What's going on, everybody?

Welcome back to another episode of the staging area brought to you by my good friends at DC Sports eighty seven. This conversation, we're going to be talking about, the long road to high volume at DC Sports eighty seven.

I we we have had one of these conversations, but it was so long ago, and it was almost like a passionate profession. I think we dug into, like, the dcsports87.

But I wanted to maybe revisit it in light of just DC Sports eighty seven being the highest volume seller on eBay, how you got there, and think just this will be a fun, chat to have. But without further ado, Tory, how you been, man?

What's new? Good. Good. Yeah. Ready for the holidays. I guess as as this drops, we'll be just coming out of Thanksgiving, so we'll all be, full and trying to wake back up from the what's the thing in the turkey?

Tryptophan? Tryptophan, the thing that I always hear is, like, terrible for you and and all that. People eat too much.

But, so, yeah, doing well, though. We're we're staying super busy. We have not seen the usual holiday lull that we usually have start in, in November. So, thankful for that. Just trying to keep up around the days off.

So, you know, nice mix of of rust or rust rush and rest for us right now. So I said at the top of this episode in the front end, I mentioned that I had just sent a submission, to DC Sports eighty seven.

So, hopefully, by the time this episode goes live, it will have landed, because I know you all are kinda taking a little break, which is is good.

But I wanna I want you to help me, like, maybe bust a myth or say this is true. But my when people when I think about the hobby, I know there's holidays and everything, but, like, I'm always I'm not, like, timing anything.

It's just, like, I just send stuff and keep stuff moving as it happens, because new cards come up that I want.

Do you find that around, like, the holidays, there is it's slower? Do you find that there are less people trying to sell their cards?

Is it different? And I know we're just entering this stretch now, but Yeah. Right. Over the years, what what have you seen? Yeah. So like I said, we we usually get a little bit of a dip.

In part, that's just people get busy. Right? You got people traveling for the holidays, taking time off. And while I know there's a lot of us out there who live and breathe the hobby twenty four seven, that's not everybody.

So I think there's just fewer people who are bossing things up and taking them to ship to us. So we usually see a little. I will say that has not happened this year.

If anything, our volume's up. There's a lot of reasons for that. The hobby's just continuing to boom as I feel like every time we talk, it's the bubble is just a little bit bigger, and then it's not a bubble.

It's just the new normal. So, so that's been great. There's been a lot of not getting into this, but there's been a lot of volatility in who's selling on eBay and what customers are going where.

So, we have gotten a massive influx of new customers over the last sixty, ninety days. So that's kept us very busy. And as far as things ending, you know, we we really don't see it change that much.

We do the obvious stuff, right? We don't end auctions on Thanksgiving Day or New Year's Eve or Christmas, like people are doing family stuff. We we don't wanna sell things then.

So, but, no, overall, there's usually a little bit of a dip, and some of that is the release calendar's been a little bit light lately, you know, other than, like, when basketball came out with tops, you know, flagship being back.

So, yes. Normally, lot of a lot of people have a lot going on this year for us. Not at all, and it's just trying to keep up through it all.

I know we can't forecast what's gonna happen in the next few weeks, but let's just say maybe one week is a little lighter and you get some time to, like, breathe and think about, 2026.

Is is there anything it's just from a brand and overall business, like, looking at DC Sports '87, I feel like 2025 is a really big year for you all.

Is there anything going into 2026 in terms of, like, the areas of improvement or things you're thinking about?

Like, what are your kinda areas of focus that you wanna maybe spend some more of your time thinking about as you're heading into the new year?

Yeah. So, I I don't really think we're gonna be able to catch our breath and do a lot of that, but we'll we'll make time.

Sometimes I wish there were more hours in the day, but, one big thing for us is working more on the higher end of the market.

You know, we really as we grew, and I know we're gonna get into some of this, but one of the things that really helped us grow was, offering a service to everybody. You know, we weren't saying, hey.

We'll send sell your cards a $100 and up, or we'll only sell a certain number of cards. It was, hey. Send us two or 2,000, and they could be worth $1 or a $100,000, and and we'll get them listed for you.

So, our recent rate change, another thing that's helped a lot of, influx of submissions lately, we upped our payout rates, on from $25 and up, but we really bumped it on the thousand dollar and up items.

So, now we're paying 96%, 1 to $5,000, 97%, 5,000 and up. And so, trying to get into more of that.

