Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
You spend a quarter of your life at work - you deserve to find a career you love!
Hosts Katy and Emma talk with guests from across industries about their careers: what they love, what they've learned, and how they got there.
Plus, you'll get actionable advice to help you succeed at work, like how to feel confident in job interviews, what to do to avoid burnout and more. Explore career options and meet your goals with Work It.
Hello, everyone, and welcome back to season three of Work It, a UBIC career exploration podcast. This season, we're speaking with some really cool alumni who are up to some really interesting stuff out there in the world of work. And we're also chatting with our amazing team of career educators who are here to help lead you down the path to a career you'll love.
Emma Ulveland:I'm so excited to get into today's episode. I've got a really special guest for you. But before we introduce him on the show, I'm your host, Emma. And today, I will talk about the fact that I have never played an actual card game, and that's a really sad fact. I have dabbled in Pokemon GO, and that's as far as I've gone.
Emma Ulveland:And you'll see why that's important later. Today, we're recording at the University of Victoria, which is located on the traditional territory of the Lekwungen, Songhees and Kosapsum peoples. We want to extend our gratitude for being here as uninvited guests and respect the ongoing historical relationships of the Lekwungen and WSANEC peoples on this land. We're so lucky to be here. It's such a beautiful, wonderful place full of rich culture.
Emma Ulveland:If you don't know much about it, I highly recommend looking into the history of this land. On today's episode, we're speaking with mechanical engineering alum, Graham Gordon, who ditched the oil and gas industry to transform his passion for Magic the Gathering, which is a trading cards game into a thriving business. He's the founder of Trading Card Games Machines, which produces automatic trading card sorting machines for commercial use. In the past four years, Graham's business has grown into a multimillion dollar business with 20 full time employees and machines operating in 10 different countries. Welcome to the podcast, Graham.
Emma Ulveland:We're so happy to have you on the show.
Graeme Gordon:Hello, Emma, and thank you very much for having me.
Emma Ulveland:So we've talked a lot about career pivots on this show, and you certainly take the cake for one of the biggest career pivots I've ever seen. And I wanna go back to the beginning of your story. I wanna know about the start of your career in oil and gas and hitting one of the industry's biggest busts in 2014. How did that impact you and your career trajectory?
Graeme Gordon:Yeah. It was an interesting time. I started off working for an oil and gas automation company. Many aspects of it were really great. There's very few industries out there where you will work on a multi, multi million dollar project, and it will be put into the field immediately.
Graeme Gordon:And so, yeah. So it was an interesting place to start. Quite enjoyed it, but oil and gas never felt really, like, a good moral fit for me. Sure. So I kinda had put this time limit of about five years on my time in that industry.
Graeme Gordon:And serendipity would have it that 2014 was almost exactly five years for me.
Emma Ulveland:Once you decided you were going to leave the oil and gas industry, how did you decide where to go next?
Graeme Gordon:Great question. I didn't really know what was a right fit. I tried to leave once before I left officially. I had a three month stint as an elevator engineer.
Emma Ulveland:Oh, really?
Graeme Gordon:But it turned out to be incredibly bureaucratic, like so many layers. So you, as a consultant, would be hired on either by a property owner or an insurance company to assess or project for a new project. And then you'd have so many different stakeholders, and your job is basically writing reports between all these different stakeholders. After three months of that, I'm like, nope. I'm I'm out.
Graeme Gordon:Back to oiling. So just because there's too much red tape, honestly.
Emma Ulveland:Yeah. Well, that's so interesting that you tried that area and you found out really quickly that you didn't like it. And you're like, nope. Actually, gonna go somewhere else. I love that you had the courage to instantly leave that once you decided it wasn't right for you.
Graeme Gordon:I had made some really great connections in the oil and gas space. And the company I had left to try out this elevator career, they actually welcomed me back, but I knew that I need to get out of the industry. It wasn't gonna be elevators, but it was going to be something.
Emma Ulveland:It sounds like after that, you made the leap into the world of cards and board games. Where on earth did that idea come from?
Graeme Gordon:Right. So I grew up with 10 kids in a small house, and one of the things that we would do is play with Magic cards. We didn't know the rules, you know, we were young, but we just enjoyed the artwork and we just played on our bedroom floors. And so that was my introduction. So even as early as probably five, six years old, I was aware of these cards.
Graeme Gordon:And then my very first co op work term, I went to Vancouver making specialized wheelchairs.
Emma Ulveland:Oh, that's cool.
