortunately like either you're in or you're out seriously it's not there's no even there's no even like gray area no either you're in or you're out and if you're out that doesn't mean that you can't get in though that's not true i'm not saying it's freaking hard dude it is so hard but i'm kind of in that i don't know i mean i'm i'm not like getting product you would think oh hey blackold's doing oh my god how much money is blackold even doing a year you know they can get whatever they want dude no so we're running into problems still today so those that have product that you guys are trying to flip if you guys are realistic with your prices and you need a buyer black gold's buying just to let anybody know seriously i'm i'm i i hope a lot of people listen to this because one thing that i'm gonna this is my shot to tell all those flippers and resellers on boxes that they get from tops dot com i am buying everything for bowman's basketball that just dropped if anybody has any inventory that they're moving at to a wholesaler i will buy it you will make money be reasonable let's work together alright i'm buying it because the people it's it's not i wish i could just go to i i came and speak on probably some of this stuff so i came and told you guys what i'm like i want you to date like what you can speak on because you're not the first person that has come on here who's talked about the struggles of just trying to get a hold of product whether it's direct whether it's from a distributor obviously with a ripping market like no i'll tell you this yeah what can you share and this is why black gold's different than anybody else that you've spoken with we are the number one the fastest there is not another breaker in this world that has scaled more than black gold in the last year that's a that's a really really like crazy statement to say so you know what i might be wrong there might be another person but not many man because i know my numbers and i know what i'm buying and i know everything that i'm doing and the amount of people that we have working here compared to to six months ago is absolutely insane the things that we're doing it it it is not normal the we have mark our marketing look at our marketing and if somebody says that our marketing sucks you are crazy we have posts that are getting five hundred thousand million every single week a new post is getting five hundred thousand to a million plus views on multiple different views like our marketing manager is amazing shout out danny you are dude you are amazing and i'm not even sure you're a marketing expert you run a podcast you know how this goes and i'm not even sure if you've seen our marketing that were the videos that are being created the real content like real content it's not it's not just hit video after hit video after hit video but what we're doing different now is we're creating content bringing in all sports fans better than any other company in this in this game right now seriously and i'm that's a shot at anybody that does good content i'm not trying to hate on your guys' stuff we this is me talking really big right now but i do personally believe we are the number one content creator in the hobby right now which is now leading to all new viewers entering streams it makes sense though no doubt i i you have a a com it sounds like you have a complete understanding of what it takes where you're where there are areas that you're whether it's needing product where you wanna grow and i sense in just from this conversation brian like you have a tremendous confidence in in yourself and the business that you're running i'm i'm curious where does this con like where does this confidence come from because it's it's undeniable like you're super passionate about it comes from the it comes from the facts okay a year ago i would not say this stuff to you because of facts but when you look at my numbers if i showed you my numbers and i showed you my scale and i showed you the number of employees and the amount of streaming hours that we do on ebay live you would be like holy crap why are you not talking to the executives at fanatus i don't know that's the hard part about this and that's the politics that we play and that's in the that's in any any industry i'll be honest with you so blackgold have we been around as long as other company no that's have i have not and that hurts me so there so so marketing we're doing the best right now but five years ago i could have been way better and it took me five years to be able to do the marketing that i'm doing today which put me back and i'm sure if i just continue to do what i'm gonna do and i'm gonna continue to do this for you know i i mean i plan on keeping i love this job so i wanna keep my company i would never jeopardize anything to lose my job because this is the best job that anybody could ever ask for so what what do you think separates people who are growing and thriving and succeeding in this space with those who aren't like what what do you think separates people like can you separates people like how just successful people who like you're you're grinding you've been doing this you started a business you left your job you're continuing to grow and scale a lot of have yeah so you're saying what what do you do differently than others that maybe just don't aren't clicking right now yep audible i mean dude you gotta if something goes wrong you just gotta hey don't you can get upset about it but you once you turn on that livestream everything's positive people are like emotional too emotional right now on livestreams if you've been on social media dude there's no way that you haven't seen like people tossing steph curry metal big head things like whatever like dude people are losing their minds and hey black gold what do i tell my streamer dude you're positive if you lose just congratulate the the the customer for winning you don't oh go bigger your next break because if they lose if we lose hey we're gonna go bigger we're gonna hey let's audible do something different if that doesn't work do a different product i don't know it's all about change it's all about and if that doesn't work well now it's probably a bigger problem whether you wanna believe it or not the platform can't make you win every single time your marketing is not doing well enough so do you have advertisements going up on meta do you have youtube ads do you have ads even in general do you have ads i bet you if you asked how many breakers that you brought on to this do you have an ad up constantly for your breaking company how many people would answer no a lot probably i mean i'm just speaking hypothetically probably a lot well maybe you should get some ads get creative when did when did you realize that you needed to invest in marketing and not only just to create ads but to hire a badass marketing manager like when when did you have that moment so we've had this obviously so this is a this is a really tough thing for any start up breaking company a marketing manager cost money right and if you're buying all this product you're starting to hire streamers how can you actually afford even some people might not be able to afford a full time marketing person so now that takes effort to build you you're you're gonna have to put an effort to do your marketing for a while and that's what i did with my other partner my silent part investor he's still he's a collector he wants to do something and this was what i told him he needed to do so he started out doing free giveaways hit videos we started getting a good following he was starting to get like hundreds and hundreds of people we were giving away something every week or making it interesting like hey guess the score of this game and you have