That's definitely a big thing for us. And then just, you know, now that we've got the app out, it's just continuing to get more technology and things that can make us more efficient and offer some cool things to our customers.

So there'll be some cool stuff coming next year. Not quite time to announce most of those things yet, but, a lot being worked on for sure.

I know, the being a highest volume seller on eBay, like, there's constant flood and influx of, like, cards coming in, and you have teams organizing around scanning, listing, and shipping, all of those things.

And so, like, resources are dedicated to these specific areas. But, like, thinking about the higher end and, like, when people are selling high end cards, they're looking at those those rates.

And since the payout rates have improved, like, have you thought at all about, like, anything you do differently maybe from, like, a, like, a marketing perspective?

Like, if there are big cards coming through, like, making sure that those cards get seen by as many people as possible.

Have has your mind gotten to that point yet? Yeah. So, you know, for us and up till now, most of what we do is just, you know, first in, first out.

List as much as we can, get people's cards up fast. We can get them pay fast. And at the end of the day, that's what everybody wants. But, as we get into higher end, timing and grouping starts to matter a lot more.

So, you know, I think what you'll see us doing is more some kind of schedule that's still kind of being worked on, but whether that's a a monthly premium auction or a bimonthly high end auction where it's, you know, ten day auctions that are starting the first Thursday of every month to end on the second Sunday night, something like that, just so that it's easier for us to group them so that as we partner with eBay on kind of promoting those across social media and emailing all the followers on our eBay store and announcing things like that, it's easier to point people to kind of like a single auction event that holds that stuff and get the most eyes.

That's still kinda taking shape and figuring out what that cadence will be, but I think more things like that just to offer kind of a a predictable scheduled place to put those higher end items.

And, obviously, along the way, we'll still let people do the premium submission where it's, hey. We'll get it listed by the next day. You tell us what duration you want, what start and end day you want, and and we'll do that.

So still offering customers flexibility while just having something that's more of a a recurring event so that for those people buying, they kinda know when and where to look for that stuff.

There's a lot that we're gonna discuss in this episode about growing the business.

Before we do that, I wanna make sure I've been having fun cherry picking some of these sales that I've seen happen over the last week at DC Sports eighty seven.

The first one here, how about, when you wanna talk about GOAT legend, all of the, superlatives.

You had a 2021 Upper Deck Diamond Club Tiger Woods Autograph PSA 10, sell for $2,639. It's been a while since I've talked about Tiger Woods and Tiger Woods cards, but I I he's like talk about, Clark transcending WNBA.

Talk about Ohtani transcending MLB. I mean, there's no bigger transcendent player in all of golf than Tiger Woods.

So, yeah, like, let's talk about this card and just, like, overall, like, Tiger Woods collecting. Like, do you still see a lot of interest for his cards? There yeah.

There there is. And I think there always will be. I mean, it it's funny. I've heard a lot of guys talking lately about, you know, like, I'm a baseball guy, so I gotta bring everything back to baseball even though we're on golf here.

But, like, how, you know, Paul Skeens and and some of these guys, like, made pitchers cool again because it was, like, nobody really collected pitchers for a long time, and it was pitchers are kind of secondary.

And then Skeens came along, and now we're excited about him and then all these other guys who have come after. And so to me, Tiger was kind of the same thing.

It was like, it really until Tiger came around, they were great golfers. You had Nicholas and Palmer and all these guys. They were famous. They were goats in the sport, but, like, he made it cool and just the buzz around them.

And so, there's something lasting about that even though I you know, we could also look at Tiger and say that's one of the sharper falls from Grace in in some standpoints, of any athlete.

But his stuff has just held up so well, especially the there's just not that much out there being an an upper deck guy.

You know, it's not like you're getting him in a ton of different products. So, the autograph supply is fairly limited. So, yeah.

You know, you get a a PSA 10. It's gonna be a low pop car. This one's only numbered to 20. It's, I think it's a good long term buy, long term hold, but, yeah, the prices you can get for them, I understand. Anybody's just selling too.

Shout out. I'm always just fascinated by upper deck and their ability to sign these goats. Yeah. It's like you don't think of them as as as big as they used to be just because they're kind of niche in what they produce card wise.

And then you look at their lineup, and it's like, okay. So they have Jordan, Tiger, LeBron, Mosby, McDade like, just all these guys who signed for them, and it's, it it's awesome. Gretzky's, you know, another guy with them.

It's, it's crazy the lineup they have, but it it's cool. It it's good to see. No doubt. Alright. We're moving over to, let's see. We're speaking your language here. We've got, a little chipper jones action.

