Welcome back to Passion and Profession. I am excited. We are going to continue on the theme of trust in building businesses in the hobby. The today's guest is no stranger to the show. He has made a couple appearances.

I am joined today by Josh from PC Sports Cards. We have a lot to talk about, but without further ado, Josh, welcome back. How are you? Thanks, Brett. I would've been better if the result of the national championship football game was not what it was.

But I know that I have no control over it, and I shouldn't let it ruin the rest of my day. You got it. You gotta let the audience know on the inside because, I told you I'm married to an IU grad, so it was all excitement over here. It seems like the media has picked this up as this Cinderella story, and everyone seems to be in high spirits about this. But when I got on and we started chopping it up, you had a reason why you weren't very happy about the result.

Why don't you share that with you? I'm a strongly devoted Arizona State alumni fan, and I go to multiple football games a year. And I have an identical twin brother who was an IU fan and has not been to a football game since his freshman year of college. And all I want is a national championship, and all he got was a national championship. And he lives an hour and a half away and didn't go to the game, so I am on hand.

Bitterness and a brotherly rivalry. Strong bitterness. I I love it. How are just as you've gotten back in the saddle from the New Year, obviously, there's so many different, conversations about what's to come in the hobby, manufacturers, changes, growth, all the things that get done at us all the time. I'm curious, like, what's been going on at PC sports cards?

Like, what's top of mind for you? Growth. Grow growth is really it. We, we set records for sales, for items sold for numbers in the months of October, November, December consecutively and January were already past what we did last year in January. So we're growing.

We've hired seven or eight more people since the start of q four last year. We're looking to expand our bit our office space again. It's, business has taken off. It's great. What would you there's probably a lot of answers, but the main driver of the growth for you all and it and it's not exclusive to you.

I feel like any business owner I'm talking to right now is experiencing some sort of growth like they're and you can see that. Right? And that reflects on cards and what's happening and number of people. But for you all, what what has been that main driver of growth that has caused you to think about scaling and adding new people to the team? I mean, one thing we we always try to be ahead of the curve.

We always try to be the innovators in the space. We did the grading consignment. We've talked about that. We launched a new website, and we're adding a lot of features to that website that other consignors don't have. So one thing that we're doing a lot of is fixed price for our customers now.

And the cool thing there is we photo the card. We list the card. You get your offers in your portal. You get to see your offer, manage your offer, accept, decline, reject, whatever you wanna do with it, and then we'll ship your card for you. So you get the whole eBay experience of managing your own fixed price.

And there's data behind fixed price items selling for higher than the same card in a traditional auction. And most of time, can even sell faster if you price it right. So it's a it's something that we're really focused on going into this year. How I haven't explored this topic in a while, but fixed price versus auction. What's the, and I don't need exact numbers, but I'm curious based on your customers.

Like, what's the breakdown look like in terms of people consigning their cards through PC sports cards that wanna run them at auction versus list them from a buy it now perspective? A lot of a lot of people don't know about the buy it now side of it. Right? A lot a lot of auction houses are just like auction, auction, auction, auction, auction, run it, run it, run it, run it, because that's the only way they they actually get paid is when something sells. Us listing at fixed price, we don't really get paid.

We get paid a dollar to list it, but we don't get paid until the card actually sells. So most consignment companies just wanna get it out as fast as possible because that's how they get paid. It's not really the best thing for the customer. So we are pushing a lot of our customers that way. At least get it listed for fixed price for two to four weeks.

And then if you want, you could just send it to auction and then make sure that it gets paid. Might have taken you longer that way, but you had an opportunity to make more money. The, I know we've talked about this. The fact of the matter is, auction is whatever one bid is above the second highest bidder. It's not really what one person's willing to pay for the card.

So especially if have something rare or harder to find or fresher, you have an opportunity to make more money listing at fixed price for sure. Always good perspective, in trying to get some understanding and of the kind of the two sides of it. Feel like a lot of the time, we're talking about, especially on this show, auction style, but wanted to gather some insights there. And I wanna get into just the topic of trust. It's the main theme on this show, this quarter.