Graeme Gordon:But the head engineer there was a huge magic card aficionado. Loved cards. Loved playing cards. And I remember in the interview process, he asked me, do you know what MTG is? Like, you mean Magic the Gathering?
Graeme Gordon:He's like, yeah. So he got very excited. And so he got me right back into the game. We'd play basically every lunch hour, and he took me to my first big tournament. And there was literally thousands of people.
Graeme Gordon:Like, they filled this huge hall, all playing cards in various different games and formats, and that just blew my mind. I was like, oh, wow. This is not just little kids on their bedroom floors. All the people here are adults, probably average age, mid thirties. And so I got really into the competitive magic scene, started playing on the weekends and at lunch at work.
Graeme Gordon:I was back in cards at that point. So then I finished my degree. I came out to Calgary after graduating because I did have competing job offers. I could have gone back to Vancouver doing the wheelchair thing, but oil and gas money was a little bit better, and it just seemed like a better place to launch my career. But I kept up with the Magic card.
Graeme Gordon:So
Emma Ulveland:Right on. That's amazing. And for people who don't know, I know this game is very complicated because I have a friend who plays, and he's tried to explain it to me many times, and I still don't get it. So I know he can't explain all the rules or anything. But for those of our listeners who have never even heard of Magic the Gathering, can you just give the briefest explanation of what it is?
Graeme Gordon:Absolutely. In the game of Magic, there's many formats, but the typical one is going to be a one player versus one player. So one v one format, you both are powerful wizards, and you are playing spells to try and bring your opponent's life total from 20 down to zero. You cast out creature spells, your creatures can attack your opponents, and you can interact with them in various ways. But it's actually quite a complex game, and part of the fun is just the strategic elements of it.
Emma Ulveland:Yeah. Well, and I've heard from my friend that you have to have many, many different cards to play successfully, and you create your own deck sometimes, and there's a whole bunch that goes into having the right cards to play the game well. And I can imagine you might end up with a lot of cards that you don't know what to do with. And I wonder if you could tell me how that led you into your new career path.
Graeme Gordon:Exactly as you say, there are many, many individual different Magic cards. At this point in time, I think there's over a 100,000 unique cards in print, and then each of those cards have variants on them, so, like, different artwork, different sets they're printed in. So the total number of individual unique cards is actually over a million, and each one of those million plus cards have different values. And so it can be a bit of an accounting and an inventory nightmare. So myself, as a personal player, I had accumulated a collection of maybe 20,000 cards.
Emma Ulveland:Oh, my word.
Graeme Gordon:It sounds like a lot.
Emma Ulveland:It sounds like a lot.
Graeme Gordon:Not not that many, though. So one day, December 2014, I was laid off from the company that I worked for. Luckily, I had specialized in hydraulics, which for whatever reason is a fairly niche aspect of the oil and gas market. And so I interviewed another company, and they offered me a job the day after I was laid off kind of
Emma Ulveland:thing. Oh, wow.
Graeme Gordon:So that worked out very nicely. But I wanted to take a little bit of time, so I just took two weeks in between and said, I'm gonna just take a breather here. Yeah. Maybe I'll sort through my personal collection of 20,000 cards. And so I took three days, back to back eight hour days, taking out duplicate cards, trying to assess whether there was any value in them, and just trying to par that down.
Graeme Gordon:And at the end of that three day experience, I was pretty exhausted. And I had a roommate at the time who was a professional electrical engineer. And he's like, oh, hey. You should totally design a machine to do that. Seems like a repetitive, automatable task.
Graeme Gordon:So I started looking into it. Like, oh, that's actually a pretty good idea. And sure enough, there's a number of forums online where store owners have this problem, but at scale.
Emma Ulveland:Oh, yeah.
Graeme Gordon:I'm one guy with 20,000 cards, but there's stores with 20,000,000 cards. And so that was kind of your light bulb moment.
Emma Ulveland:And so obviously, now you're interested in this idea and you're thinking about how you could make it happen, But thinking about it and actually doing it are two different things. So can you walk us through that process of how you went from idea to I'm gonna make this a reality?
Graeme Gordon:Certainly. So here we are in now January 2015. Dillon Oil and Gas, gone to another company in the oil and gas industry. And I've had this epiphany that, okay, trading cards, there's a need for a mechanical mechanized product. And I spent the next year just starting to design the initial concepts for a machine.