99 skybox, molten metal metal Chipper Jones titanium fusion out of 50 PSA nine selling for $3,930. This is one of those sets I think most collectors think about the basketball product, and it's probably because of Jordan.

But Yeah. In terms of technology, man, there are fewer cooler cards from the nineties, I think, than the this card. Chipper Jones was such a, figure in this era and just a a prolific, player.

And I feel like maybe he's not even talked about as much as he should be now. But when you see a card like this from the nineties, Chipper Jones, like, what's going through your head?

Yeah. I mean, there was just there were so many cards produced in the nineties. So when you see something, like, I think nowadays people maybe don't realize, like, something numbered to 50 in 1999 just like what a chase that was.

Because nowadays, it's like we open a chrome product and okay. Number to 50, we've got gold, gold geometric, gold wave, gold ray wave, gold lava, gold shimmer, gold like, I can just keep going.

Like, they just go on forever. And, so back then, you had so much of this stuff, and, you know, you weren't getting one of these a box or anything.

So I I love this set. Like you said, it's it definitely has kind of a basketball feel. I see this card and I immediately think platinum portraits and, like, the Jordan platinum portraits card.

But, yeah, you know, it's just one of those chases. And if you're a a PC guy or just a long term hold, like, this is up there with me.

It's not quite there, but it's up with, like, the Starrubies and PMGs and Flare Brilliant 24 Karats and, like, some of those just really tough chase is from the nineties.

So, super cool card, agreed chipper is is a bit underrated sometimes and, you know, to find these in a nine is pretty good too.

You know, you're not gonna find super high grades on this stuff often. So, yeah, great card. Definitely nostalgia for me, nineties baseball collecting.

Alright. Moving from chipper to the last card I wanna feature here. And this is the one I saw on the Instagram page, so I had to figure out, like, where it ended up. And the talk of the town right now, Drake May.

This is the 2024 prism Drake May variation gold prism out of 10 raw. This is a raw copy of this. This card sold for $9,900. And you know what? And I hate to admit this because I'm not a Patriots guy. I'll never be a Patriots guy.

They're actually the opposite for what I think about and support as a fan. But this guy's balling out, and he's a great player. And it's it feels like it's so not often where you see a player that you can just look at and be like, yeah.

This guy's gonna be good for, like, the next ten years. Oftentimes, we see, people buying into cards based on hope and hype and potential.

And sure, May has hope, hype, and potential, but I also feel like there's a lot already solidified just by the eye test of what we've seen. But monster sale of this card, yeah. When this one came in, I would imagine it's like, okay.

This card's probably gonna sell well, and you posted it on Instagram. But, yeah, what what what do you think about this sale and just, you know, Drake May and young quarterbacks often get a bad name because they explode in our face.

But, yeah, Drake May appears to maybe go against that, way of, of, quarterbacks disintegrating after a couple years. Right. Yeah.

It's funny because you'll see all these, like, posts on social media about people who are complaining. Like, it's not fair. They got to go from Brady to Drake May, and, you know, we're already anointing him as, like, the next coming.

But, hey, I mean, they're a ten and two team. He's looked phenomenal for them. I think the whole 2024 rookie class of quarterbacks in particular and football is interesting because I felt like last year, it was Jaden Daniels by a mile.

Mhmm. And then Bo Nix was kinda number two because the Broncos were winning games.

But Nix is a little different because they're getting wins and the team performs, but he's not like a big stat guy, maybe not as flashy. And then they kinda flipped this year, and now it's like Drake May is number one.

Daniels takes a step back. Caleb Williams has looked pretty good. The Bears are winning games. And so, you know, young quarterbacks, there's nothing more exciting.

They're they're the, you know, they're the young highly liked prospects in baseball or the young quarterbacks in football. And so, I didn't know what this one was gonna do when it came in.

Obviously, we knew it was gonna do phenomenally. The fact that they just kept winning after it came in certainly helped. I think near $10 is a really good sale for a second year quarterback.

It's gonna be really interesting to see what happens. I wanna see this postseason and what happens in the playoffs. So, obviously, they're going. And so just to see kind of that's obviously that next step.

Right? You get the young quarterbacks. It's hype first, then it's performance. It's winning games, and then that next level to get to is what happens when you get to the playoffs.

And so, excited to see, and, I think that'll be what kinda dictates his market from here on out is how far they can go this year. Absolutely. That class is certainly interesting and probably one we'll be studying for years.