And maybe digging back into the early days of PC sports cards and thinking about, like, where you were and where you are you are now, where you have multiple employees and you're growing. I'm curious, like, when you as a business owner first realized how much trust mattered, not only just, I guess, in this space and especially building a business around it? I mean, the day I took somebody's card for my first group BGS submission was the day I realized how much trust mattered. Right? Like, they're giving you something valuable, and they have nothing to say, like, oh, you're gonna give this back to me.

Right? And then you just build your reputation, and it's word-of-mouth, and then it's how transparent you are. Right? Like, that's why we built our website to be transparent about where your cards are, what the statuses of your cards. So we've always tried to be there's a bare minimum you could do, and then there's the what we set as our bare minimum in our office for our customers.

Right? Some of that stuff was naturally built, and some of it was learning from mistakes of the past and learning that we needed to go this extra step to give our customers the transparency and that feeling that they needed. How does how do you like, when you're looking at this hobby and it the growth and just businesses popping up and you kind of brick by brick building PC sports cards, growing consignments, growing those relationships and trust. Like, do you think about kind of what you've been building and how trust has been a foundation versus, like, the way so many of these new business are popping up. And it just seems like I don't wanna say there's, like, shortcuts taken, but it just feels like there is this feeling when I see certain businesses pop up or certain actors appear that where it feels like they're maybe not doing the groundwork that more established companies in this space.

I I wanna get kinda your outlook as you're seeing other businesses doing similar adjacent things pop up in this space. Think that I think that a lot of the consignment space has gone to the route of having websites so you could see the status of your cards. Having all of those things that we started doing a long time ago, I think a lot of the consignment companies that are here do that. I don't think that there's many out there that are not giving you an update so you have an idea of where your cards are at all times, from the consignment side. Right?

The grading side, I think I think we earned a lot of trust from the grading side because I think that's the hardest place to earn trust. And once you see something go wrong, now we're responsible and we have to be answering the questions of what somebody else did. Right? Like, there's been enough issues with grading where people would take money up front for a payment with a PSA submission when PSA some pays up charges you on the back end, and then the money disappears and then you the person that took the cards can't pay for it because they use that money. They're they're going through that whole Rob Peter to pay Paul type of scenario, and we never took money up front.

Right? You sorta have to look for and it's tough because there's a lot of people that are uneducated that come into this hobby uneducated about this hobby that see something posted and, like, somebody referred them and somebody had a good experience. And it's tough to, grab those people because then they get the they get a bad experience. They're like, fuck. I'm sorry.

I'm not doing this anymore. Right? Like, I got screwed by this person, so everybody is bad. And I think the more transparent you could be and the faster you are on helping a customer when something goes wrong is what builds the most trust. Right?

Anybody could sort of, like, sugarcoat a problem. It's about taking a problem and making it a win. That's really what we do here. What maybe talk a little bit about just, like, grading and perception of grading and what questions and things that are coming your way. Obviously, there's massive news on the grading front with, you know, PSA's acquisition of Beckett.

There's been individuals in the space. There's always going to be people complaining about stuff, whether it's turnaround times or monopolies or all of these words we've been hearing. I'm curious, like, how does that how does the the conversation around what's happening on the grading front trickle down to PC sports cards? And, like, what how are you kinda having conversations with your customers about, like, the current state of grading? I mean, first and foremost, we were blamed for the backlog back in 2020 and 2021 because we were sending in 13 to 15,000 cards a week.

We had over 400,000 cards at PSA at one point. So I get blamed for the backlog daily. Not as much anymore, I guess. The biggest the biggest concerns that people always had, especially when they're using somebody like us, like a a group submitter for grading, how do I know that you're gonna send in my card? Like, you're not gonna switch it out.