Graeme Gordon:I was very lucky that my background was in mechanical engineering, in automation, and always working for small and medium sized manufacturing companies. So I also had a amount of experience with how products are made. And so over that year, I started prototyping, came up with something that I thought would work, and then I called 200 board game, card game stores all across Canada and The United States. And the overwhelming majority, I think it was 92%, said that if I built some kind of a card sorting machine product, they would absolutely be customers for that product.
Emma Ulveland:Oh, cool.
Graeme Gordon:This is the key point. It's one thing to think you have a great idea. It's another thing entirely to validate that there's actually a market for that idea. And I think this is something that a lot of young passionate, but potentially naive young entrepreneurs might miss this step, and it's a pivotal step, is you gotta make sure there's actually a market. I went to speak with my boss, the engineering manager of that firm, and I said, I'd like to put in my resignation.
Graeme Gordon:I'm going to pursue this full time. So September 2016, full time, jumped into TCG Machines as an enterprise and an entity.
Emma Ulveland:Okay. So what does TCG Machines look like? What is it? How does it work? Tell me all about it.
Graeme Gordon:Right. TCG machines, at the beginning, is very simple. It's me in my basement, feverishly designing a machine concept and trying to come up with the mechanical components to sort and handle cards in a safe and yet also expeditious way. I did not take a salary from 2016 until 2022. Mhmm.
Graeme Gordon:Because there's no revenue. There's no income from which to pay yourself. Yeah. Sure you have a business. But until that business is actually bringing an income, it's it's just words on a piece of paper.
Graeme Gordon:So again, very fortunate. I met a wonderful, beautiful woman in Calgary when I moved out there. We met in 2013, and we got married in 2017. And she is a high school English teacher. She was able to support the two of us on her income.
Graeme Gordon:And this is another piece of advice I'll just throw in here.
Emma Ulveland:Yeah. Throw it in.
Graeme Gordon:Everything you think about starting a business is gonna take longer than you initially think it is. I have a business plan that I wrote from this period of time. It said that projections wise, you know, we're gonna be in production in, like, six months. And, you know, we're gonna be in the profits in eight months. No.
Graeme Gordon:You're
Emma Ulveland:you're wrong. Wishful thinking. Very. Yeah.
Graeme Gordon:From 2016 all the way through now to 2018, I'm working on the design of this product. I'm finally getting to full package of engineering drawings, which I'm able to take to some local firms to get some quotes, like, can you prototype this for me? And I found some great fabrication shops around Calgary that were able to do some prototyping for me, and I put together a first unit. And then I had to become a software engineer because, sure, you know, you have a machine now. That's great.
Graeme Gordon:It can handle the cards physically, but you also need systems to recognize what the cards are, compare them to a database of all the existing information, connect that, come up with the appraisal, recognition and identification of what the card is you're looking at, make sure you're having the right variant. Like, there's a lot of nuance there. So I basically had to YouTube train myself to do computer vision software, database engineering. It was exciting, though. So I went from mechanical engineering into software engineering and eventually got to the point where I had this machine and the code.
Graeme Gordon:You can load a thousand cards into this prototype machine. It'll pull the bottom card out, put it over a couple cameras, take photos, image the card, find out what it is, and then spit it out into a number of bins depending on what the sorting criteria is that you'd like to sort the card by. And I took that prototype, and I showed it to a dozen different stores all around Calgary and surrounding area. And one of those stores, Phoenix Comics, the owner saw the potential there. I will alpha trial your product for you, and then you'll get good information and feedback.
Graeme Gordon:I get some cards sorted for free. I think it's a good agreement here. We started this alpha trial, which lasted from 2018 to 2020. And over that time, Phoenix Comics sorted through 1,000,000 cards using this alpha prototype. And I was getting to test and overcome all the mechanical issues, as well as all the software bugs, of which there were many.
Graeme Gordon:It was a great symbiotic relationship. Based on the success of that trial, I was able to apply for a $100,000 grant through an organization called Alberta Innovates to build eight more machines.
Emma Ulveland:Oh, neat.
Graeme Gordon:Yeah. And I built eight more machines and then spread those out to eight different businesses all across Alberta to see if we could do the same program at scale. It went really, really well. At the end of the day, was mostly positive feedback, happy customers, and it proved that this one unit could be scaled to a fleet of units, and there is a viable business model there. Also, very importantly, these people actually paid.
Emma Ulveland:Yay. Success. They
Graeme Gordon:were paying $500 per month per machine based on the success of the beta trials, those eight machines. In 2021, I was able to hire my first employee, so I brought on a full time software developer who built out the marketing website.