But, yeah, if the the this couldn't which is crazy to think about. But if the the Patriots have a run and have success this year, this could look like the steal of the century, which is wild.

Yeah. Yeah. Easily. Which is which is crazy because we didn't think that originally, but, you know, yeah, you know, young quarterback sheet, you never know.

I mean, we can talk about the early guys in the twenty twenty three NFL draft if you want and how they've fared in Indianapolis.

Like, maybe the overall pick that year. Hey. Hey. Let's let's let's let's keep our focus on 2024. If you wanna throw some shade, there's other guys you can JJ McCarthy, Michael Penn, you could you could do that.

But Right. Yeah. If I if I wanna talk about three. If I wanna talk about Colts quarterbacks, my options are $19. 98 and or bust, really. That's that's what we're talking about. Hey. Hey. Don't you throw Andrew Luck into that mix now?

Alright. Let's, let's dig into the main topic. Really wanted to dig into the kind of DC Sports 87, scale story and just, try to figure out from you, kinda everything that's transpired and how you got to where you got to today.

And I'm always fascinated by businesses and business growth, especially in the hobby. So let's just get into it. Let's let's start maybe just from the very beginning.

And maybe some of this will be revisiting a previous chat we had when we first met, but that was a long time ago. Talk about maybe, like, the early days and how DC Sports eighty seven really got started on the consignment side.

Yeah. So in the very beginning, you know, the business was initially started by my brother-in-law, Zach, who who some may know, and he started as a breaking business. And so, he was breaking.

He had gotten out of the coast guard and started and this was, you know, obviously early days was operating out of his, you know, basement and and place he had in his house and, we lived near each other and so I started working with him.

I had a nine to five, but I was over there and I was the one who originally got them into cards, I think, in, you know, like 2012.

And then you fast forward a couple years, 2015, I think is when the breaking started and, I would go over and just help sort brakes at night and just kinda hang out and just be an extra set of hands.

And, one of the things we started offering in the early days was if people got cards in the brakes and they didn't wanna keep them, we would just list them for them.

And so, you you know, we have the eBay store, DC Sports 87 set up, and it was kinda great for everybody because a lot of these guys, as we all know in breaking, you know, breaking is always a gamble to some extent, and not everybody's collecting all the teams.

It's kind of the fun of the chase. And so it gave us a way to sell their cards for them, give them the money back.

They would use that to buy into more breaks, which helped our business. It was a cool service for them. They didn't wanna wait to get the cards in the mail, have to list them, ship them all out themselves.

So that was how we very first started consigning. And then just as time went on, we got more and more and more of that. That led to, hey, I love what you guys do in the breaks. Can I ship you some cards I've got sitting on my desk?

Can you do it for those for me too? And so we started doing that. And just over time, the amount of time we had for consigning just had to keep going up because we had so many requests to do it.

And so, ultimately, kind of the breaking point was realizing there's a huge opportunity there, and there really weren't any consignors yet offering to consign anything.

And so we really saw kind of the mid and lower ends of the market as like a underserved segment in the hobby.

And so there were a lot of guys saying, hey. You can send me $100 cards and up, or, hey. I'll only do graded or or things like that and kind of a niche thing for the high end.

And we didn't care. It was you can send us $2. 03, $4 cards, you can send us thousands of dollar cards, you can send us two or 20,000 cards at once, we'll make it happen.

Just give us cards, we'll do it. And I think that willingness to work with anybody and be flexible and offer everybody the same level of service there really helped us grow.

And so, ultimately, we sold off all of the allocations from breakers, got out of working with distributors on breaks at all, went full in on consignment.

And as we did that, two of Zach's sisters joined us. My wife was working with us on, doing eBay messages for a while, and it's kind of became his mom jumped in.

It was kinda like the whole family just helping grow this thing, and we were sorting consignment submissions on our kitchen tables and transporting them house to house for who's gonna take photos, who's gonna list them, and, and that was the early days.

That that was how everything kinda started. And then, obviously, quite a bit has transpired since then, but that was really the foundation of what we're doing now.

So what what what what was, like, the year or time frame where there weren't any other really other consignment shops on eBay? Like, what era are we talking about?

Yeah. I mean, we're talking, like, you know, the couple years in the beginning for us, so like 2016 through 2018. And not to say there weren't other consignors, you know, some of the other big names have been on eBay forever.

Probesine was around then, the Greg Morris and four Sharp Corners and some of the other guys that that we know, you know, PC Sports and MC and other guys were out there.