How do I know you're not just combining people's orders and moving stuff around? And the only way to show them that is to have them go through the process and have a good experience. Right? It comes to all the things that are going on in the hobby, I forgot who I I forget who told who said this to me. I I think it was my fiance.

I think she said to me, like, the when there's two people that are having a conversation and talking about an issue going on and one person is, like, the expert on it that knows everybody that is in the conversation that's in the room, and the other person is your drunk uncle at a barbecue. You're gonna believe your drunk uncle at a barbecue because who's not gonna believe your drunk uncle at a barbecue? Right? So a lot of people just want they're like, oh, that sounds like it's spicy. I'm gonna believe that is true.

Right? I could tell you that in the same day and the multiple times this has happened. In the same day, I read one post that somebody's complaining that PSA is grading too hard, and then the next post I read is PSA is giving away tens. Right? It's so, like, you just have to take it all with a grain of salt.

And when it comes to gaining trust, you just have to show everybody where their cards are every step of the way, and we overcommunicate what the statuses are. We overcommunicate what the levels are. You know more from us than if you direct submitted directly with PSA. How are you may how are you maybe managing those customer expectations? You're saying you overcommunicate, but at scale, I would imagine there is a lot of customers that, like, be maybe a stat status was supposed to be move in fourteen days and it's still the same.

Like, how are you handling the conversations with people who might be continuing to ask you the same question over and over? And you want to just scream, but you know, like, you're there and you're trying to, like, build and develop a relationship and trust. Like, how do you think about kind of those one off conversations with individuals who want their answers and want things to move fast? And you're just kinda in the middle trying to facilitate. We are just as open and honest as possible.

Right? We we share the dates that stuff gets up updated. We show all the API activity if we need to. I mean, we we developed the website originally. Our first website we developed so we could spend time working on the company instead of answering those questions of where are my cards.

Right? We we help develop the PSA APIs so we can have that information for our customers when they needed it instead of every day saying, hey. I'm in this submission. Where are my cards? Right?

So, again, like, that's why I'm saying we try to be at the forefront of these things so we're ahead of the game. And being ahead of the game is one of those things that gains that trust. Right? Always being always being a step ahead of the competition. When when there are changes perhaps, like, let's say, a turnaround time gets extended or the dollar value of a specific service level goes up, how what is your typical process in order to make sure you're communicating kind of those updates and changes to your customers who are expecting a certain thing because it's the way it it has been?

I mean, so anything that's in house from a customer, the p PSA usually gives us, like, a forty eight hour window where they tell us this is happening, but we can't say anything about it. And we prepare internally to get everything out before that. And then anything that comes in or gets submitted in that window where it costs us a little bit more if we don't do it, we just take we just eat it. Right? And we create an email to send out to all of our customers.

Create a post to post to all the socials. We make sure we're at the forefront of communicating with our customers about what's going on and what what changes to expect. Like we did with the Beckett when Beckett said they're gonna stop taking cards from from group submitters, we were the first person to post it. We got a lot of flack for it. Right?

But we we we just it's better to communicate even if it's something wrong rather than hide from it and then start being on the defensive in answering questions. Inevitably, I would imagine there are situations you want everything to go perfectly. You want the customer's expectations to be met. But, you know, in the hobby, we know stuff goes sideways and stuff that is outside of your control happens. Like, when those things might take place, whether it's on the grading front, whether it's on the consignment front, like, how what's your position in terms of, like, handling those conversations in order to make sure that trust is not lost between PC sports cards and your customer.

Be open and upfront about what happened. Take responsibility for what happened, and offer a solution that goes over and above what the customer could even think would be reasonable. Why do you think so many, and I this is my context for the this follow-up based on what you said. It just seems so often you see, like, somebody posting about customer or company x not handling the situation and maybe taking for taking a shortcut and not thinking about it from a big picture, and then, you know, the customer will post something that'll make the company look silly. Like, because we have a everybody has access to the same tools and can share everything that's happening in real time, like, why do you think not that's not the basic in elementary and every company follows kind of that mantra?