Emma Ulveland:What did your marketing look like? How did you even know who to promote this to?
Graeme Gordon:We didn't really do a lot of marketing or advertising, but the one thing that I did was I started this grassroots Reddit campaign. I I started posting in the various magic channels on Reddit. And so then when I had the product ready to showcase, I put together a YouTube commercial for it, and I posted it on a few different Reddit channels, which got a ton of attention. When we actually launched, we already had a lot of people kinda looking at our direction, and we're ready for this launch.
Emma Ulveland:Oh, that's great. Wow. So many things stuck out to me from everything that you've just shared. Even though now you're technically an entrepreneur, your engineering background from UVic really made a big difference. So can you tell us about how your time at UVic, whether that's through co ops, through what you've learned in the classroom, how that's really shaped, what you were able to create here?
Graeme Gordon:Absolutely. The engineering program is brutal. It's brutal. I will not try and sugarcoat it. And honestly, I have my qualms with it too.
Graeme Gordon:But the one thing that it does very, very effectively is it brings people in and it puts them through an insane gauntlet of difficult tasks over and over and over and over again. And so if nothing else, you come out the other side knowing that you have a mind and the resources to overcome pretty much any technical challenge. And so, yeah, it instilled me with quite a bit of technical confidence. I'm able to do some pretty crazy stuff here. Were it not for that background, I might have been overly daunted by the notion of making a hardware, software, Internet connected computer vision based product.
Graeme Gordon:Where do I even start?
Emma Ulveland:Yeah. Right on.
Graeme Gordon:They're all just little challenges, much like a six course load semester.
Emma Ulveland:You just
Graeme Gordon:gotta pick them and do them, and you'll get through them. So it was good for that. It really gave me a lot of confidence.
Emma Ulveland:That's great. And what I'm hearing is transferable skills, transferable skills, transferable skills for our listeners. Do not be afraid to try something new because everything that you've learned in the past will come with you and will support you in whatever future thing you decide to do. So I'm really happy to hear that your transition has been so successful, and now I wanna know what on earth comes next.
Graeme Gordon:Here we are now in 2025, and we ended last year with 15 full time employees. And as of right now, we have 20. Wow. So we've hired five people this year already. We have a backlog now of 40 machines that we have to deliver on.
Graeme Gordon:And we've increased our revenue year over year for the last five years at a minimum doubling each
Emma Ulveland:My goodness. Congratulations.
Graeme Gordon:Thank you. Yeah. It's insane.
Emma Ulveland:Yeah. That's great.
Graeme Gordon:Effectively, the appetite for this product is enormous. And we're mostly servicing The United States right now, it being the larger market in North America. But we're barely touching Europe. We only have a handful of machines over there so far, but we are now in 10 different countries. The number of inquiries we get vastly outstrips our ability to produce.
Graeme Gordon:So hence, we're scaling up.
Emma Ulveland:Wow. That's wonderful. How exciting.
Graeme Gordon:Very much so. Yeah.
Emma Ulveland:Well, here's my last big question for you in this segment of our episode, and that's what advice would you give to a student or someone who's recently graduated who wants to try out their own business idea, and they're listening to your story, they're inspired by your story, what advice would you give them?
Graeme Gordon:I guess, first and foremost, if you have an entrepreneurial spirit to if you know that you don't love working for other people or you just you know that you have to do something for yourself, anything that you perceive as a challenge or an encumbrance or even just a slight inefficiency is an opportunity for a business. It doesn't have to be some highfalutant product that's highly mechanized or automated or using crazy advanced software. Anything that would be a small quality of life improvement is a business. So that's where I'd start. It is a long and challenging and expensive road.
Graeme Gordon:So have no illusions. Whatever you think your timeline and your budget are, times it by five, times it by 10, and that's gonna get closer and you'll still be wrong. You gotta have a support network. You need to be able to fund this venture. We live in a wonderful country in terms of its ability to support startups and scale ups and make sure you lean into the resources around you.
Graeme Gordon:Talk to your advisers, your professors at your university, because they're gonna be involved in different programs. They'll be able to point you to the right people to talk to. Don't try and go it alone. You will not succeed. And and help exists, so find it.
Graeme Gordon:And the last very, very, very important thing is that even when you've landed on that idea, and even when you're pretty sure it's a great idea, and it might very well be a great idea, that doesn't mean there's a market for it. You have to validate the market. Go and call people, interview people, talk to people. Don't talk to one person. Talk to dozens or hundreds of people.