So there were consignors. I think, they just at that time, there wasn't really a send us absolutely anything in any volume, and it just kinda goes in the queue when we just churn through it.

It was a lot more selective and targeted with some of what the other companies did.

And, again, then, you know, our approach was also not being shy and maybe this is kinda what we get into next about how did we spend money and in what order did we do things to be able to grow because, you know, that's the other big thing is, you know, you you're always hungry to grow and you want it to happen fast.

But if you don't do things in the right order, that will blow up in your face. Yeah. I wanna talk about the order, and I wanna start with this philosophy you had, which you continue to have. But it's like, we will take anything.

And knowing what I know about how consignment businesses work, it it takes people to do all of the things and to get the operations in order. So, like, you have this mentality and mindset. It's like, give us whatever.

Give us anything, which is like opening up the floodgates. Talk about, like, that snowball effect of, like, I'm sure someone had a good experience. They tell their friends, and so everyone just starts sending you everything.

Like, how do you make sure that you're not, like, syncing as all these cards are in when you don't necessarily have maybe, like, the structure back then that you have today? Yeah. And and early on, it definitely was different.

You know, we always try to be as transparent as we could be. So we always had a posted wait time, whether it was before we had the website, it was something we would post periodically on Facebook, or we would message out to people.

Because Facebook is where we kinda started before everything, you know, we had all the innovation and all the growth over time.

But, you know, there were times that it would get up to it was a thirty business day wait time or something crazy because we just got so much in, which is what triggered a lot of the hiring for us.

But I think the big thing was when we started, we knew we wanted to go all in on this.

We knew we wanted to make this grow and get big and and not really have a ceiling on ourselves. And so that was why early on, a lot of the work went into, okay, we're gonna have to build a website.

And not think about it in how many more bodies do we need to keep up with the crazy mail when we started getting blown up with submissions.

But what tools would we need to give each body to make them three, four, five, ten times more efficient?

And I think that's really the perspective is you can throw bodies at something all day long, but it gets really complicated because then you are requiring yourself to find the absolute best people. And we've got a phenomenal team.

I'm not taking anything away from them, but it's sometimes hard to find somebody who knows cards perfectly and is gonna be great at shipping and sorting and is good at all the hands on stuff and has a flexible schedule.

And so, being sure we have, like, the technology and the tools to put in those people's hands as we grew to keep up was kind of what enabled everything to happen without, falling apart or kind of busting at the seams like you're talking about as a growth kinda hockey sticked on us over the years.

And, you know, the few years we mentioned were when we really got going, but then, obviously, it was only a year or two later COVID hit, and then we all know what happened in the hobby then. And that was when everything just took off.

How how did you know even though you've never done this before, how did you know to what decisions you had to make for the business and in the order you had to make them in order for DC Sports eighty seven to continue to scale?

I mean, you talked about, like, not over hiring and making sure people were Right. With technology. But, like, the order of operations, like, how did you come to those sorts of decisions on when stuff happened?

Yeah. I mean, as the team, you know, and it makes it easy in the beginning that everybody was, honestly, in our case, everybody was family. We were all a part of growing this thing together, and everybody was very entrepreneurial.

And it was eighty hour weeks, and, you know, it it was crazy, but it was everybody's all in on being sure that we didn't kinda drown in the early days to get over that.

And then, I think you just kinda learn through that where do we need help. And and you have to just be really honest about how much you need and how you're gonna get fast enough and how you're gonna scale things up.

And, I think the biggest trick for us is and when I look at our kinda history, it's it's really in like three eras to me. The first was just kind of establishing ourselves, and I think back then, it's all about trust.

Right? People are sending you cards that are worth a lot of money and in the early days, there's some discomfort with people of like, Hey, are my cards gonna sell for enough?

Are they gonna get them listed for me? Are these people not scamming me? When you're when you're just starting, like that's a real thing.

And so back then, it was literally like Zach on his personal Facebook account. If somebody had a question, they just messaged him directly, and he would answer, you know, for hours and hours and hours at a time.

He's sitting there doing all the customer service, one on one white glove treatment with everybody while the rest of us are looking at, you know, what tools are we building today for the growth next month, and let's get a new person hired and trained, and, how do we keep up with the volume and things like that.

Because you kinda needed that. Like, people needed a personal touch, somebody they knew, a face and a voice they knew, and a relationship to trust.