Why do you think companies struggle there? I think a lot of smaller companies are run poorly, and they don't think about the big picture. Right? They just they just think this is my way. This is how it went.

I don't care what anybody thinks. This is what it is, and that's just unfortunately not what it is in the real world. Right? I think that you need to it's everything status quo is status quo. Right?

Like and I this is something that we talk about here a lot. Right? Like, we look at our employees, and it's tough sometimes when they're doing their their job right day in and day. I have to celebrate those small wins of doing their job right. But then when something goes wrong, it's like, why the heck did this happen?

Right? And the same thing with, like, being you're a new parent. Is that something you'll you'll you'll learn? Right? Like, it's same thing with your kids.

Right? Like, it's very hard to always look at, like, oh, you did put your dish in the dishwasher. You did throw your plate out. You did do this. You did fill fill up your own water.

Hey. Great job doing what what we expect. Right? But if you don't do it, how dare you not do that? Right?

It's it's the it's the same kind of thing. It's it's how humans are wired. We we we think that every mistake is an opportunity to have a customer become a customer for life. Right? Because if you treat a customer that something goes wrong, if you go over and above for them, they're gonna say, hey.

Listen. Something went wrong when I was doing it here. I don't really wanna talk about what went wrong, but I was expecting them to say, we'll comp this one card. And they said, they'll not only comp that one, they'll give me 10 more cards and oh, they they made a listing mistake, and this card sold for 50% of what every other one of this card sold for because they listed it as a base instead of as a silver. They ended up giving me the full value of the silver and not even taking any fees.

Right? Like, things that people it it just doesn't make any sense to me to leave it on an edge with somebody. Right? Just go over, spend a little bit of money, and it's gonna be end up being worth it in spades in the long run. I love this idea of customer for life.

In my previous industry, we would talk about these long lasting relationships and building customers for life, and the whole strategy would be around that. In the hobby, the industry, you're the first person that I've heard say that phrase, and it like, my antennas went up. And it, like, triggered this whole thought in my head where it's like, well, it feels like most of the hobby is this transactional mindset where everyone's trying to, like, make that deal and move on to the next deal and don't think about the long term ramifications of, like, building and developing trust in a relationship with the customer that they continue to come back over and over and over again. When you think about customers for life at PC sports cards, what types of things do you think about doing in order to make sure that they don't leave once they're once they've used you guys? I mean, we spent a lot of time and money developing, first of all, developing a completely transparent system where customers could see where their things are.

So when things are good, they're good. Right? And then when when again, like, when something goes wrong, it's about making sure they're more than happy. The other the other side of a customer for life is it's a referrer for life. Right?

And it's a lot easier to get business from a referral than it is to get business with any type of marketing that you're doing. It it's just somebody somebody is always feeling like they're being sold. And if it's coming from a customer that used us that had a great experience or even had a bad experience that became a great experience, it's a lot more valuable than anything we could ever do ourselves. Right? So investing in making sure our customers are happy, communicating with our customers.

We send out surveys to our customers to ask what we could be doing better, what we're doing bad, what we're doing good, how we could be better for them. And, I mean, inevitably, everybody says, lower your rates. Right? And sometimes we do. We have in the past.

We think we have very competitive rates now. But it's also things like the fixed price offering that we're coming up with to make the to give them the ability to sell cards for actually more money. Right? We have we have we have, we're working on a lot of other tools right now that we're gonna add into the website, the new website that are gonna be something that no other consignor is offering their customers right now. So we we want to be competitive on price and blow everybody out of the water on service and value.

You mentioned referrals, and referrals, I feel like, in any line of business are gold. Are are you able to measure or track any referrals that are coming in via another customer or someone at a show or whatever, or is it just something that you notice organically populates over a long period of time? Like, how do you think about the the tracking and just the monitoring of referrals? Currently, no. But that is in our q one plans is to get affiliate tracking or referral tracking onto the website because that's very it's very important to us.