the opportunity to win this aaron judge card it was just something fun and we were like it was going crazy over that time period we had app like we had indeed up we had linkedin applications for our marketing we wanted to hire somebody full time we didn't want contractor we wanted somebody on-site which makes it even tougher and it took us about man a year and a half to two years to lock in somebody that was good for the culture of the company that fit in that loves sports he actually my marketing manager did not know sports cards i taught him everything about sports cards that he knows today so that's an insight and i wanna unlock it just in the hiring process the like when you're weighing out product or subject or domain expertise versus like skill set like how do you weigh those out obviously you said your market manager doesn't know anything about cards so you you would you would much rather now he does now obviously he does but like when you're evaluating talent to bring into the team like he showed me some videos that he did in sports in general that was perfect it would have fit it would fit black gold now obviously there was always a risk there that he could have never evolved with sports cards there is always a chance there's always a chance with anybody and obviously we had a time would tell you know like i'm gonna take this chance i'm gonna hire this person i'm gonna take him under i'm gonna tell him everything that he needs to do and let's see if he can do it and i will reward you for that like seriously reward he's not even asking me for something and i'm giving him a reward you know like dude seriously he's not i've given him like multiple on multiple on multiple rewards and now he's happy and i'm still like dude what alright let's move you up bro you're doing amazing like keep doing what you're doing and i'm gonna move you here by this day that's awesome good good yeah it's good intention you know no doubt i guess what would you say just kinda as we're nearing the end of this chat you have been through a lot in building this business growing it there's a ton going on there's a history behind black gold what would you say you're the most proud of at this point with your business i just i'm really grateful for the people that work in this company just because like i said it's not in an employee to manager type feel it's a friendship that starts on day one if you get a job with blackold you're a part of the family okay and i mean that like if you had a flat tire when you were leaving at twelve fifteen you left the shop and you got a flat tire i would wake up in the middle of the night and come out of my way obviously i'm just doing this as a friend just to help you that's what i enjoy the most is the people that i've met at this company they're not just employee to employee it's like true friends we all have one thing in common and we all love cards and we all love our jobs that much and we show that appreciation to our customers this is the right business model man a lot of these breaking companies don't they think about the money yes we have to have money to operate so that is very important don't get me wrong it's so important i will not hide that okay is that we have to make a profit in order to run this company otherwise people won't have jobs but second to none the relationships and the the the customers that you gain they're just not customers man they're they're friends all these people have common similarities with you that's the best thing about this job and this company in general i mean there's not a lot of companies if you come to this area and you looked at the the mvp map right for tops and you see boom boom there's like five shops in this area how many employees do they have seven three five and you got black gold with thirty five what is black gold doing different dude that's crazy right thirty five employees and i don't think like maybe one other company cracked ten that's crazy dude you gotta appreciate the growth and giving people opportunities and just your connection connection with the people you're working with there's a lot of individuals who are listening who are in the industry or maybe aspiring to work in the industry and maybe i don't know what would you leave these people with like one piece of advice you give to someone who wants to kind of continue to grow or wants to jump in and be a part of working for a job or starting something for themselves in this industry yeah i would say if so it's something that they're that they that they should be doing that they're not doing right now yep i would say content is probably i think the single handedly the most important piece to your company right now and that doesn't even just jump that's dude that's not even just sports that all of it they're just they're not buying sports cards and you're like man i i wanna i wanna get into sports cards so i alright i'm gonna listen to this podcast and you're an owner right now for this jewelry shop that you own and you're like man brian just said content and i'm not even i own this business and we don't do content well i'm telling you right now you should be doing content and if you're not that's why you're not big okay and no wonder why you're struggling so that is not just for sports cards that's for any business owner in general content's number one if you're not doing it start doing it today it will start small be consistent that is the number two thing whether it's content whether it's streaming whether it's your podcast how many what brett how many podcasts have you done over nine hundred you are wow congratulations dude that's amazing it's it's what it's what you said though can it's consistency you just continue to do it day after day and people day after day people more people find you and more people listen and that's how you build trust and it sounds like black gold's in the business of of building trust not only internally with your team and people but the the individuals who are coming to your stream hundred percent i'm glad you said that by the way i never even mentioned like what the last thing i'll say about black gold is like we take security to the next level and we've shown people fanatics and tops have definitely seen our security they've asked us for photos of our setups and and this goes to any customer that's just a customer into breaks but we have literally a casino type to security system every single pry table there is hd hickvision cameras pointing down literally you can see every every card every movement every label every single move so if something does go wrong everybody's human in this breaking game things do happen in shipping unfortunately from break and into shipping something happens how can you fix it we're able to actually tell you well hey we shipped it to the person in the break before we're gonna call them and nine times out of ten actually they're on us back we we did get your card and and they shipped it back we give them a label and we fixed the issue not many breaking companies can do that so that was just about trust obviously that's a huge factor about black gold too so awesome i i've had a blast getting to know you brian i can feel the passion and energy you have for your business this is passion to profession so i would say you're an example of that really appreciated the time and you sharing your insight of building your business and looking forward to doing this again down the road yeah i appreciate you having me on and for anybody looking for us we're on ebay live guys just like we were saying you can find us there if you're if you are a streamer i would suggest applying to to maybe get on there as well and and we'll see you on there so we appreciate everybody thank you for having us