Our our kinda second era or phase is what really happened from COVID to probably year and a half, two years ago, which was you almost have to get away from that personal stuff because it's not scalable.

Having one person answer Facebook messages all day, you can only grow so much.

And so that was when we built the website, and we hired a team to handle customer service, and we hired more people to handle shipping, and we made it so that people could go on a website and get their own information.

They didn't have to ask, hey. When are my cards going up? And, hey. How much did my card sell for last night? Getting payouts automated so people aren't waiting for, hey, I sent a message at 10PM.

When are you gonna answer me and give me my money kind of stuff? And that was really the huge growth accelerator for us was getting it away from just being hands on every little thing.

And now in the last year and a half, two years, it kinda flips back because it's now we've got a massive team, a ton of great technology and a great systems in place.

And now it's okay, we can get back out there and we need to do engagement and sell on multiple platforms and channels and do content and kind of humanize the business again.

Just let people get to know us because now we've made ourselves efficient enough that we have time to do those things.

And so I think that flow is really then what's changed the most over time for us. It's kinda how we prioritize efficiency versus, like, the personality of the business.

But it's kinda necessary. And I know that's a that's a long rambling answer to a a couple of eras that summarize, you know, the last seven or eight years in a few minutes, but, it's definitely a big part of kinda where we are now.

I wanna spend a second talking about people, but wanna maybe focus on you. Like, what was the what what was the moment where you realized, like, you've gotta leave current job because this is where the opportunity is.

And what was, like, what was going on your head when you made that decision? Yeah. So for for a long time, you know, Zach and I had worked together since the beginning, and and we had a lot of conversations about what it was gonna take.

And so, you know, I would do my job, you know, just a nine to five office job from, you know, eight to 04:30, 05:00 each day, go home, have, have dinner with the family, go into my office at home, and from, you know, 7PM to often 02:30, three in the morning, be, working on eBay listings and learning, like, new tools that were out there, and how could we make our spreadsheets work faster, and what would be more efficient to get titles that we had made into listings for eBay so we could do it in bulk instead of one by one and all that stuff.

And so, in the beginning, that kinda ebbed and flowed.

It was like I can do two hours tonight, we're good. Oh, mail's not bad today, I can do an hour. When I started putting in those eight hour days after dinner after my eight hour day at the office, that was when it got a little crazy.

And everybody else that was a part of the team at the time, you know, Zach and his sisters and and the crew we had were putting in just as many hours.

And when it got to that point, you know, we just I remember the day that we had a conversation in my living room on the couch of, like, hey.

We're gonna be capped pretty soon. Like, you're gonna have to go full time for us to keep going. We talked it out, figured it out, quit my nine to five job, went all in on it.

And from there, you know, I had extra time to put into all the stuff I just talked about along with everybody else who's working on stuff too and work on that transition of getting people hired.

We, brought a few other great people on board who we kinda knew from the hobby or personally that we knew we could trust who would be great members of the team.

And then it was really just all hands on deck to get things built where we could honestly hire anybody and make them efficient because all our in house tech worked well enough.

And so that's when we really put the focus on all the, like, proprietary things we have in house that drive everything we do today.

But that was the, yeah, that was kind of the tipping point when I just there aren't enough hours in the day to keep going that it had to become a a full time thing. Burning at both ends for a while. Yeah. For sure.

Very much. So I wanna talk about just people and maybe just hiring and profiles. I I I get this vibe, and I'm sure you you understand it just in terms of, like, you're probably always trying to increase staff when stuff comes up.

So you're you've got, like, a hiring drumbeat going on. But it it seems like I'm seeing more and more people that have interest or are moving into the the hobby, working at companies like DC Sports eighty seven industry.

And, also, like, there are people that have, like, this domain expertise with cards, and they might just never thought they could apply it to anywhere.

But in a place like DC Sports eighty seven, like, having card knowledge is probably a a pretty, good trait that you you know, if you're bringing someone in that you would love to have.

Maybe just in the history, what you've seen in terms of hiring profile of people, like, are you seeing more people interested in working for hobby businesses like DC Sports?

Like, just share a little bit about just, like, the market of people in this industry that we spend our time in.

Yeah. For sure. And and, like, look, we're super fortunate, and I'm very grateful that we've had a ton of success doing this.

And it's a lot of fun. Like, I love the hobby. I love the people in it. Cards are still something I'm passionate about, so it's fun to be able to do that for work.

I I'll say that in the early days, so, you know, say we're talking the 2015 through 2018 range, a lot of people were kind of like, I want the side hustle.