I mean, we launched in December mid December, and we've spent a month going through bugs and getting through fixes. We actually just launched our first upgrade, over the weekend, which is a daily update on your fixed price listings, what offers you have outstanding. It's gonna there's gonna be one for your sales and one for all your current listings on eBay, whether they're auctions and when they end, and there's gonna be a sold one. So you're gonna get daily eBay updates from us about what's going on with your card. So even if you don't wanna log in to the website, you're gonna have that communication.

Right? You know exactly where your cards are every step of the way. That's awesome. You mentioned, obviously, you've invested in technology and resources and staffing. And at the earlier, you said something about just, like, whether it was it's hard to run a business or or a lot of businesses aren't aren't run real really well.

And I think that it obviously, it takes a process strategy, the right people. The one thing that I continue to uncover in a lot of these conversations, which separates, like, average business from, like, high performing business is, like, the individuals who are running the business, like, have had time in the hobby as participants themselves outside of their business or collectors. Like, I know you you're a long time collector. How important do you think having that, mindset and mentality and being able to empathize with the collector that's been for just the success of PC sports cards? I think it helps us relate.

Right? And it helps us understand the experience that somebody wants. Especially our cost our customers most of our customers are hobbyists that are looking to make money with the hobby. Right? And we that's literally our business.

So so we we understand what they're looking for, and we target what we're doing to make sure that they feel comfortable with what we're doing. And we have a group of people that we ask for feedback all the time on what could be better, what could look better, how could it run better, what's the is this update schedule good for you? Like, what offerings we could enhance to make their experience better? And the reason we're able to ask those questions is because we've lived what they're living, so it's easier to relate. Having that insight just in the like, that snippet of how you described your customer, that's, like, insight.

Obviously, you've gathered that insight from conversations, analyzing the data, but having that insight, I I'd I'm probably confident in saying that that separates, like, someone using PC sports cards one time versus someone using PC sports cards long term. So how important has that been to for you in order to really understand the the mindset and mentality of the standard customer that's coming in to use your services? Again, what knowing that a lot of them wanna have the same experience that we have, we're we're able to leverage things that we've done in the past to add value to their experience. For example, one of the things that we're working on developing right now is a back end an enhanced back end where you're gonna be able to input what you spent on the card, and then you could use our grading services and our sell selling services, and you'll be able to report on your p and l with the what we've built for you. Right?

So people that are in the hobby to make money want that. Right? If you're just ripping and you want the money back, that might not be valuable to you, but we might not be the right consignor for you then. Right? It's about we want the customers that value the things that we're adding to the experience, not somebody that's just shopping strictly on price.

Right? We like to add one of the things that we do that nobody else does, we video every single package that comes in, sit in front of the camera, and record every single card that we pull out of a box. Because one time a card went missing, and we didn't know where it was. Right? And we don't wanna be in that situation again.

So we're gonna sacrifice we're gonna sacrifice the efficiency of just opening a box to becoming a little bit less efficient, but becoming a little bit a lot more transparent about where your cards are and making sure that they're here. You know how times we've opened the box and it was empty and the customer's like, bullshit. You stole my cards? Well, no. We didn't.

Here's the here's the video of the box. Like, unfortunately, it happens. It's once a month. Right? It happens.

We can't do anything about it. We don't control that. But what we do control is narrative of this is what we opened. That that kinda goes back to the what we were talking about earlier when something inevitably happens that sucks and you're not responsible for it, but you have to take account accountability and ownership. And I'm just thinking back to that, whatever the example would would have been that the card or the box arrived and there was no card inside, then you're gonna you're having to have that tough conversation with the customer.

And then you all made the decision. Okay. Well, in order for us to avoid this from happening again, we're going to build in this whole new process in our workflow, and that's videoing the packages as they come in. So talk maybe, like, that decision. That decision, like, it happened once, you're like, alright.