Graeme Gordon:Validate the market. And then once you've done that, you can do the thing.
Emma Ulveland:Yes. That's great advice. I'm so glad that you shared all of that. I think it will really help out our listeners who have that entrepreneurial spirit for sure. Before we jump into our rapid fire section, what has been a surprising tidbit about your journey?
Graeme Gordon:I'll throw some mind blowing facts out there. Trading cards are a massive industry. There is a Magic cards pro tour. There is a world tour. You can be a professional Magic card player.
Graeme Gordon:Wow. Gainfully employed doing that. Globally as an industry, it is a $20,000,000,000 USD transaction volume per year. The Pokemon Company between March 2023 and March 2024 printed 12,000,000,000 Pokemon cards. That's 25,000 tons.
Graeme Gordon:And we're talking a cruise ship volume worth of cards.
Emma Ulveland:Good gracious.
Graeme Gordon:Entering the market in twelve months.
Emma Ulveland:My goodness.
Graeme Gordon:And that's year over year. It's mind blowing.
Emma Ulveland:Oh, yeah. That is absolutely insane.
Graeme Gordon:Interesting tidbit. When I did the Reddit campaign and we launched sales, our tenth order for our machine was from Austin r Post. That's Post Malone. So our tenth customer was Post Malone.
Emma Ulveland:Oh my word. That's crazy.
Graeme Gordon:Isn't that crazy?
Emma Ulveland:That's crazy. So it turns out
Graeme Gordon:he's a big magic card guy. He plays in tournaments. He collects cards, and he's one of our longest time customer.
Emma Ulveland:Okay. That's really cool. And now everybody who's listened to this show before, you know what time it is. It's time for our rapid fire questions. Are you ready?
Graeme Gordon:Ready.
Emma Ulveland:Alright. What was your favorite snack when you were on campus?
Graeme Gordon:Pizza and chocolate milk from Bits and Bites.
Emma Ulveland:Oh, yum. If you lived off campus, did you live off campus?
Graeme Gordon:I did. I live with my parents down the road.
Emma Ulveland:Oh, perfect. What neighborhood?
Graeme Gordon:Right on the border of Fernwood and Oak Bay on Richmond Road next to Royal Jubilee Hospital.
Emma Ulveland:Nice. That's a beautiful spot. If you had a time machine and you could be a student again for one day, what would you do with your time?
Graeme Gordon:I'd play some Frisbee in the quad. I miss that terribly. And I'd go and party a bit because engineering, you just don't have the time. You're always focused on your studies, and I was always very jealous of my friends in different programs and they would tell me their university stories. I'm like, that's very different than mine.
Graeme Gordon:What
Emma Ulveland:was the hardest engineering project you worked on during your time here?
Graeme Gordon:We did a project in our fourth year design course. And you could have either made a ping pong launcher for, like, a dog to play fetch Uh-huh. Or a tennis ball hitting racket. Or the one that no one ever chose because it just seemed too insane was you could make a six degree of freedom pool cue actuator for
Emma Ulveland:people to
Graeme Gordon:play pool that wasn't able to use their hands.
Emma Ulveland:Okay.
Graeme Gordon:And so myself and three or four other very ambitious people were like, let's do it. And we actually built a machine that worked quite well using bicycle cables and a small linear actuator on a $200 budget. You gotta remember that this project is on top of the six courses and the three labs, and you're trying to do this more or less like extracurricular difficult project. And I have no idea how we came up with all the time to do it, but that one sticks out in my mind for sure.
Emma Ulveland:Wow. That is amazing. Well, thank you so very much, Graham, for coming on the show, for sharing all of your experience, your knowledge. It was really fun to talk with you. I loved our conversation today, and we really hope to see what you do in the future.
Graeme Gordon:Well, thank you so much, Emma. This has been lovely. And to all you aspiring students out there, stick with it, keep going, and be brave. It will be over one day, and you'll actually miss it.
Emma Ulveland:Hey. That's true. Work It is developed and distributed by Co op and Career Services at the University of Victoria. It is hosted by M. Alvelland and produced by Joy Pollakwyn.
Emma Ulveland:Today's guest was UVic alumni, Graham Gordon. Our theme music and art were created by M. Ovaland with audio editing by M. Ovaland. To learn more about career possibilities and resources from UVic, visit uvic.ca/career-services and follow us, give us a comment or a like anywhere that you listen to podcasts.