Right? It was, hey, I'd love what can I do for you guys remotely? Or how can I help here and there? Like, if you guys are gonna set up at a show, can I come work with you?

Or, hey, do you need me to make some listings for you remotely? I could do 50 a night for you for my house kind of thing. And, I think it was in those early days and the hobby hadn't exploded.

We haven't had COVID yet. We haven't had all the things in the last few years and all the new entrance to it. Now if we put out a post about hiring, we talk to people, people are really in on it. Now for us, I think that's two things.

One, I think the hobby is so much more established in, like, mainstream culture and people just know about it because you're seeing about, you know, news coverage on, like, your main news about, you know, 8 figure card sales and you're hearing about it and the marketing that's done by, like, fanatics and things so just push it into, like, pop culture more.

But also, it's for us as a business, when we talk to people then, we were selling, you know, maybe a $100,000 a month or we were selling $200,000 a month on on eBay.

That number is now closer to 11,000,000. And so in our shoes, right, if you're having a conversation with us, I think we're now viewed as this is a career opportunity.

This is not a part time job I'm gonna throw on top of my nine to five kind of thing. And so, I do think the way the hobby has evolved and become more normalized and mainstream is a big part of that.

But for specifically through the DC Sports eighty seven experience, it's also we're now a team of 45, 50 people if you include our remote people, doing this. And so it's a big crew doing huge numbers.

We're very well established. And so it's just a very different dynamic if I talk to somebody about coming on board that we might have had back then when somebody might say, how are you sure you're gonna have work for me next month?

Or, hey. Is this gonna be a job for me in a year? You know? And and those concerns are not a thing anymore, of course. So, I guess the elephant in the room is how do you get from 100 k a month to 11,000,000?

Like, what was the moment? Like, what were the inflection points along the way where you just saw hyper growth at DC Sports eighty seven? Yeah. I mean, I honestly don't think this is all that different from your typical business.

I think some people are just shy about doing it. You can't be afraid to spend money. The whole, like, it takes money to make money, like, it's absolutely a thing.

And and for us, that was it takes money to build the tools to give people to be able to do this fast enough that we can offer a service good enough that it makes us grow, which is interesting because a comment you made a few minutes ago was, you know, it's great to have card knowledge and to find people who know cards work at DC Sports eighty seven.

It's ironic because the very early conversations Zach and I had is foundation of what's let us grow is we have to be able to hire people who know nothing about cards and have a system that makes them great at what they do.

That's why and, you know, we recently did, like, a behind the scenes shoot with, Troy Reich who does tWright cards, great, like, YouTube, Instagram comments.

So our content, so shout out to him. But, you know, if you watch the way we do things, you could have never seen a card in your life and you're fine.

When you go to do, like, our pick pack ship processes for fulfillment, you're working off an iPad with high res large front and back images and a title so you know you've got the right card to put in that order.

When you're shipping, you've got thumbnails of every card and account and what method should you use to ship it and where is it going.

And that's tied to labels that come out. We group everything by the shipment type we're gonna have going out the door so it's easy for the person packing those.

And the reason all that's done and, like, more recently in the introduction of AI and Haystack to let us title without human manually doing everyone is so that we can just find hardworking, trustworthy people and just throw them into the machine and it lets us grow.

And so I think a lot of businesses are shy about that, and so we spent a ton of money on our website, on all our in house tech, on all the equipment we use, on all the things we needed on our own internal network to make all this happen, so that we could then hire the people and know they could be working efficiently, and then start to market ourselves.

You know, we didn't really market ourselves or advertise until a year or two ago because we couldn't, you know, to to keep up.

And so, you know, that was really what set it up for us was just making the investments in all the infrastructure and all the tech and all the things you're gonna need. And just ask yourself, like, okay.

We're at 100,000 a month. What would keep us from doing this at 1,000,000 a month? What would keep us from doing this at 10,000,000 a month? And whatever those answers are, that's where you invest your money.

And that's what we've done for, you know, the better part of a decade now, and it's worked really well for us. Have have you taken experiences from your previous professional life?

Like, that that thought process on, you have to spend money to make money. Yeah. You know, when you're in that position and you're like, I'd rather have this money in my account.

It's really hard to justify these thousands of dollars I need to do here, because I don't know if it's gonna work. It's like, it's really hard to, like, make those business decisions, especially when you're spending a lot of money.