We can't deal with this again. Let's start this whole new process that's going to show transparency. And it might take a little more time, and it might, you know, be an additional resource or whatever. But at the end of the day, it's going to help kind of build that transparency. Like, talk talk to us through about, like, how that decision came to start videoing and why you did it.

Well, when one of my employees had to go run through a dumpster because we couldn't find a card that somebody takes the top of the box. Right? The customer sent in a bunch of cards somewhere in a box, and the rest was the the best card was taped to the bottom of the box. So it was like a shoebox. Right?

A shoebox inside of a box. So the best card was taped to the top. So we couldn't miss it, and we missed it. And then we had to go get it. I'm like, this is ridiculous.

We're not going dumpster diving for a $500 card. Right? But it it it happens because you don't know how somebody's gonna send it in. You could you could put your guidelines out there, but you don't know what they're gonna do. And then we have to go through that, and we don't we don't wanna do that.

We don't wanna spend time in a dumpster. Was it hilarious Because it's one of my friends that works for me. Yes. It was absolutely hilarious. I sent a video of it to his wife.

Right? It was great. But if we have the recording of it and all of a sudden we flip the box up, we know where it is. Right? Oh, look.

It's here. We're recording it. So mistakes will happen everywhere. Every single person in this hobby, every business in this hobby has had an issue. If they haven't had an issue and they're telling you they haven't had an issue, they're lying to you.

And to me, that's the first sign. If somebody can't admit, listen. Stuff goes wrong every once in a while, it's somebody I that's somebody I can't trust. Right? Be a lot of people are afraid of being honest about there being issues.

I'm very honest about it because it's just how this world works. Right? I don't wanna be the person that when I say honestly, I I hate that's one of the phrases I hate the most. Right? Because if why if I'm saying that, am I not honest with you other times?

Right? So I hate that completely. So I'm just gonna just be it all the time. Stuff goes wrong, and then you fix it, and you figure out a way even if it takes you more time to fix it forever. Right?

It took us three months to figure out programs and cameras and setting all this stuff up, and then it it's all much less efficient than other companies that are selling a lot more cards than us. But it protects us, and it protects our customers. And when you're protected, especially selling high value cards, you wanna know that your stuff's gonna get there. I love the mindset around this. And, inevitably, as PC sports cards is growing and scaling, whether it's adding new tech or new people, there are going to be opportunities, I'm sure, as the kind of business owner operator where you're having to reassess and rethink things.

And I'm wanna maybe understand how you think about maintaining kind of loyalty as you get more customers, you get more submissions, and the the business scales. Like, we're seeing this across the industry and marketplace is grading. Like, there's more. And companies are having to figure out how in real time to keep that trust and keep that loyalty as stuff starts to kind of burst at the seams. Like, how are you thinking about that?

We have started to develop a team that goes to shows, and that team people on that team end up talking to our customers a lot. So we've we've we've started to come up with some type of sales and communication method, leveraging some type of CRM program in the back end of our website to make sure that we're staying in touch and make sure that we're communicating with our customers and make sure we know what's important to everybody. Because I can send the survey out, and I'll get a ton of different answers, but there'll always be one that's 75 to 80%. And that's what's important to everybody. So it it's all about asking questions and listening to answers and figuring out what's important and making sure that that aligns with us.

And if it doesn't align with us, again, they might not be the right customer for us. And that's okay. There's enough businesses out there for people, for somebody that wants different levels of service. And if you want better service, it's gonna cost you more. That's just how the world works.

You're not gonna get the best possible service, the cheapest, and the fastest. That just doesn't work. How how are you thinking about bringing new hires along from maybe, like, from a training and onboarding perspective? How do you get people at PC sports cards who are new to it, who who haven't been around for its history to get the insights and the expectations you have regarding the customer relationship? How do you get people on the same page?