What did you have per like, through your previous, like, career experience, did did you learn stuff along the way that you've applied to your experience at DC Sports eighty seven that made those sorts of decisions, which might be challenging for other operators or new business owners in the space just come natural to you?

Not I'm gonna say no. I'm gonna say, honestly, Zach is way more that person than I am here.

You know, our conversations early on were we want this to get big. Like, we like I said, we don't wanna put a a ceiling or a cap on this, and so we were both very driven entrepreneurial mindset. I'm a admitted workaholic.

Wife hates it, but I'm guilty of it. And so for us, it was you know, the stuff I applied was more, you know, when we were building this thing, Zach was very much like a a vision and road map and where do we wanna get to guy.

And I am very much a nuts and bolts execution kinda guy. And so, you know, my past jobs were project management and a lot of just, like, I'm not not super techie, but, like, I'm more technically inclined.

And so I'm a I'm a massive, like, spreadsheet Excel nerd, you know, things like that. And so just being comfortable with that stuff just made it so if we decided, hey.

We need to go build this thing or this is gonna be necessary for our next step of growth, I love just throwing myself into the research and the homework and the discovery of what are the options out there?

How can we use them? How can we pair a couple together? Let me test it. Let me try it out.

What works? And so that was a lot of what I did. And it was really just pairing that with kind of those conversations with Zach and our the rest of the family, our core team here that really got us kind of propelled that way.

But, yeah, I would love to say, oh, yeah, you know, built and grown multiple businesses before. And I just brought that here and it worked out great. But not my story. My my my story is just, take as many hours as it can be.

Never content, never complacent. We're never big enough. We're never fast enough. And, I just think that to this day. And that's the reason we keep growing is because none of us are ever content with where we are. I love that. Alright.

Before I let you get out of here, the something that it just keeps coming to my brain is like, it it is not I can't imagine it's easy to become kinda eBay's highest volume sports card seller, not something that happens overnight either.

If you could just attribute, like, your current success and position within the hobby ecosystem to, like, I'm sure it was a lot of different decisions along the way.

But, like, what do you think the most important decision was along the way that you all made in order to get to where you are today? Look at your competition and look at the customers you're trying to serve.

And just, you know, ask yourself what are the most valuable important things to the customers we want, and where are other people in our space not doing those things well enough?

And then be willing to take no paycheck for a while if that's what it takes, but invest aggressively in building out things that work there.

And so I think a lot of people were great at selling on eBay, were great at being consignors on eBay, but they needed a card to sell for a $100 to have enough meat left on the bone that they could profitably run their business.

The question we asked ourselves was, how could we list a 100 times the quantity they do, but do it on 2 and 3 and $5 cards and still be profitable?

Go and do that. Because in doing that, we, take advantage of where there's an underserved part of the market.

We offer something customers aren't being offered today, and we set ourselves up in a way where if the hobby moves up or down, it doesn't matter.

If if the average card price tanked by 40% tomorrow, we'd be fine because we're built on volume and working across all price points.

And so, we've kind of insulated ourselves from that hurting us. And, I think that combination of things, just understanding who else is in your space and understanding what sets you apart, that's the, that's the big thing.

And then other than that, just, you know, like I said, you you can't ever be satisfied.

It can't be, I'm at forty hours this week. Time to call it till Monday. It's no. I might put in twenty hours this weekend if that's what it takes to stay ahead step ahead of the next guy.

And, that's just life. Like, it's a competitive world. And if you wanna grow, you have to do that stuff. Whether you're building a business inside or outside of the hobby, I think there's a lot of great lessons shared, in this episode.

Tory, always enjoy, doing these episodes. This one was, especially fun, kinda just revisiting the dcsports87. Thank you everyone for listening, Tory.

Looking forward to doing this again soon. Yeah. For sure. And last quick plug, I guess this will be what? We're dropping this on December 2? So, December. So Friday and Saturday night, we'll be on eBay live. We're doing two nights.

Be Mike Gio from Sports Cars Nonsense and myself hosting, and we have all high end singles, all sudden death, all starting at a dollar on eBay. So gonna be fun, gonna be some exciting grill pieces and things like that going.

We've got a Jordan Star rookie, Mahomes NTRPA, Luca NTRPA, Shohei Autos, Judge one zero one. It's some some really cool cards, and, we're gonna have a massive group in the room.

So be a lot of fun, so come hang out with us. Awesome. It'll be entertain even if you don't collect any of those, I'm sure it'll be entertaining nonetheless. It will be. Absolutely.