Well, the cool the cool thing about us is that we have hired every single person that's ever worked at this company, not including remote listeners, anybody that's worked in our office has always been hired and has always started from the same position. They've all started as ship pulling and shipping. And then they sort of gravitate. Some gravitate to doing listings. Some gravitate towards photos.

Some gravitate towards the mailroom. Some gravitate towards customer service. And our highest level manager right now started in that same position. Our second highest level manager started in that same position. They've been with us for a long time.

So they all get the same training along the same process. And when you get that and we build that, culture here, you learn that it's either that way or it's no way. And if it's no way, you're out of here. So we we also management monitors communication between customer service and customers. And we have weekly meetings about better ways to handle things or a better way to communicate it to make sure that we're giving the best possible service.

We take we take it very seriously. The that kind of that linear path of of people everyone who works here starts here and then kinda moves up to next role and responsibility. Has having that that, like, career growth or career trajectory model that you've that you've implemented, has that had the desired outcomes? Or did you have desired outcomes for having a process like that, or did that just organically take shape as you built the business? It organically happened because, like, the first few people are the ones that are in those higher positions now, but we have had people that come in later that move into a salaried role or a higher end role over people that have been here longer because they've proven that they get what we're doing.

Right? They've proven that they get what they get what we're doing, they could they could they have that problem solving ability that we really look for. Right? What the big the biggest value to me as a business owner is somebody that could come up with a proposed solution for whatever the problem is. Like, you're gonna have problems every day.

I don't wanna be your guy to solve the problem, but I wanna help you figure out what the solution is. And if you can come to me with proposed solutions, we could figure that out together. It's fun to kinda get some perspective from a company that's growing and scaling, especially as the hobby continues to expand and maybe focusing in on this topic of trust. It is I think trust, obviously, is is the probably the most important currency we have in that hobby, but it's also very fragile. And I find that interesting in a kind of a weird way where a lot of companies or a lot of people want it, but it's not something that you can just earn overnight.

Like, why do you think trust is such a fragile currency in the sports card industry? Greed. And it's really easy to make a mistake. And I think a lot of people, especially in the, call it, twenty to forty, twenty to fifty age range big age range, but adults, young adults, were raised in a way where they weren't told they have to take responsibility for their mistakes. Right?

Like, I could tell you my nephew dropped the camera on the floor, and then he said, well, the floor broke my camera. Right? And that's just one example of it. Right? And a lot of people are shortsighted where they point the finger at somebody or something else instead of taking responsibility.

And it's a lot easier to point the finger at somebody else and try to say, this is why it happened. It's a lot harder to take responsibility, but taking responsibility goes a long way. I think I don't know what you're you've been around this space for a long time, and you've seen a lot of ups and downs and cycles. And right now, it seems like, you know, we're the the growth and the expansion is only going to continue, and you said greed. I would imagine as the growth and expansion continues, there'll be more and more greed, more and more people in trying to take advantage of other people, more bad actors.

Inevitably, like, as the bad actors come in and do their thing, whether it's try to, you know, you know, defraud someone, try to show a bit on auctions, whatever it is, you know, bad activity. Like, that indirectly or maybe even directly can impact good businesses like a PC sports cards that are, you know, having stand up meetings with your people, trying to talk about better ways to communicate and trying to be fair and trying to do all the right things the right way. Like, how do you think about the inevitability of the bad actors in this space having some sort of negative impact on the good work you and your team are doing. We've lived it. Right?

We've we've lived it through the the, again, the PSA ones where the company takes your money upfront and doesn't pay for your PSA submission. We we we've had it over and over again, and we keep on growing because if you do it right and you tell the truth, it ends up working out for you. Right? Like, any cost anybody that does something that just doesn't feel right is there's probably a reason for it. So my job is to get our name out there more and more so people see us before they see one of the bad actors, before they have that bad experience.

So we focus on social. We focus on going on podcasts like this. Right? We we focus on getting our name out there so you could see who we are, and we can try to help you make money in the hobby. We can try to help you feel comfortable in the hobby and know that you're getting the best experience possible.

What do you think the or what do you think trust building looks like for PC sports cards? You know, it could be the next this year year in 2026 or kinda beyond. Like, how are you thinking about it? More of the same. Right?

No. Seriously, more of the same. Own your mistakes. Celebrate your wins. Be completely transparent about what's going on in the office, where your cards are, where your items are.

If there's a question, happy to answer it at all times. Give you as much insight into where your cards are and the status of them at all times. And that that's all you can do. Right? Answer questions.

Be honest. Help people out. Do the right thing. Something goes wrong, go over and above. What what is, I guess, what is success for you in terms of that relationships?

Like, what what do you want customers to to feel like after they got done working with you? Thought they can't wait to send us the next package. Good answer. I love it. Maybe before we let you get out of here, I'm always interested.

Has there been anything that have come come across your desk that got you excited or anything that recently sold that was a head turner or worthy of note? Yeah. So we, we actually just did last Thursday, and we're gonna continue this this Thursday of probably the next one and going forward for the foreseeable future. We did our first ever high end vintage focused live show on eBay live, and we sold a nineteen o nine or 1910 Philadelphia Carmel Honus Wagner p s SGC one. Started at $1 and sold for $4,100, something like that.

Wow. So we we we've had some really cool vintage come across lately. We're we're focused we we think there's an opportunity there for our for our live shows with Vintage, so we're getting a lot in. Yeah. That that that that's something cool.

I've been buying a bunch, so I've gotten a couple cool like, I got another Grand Hill Falls dual patch auto win, which I think is cool, some Dunkin' rookies. Yeah. Some some some of that stuff. So I I I I'm more I'm more into, like, the rare stuff and the like, I don't care about the value of the card. It to me, it's like, I've never seen this before.

So we we bought a collection that had a '93. It was either Rockies or Marlins inaugural Jita rookie in it. I haven't seen one of those in a long time raw. So it's it's just cool to see stuff like that. You mentioned eBay live.

Curious the your how that kind of stream has, changed maybe the way you think about your business. Obviously, it feels like every time we talk, you bring up live and there's some some new something on live. Is that an area you you think you'll be kind of continue to be focused on investing resources? Yeah. We we're growing live.

We wanna do more consignment with it. We're offering a 100% payout for that vintage live show. So this card sells for $500, you get $500. So that's cool. We think live selling is the future.

We agree we see a lot of people saying that, but we agree with it. So we know it's somewhere we wanna be, and we focus the team on it. We actually also we know how big TCG is getting, so we're gonna talk to eBay about doing a different night with a high end TCG show. Sort of just leveraging all the all the things that we where we see the hobby going and trying to be in front like we always are. Before I let, let you get out of here, any shows you heading hitting the road anytime where people can stop by and say hello?

Yeah. So we're sponsors of all the New York Metro shows, like the Hofstra show and the White Plains show. We may be start we may start sponsoring the Philly shows, and we are sponsoring, Zach's going up to a show in Milwaukee in a couple weeks up in I don't know exactly nowhere. And I'm going out to the Arizona show Arizona sports show that's gonna be at Chase Field in March, and we're also sponsoring that show. So we are getting our show legs back on.

We all need I'm I'm sitting here. I'm watching I'm following the digital streams and all all the content from the Dallas show, and I was just like, I need to get out in the wild. I'm stuck in the home office. I need to get out in the craziness for at least one show. So I'm trying to plot that out.

The the good thing is the Arizona show is great because it's at Chase Field, and it's during spring training. And there's probably 12 stadiums that you can get to and go see go see Gabe sit on the grass and have a beer. The beer cost more than the ticket. That that's amazing. Josh, always great catching up with you and learning more about, PC sports cards.

Fun to talk about trust with you, and looking forward to another one of these conversations down the road this year. Thanks, Brett. I love coming on this. It's always great catching up, especially before we go live.