welcome back to another episode of hobby jobs the show that exists for people building in the sports card industry not just collecting not just commenting on it but building if you run a shop work in breaking lead content move inventory operate events support retailers build marketplaces or you want to turn your professional skills into a career in this space then hobbyjobs is for you this episode is built off of the core idea from the sixteenth edition of the hobbyjobs newsletter but i do not want to just read the newsletter back to you the line from this issue was simple product knowledge can help you start but systems help you scale and the more i sit with that sentence the more i think it explains where the sports card industry has been where it is now and where the best opportunities are going next this is a fun episode of hobby jobs you will hear a conversation integrated into this episode towards the end with ryan johnson card collector two i was at columbus card fest last weekend doing some interviews over the next few weeks you'll hear those interviews on hobbyjobs really fun chat with ryan for a long time a lot of hobby businesses were basically extensions of one person's eye one person's instincts one person's relationships one person's taste one person's brain that founder knew what to buy who to trust how to price where the landmines were and what good look like that is how a lot of great businesses in this industry get started and to be clear i think that part matters product knowledge matters collector credibility matters knowing what actually matters inside seats sets players release calendars grading dynamics and customer behavior still matters and it matters a lot but there is a ceiling on the founder brain businesses and at some point the thing that made that company work at a small scale becomes the thing holding it back from a larger scale if every key decision has to run through one person if hiring is vibes based if training is scattered through dm trends threads if customer experience depends on who happened to answer the questions that day if the team cannot tell what good looks like without the founder standing there the business may have passion but it does not have the operating infrastructure that is the shift i think we need to talk about more directly and this is not some abstract business school concept look at what is happening across the hobby the national says the twenty twenty six show will be the largest show ever with more than six hundred dealers spread across five hundred thousand square feet fanatics fest says its twenty twenty five event drew more than one hundred and twenty five thousand attendees and is part of a larger ecosystem connecting commerce collectibles and fan experiences collectors described itself as an infrastructure for trust security and opportunity in collectibles and now spans brands like psa beckett sgc and card ladder these are not signals of tiny niche where everything can keep running on memory and personality forever these are signals of building real institutions that scale changes what businesses need when an industry starts building larger companies larger events and more formal brand stacks a more complex customer experience it stops being enough to have the best instincts in the room you need marketing systems you need training you need reporting systems you need shipping systems you need event systems you need standards that survive when the founder is not in the room that is why i keep coming back to the idea that product knowledge starts the business but systems are what let the business become a true company there's another layer here and i think professionals listening really need to hear this the future talent pool for the industry is not going to come only from people who have spent ten years memorizing checklists and parallels linkedin's twenty twenty five skills based hiring research found that when companies hire for skills instead of matching only on prior job titles the talent pool expands by a median of six point one times globally and fifteen point nine times in the united states that is a massive difference it means there are a lot of people outside the traditional hobby resume who can solve real problems if you know how to identify that overlap that matters a lot in sports cards because the instinct of the industry is still to ask do they know cards and that's a fair question but it is not often the best question the better question is what business problems can they solve can they build a crm motion can they improve margin visibility can they fix inventory chaos can they train frontline employees can they write positioning that actually converts can they build a better event experience can they develop standards that make a company less dependent on improv that is where outside experience starts to matter and once those people come in the next challenge is not just hiring them it's onboarding them and scaling their knowledge across the entire organization gallup's research here is brutal in the best way possible only twelve percent of employees strongly agree their organization does a great job of onboarding new hires only twenty nine percent of new hires say they feel fully prepared and supported after onboarding and employees are three point four times more likely to feel onboarding was successful when managers are actively involved gallup also says new hires often take around twelve months to reach peak performance potential that should be a wake up call for every hobby business that thinks we hired someone good equals we're built capably it does not capability only compounds when knowledge transfers so if i were to simplify the operating note in one hard truth it would be this the next winners in this industry are not just going to be the businesses with the deepest collectors they are going to be the businesses that learn how to convert collector instinct into repeatable standards repeatable systems repeatable trust that is the game right now now we're gonna dive in and talk operator stories the first one is gavin hoover from tombstone collectibles and what stood out to me in my conversation with gavin was that gavin came from the outside of the hobby it was where he came from and what that trained him to see before tombstone gavin had experiences across verizon blackberry go wireless working across training employee development sales hr operations and leadership so when he entered sports cards he was not evaluating the business only through the collector lens he was evaluating it through a systems lens he was looking at talent reporting customer relationships and the infrastructure required to scale and the business itself reflects that mindset tombstone's official media materials say that the company operates retail locations in miami and maintains a live presence across multiple streaming platforms and covers not not just breaking but major hobby events conventions and launches then in twenty twenty six tombstone launched tumba collectionables as a dedicated spanish language platform built for underserved audience in the us hobby market that is what operator thinking sounds like in practice it is not just let's do more breaks it is where are the customer gaps where are there underserved communities what distribution layers do we control and how do we architect an experience for a segment that is currently being underserved there was another insight in that newsletter that i think is really easy to miss but incredibly important gavin's bar for quality was not confined to being just good for the hobby that's the standard was bigger than that the consumer compares what they watch in the hobby to everything else they watch that is a serious operator mindset it means you stop benchmarking against the weakest players in your niche and start benchmarking yourself against broader the broader attention economy the hobby does not get better by protecting low standards it gets better when operators raise them but gavin is the outside operator example ryan johnson a card collector two is the inside the hobby example and that is why the conversation matters so much for this show ryan did not start with a fully formed operating company card collector two started as an instagram page in twenty thirteen he left his job to pursue cards full time and then he bought a sports card shop that he'd known for years remodeled it and reopened it and over time the original identity grew into a larger business spanning into a physical store ecommerce buying selling breaking and live events and if you want the cleanest evidence that ryan should be framed as an operator not just as a personality look at how your own april i'm gonna take that again ron and i can just look at my conversation i had with passion to profession with ryan in april twenty twenty six when he was telling his story he said he did not just set out to build a thirty five person company in that conversation he had a shift from collector and content creator to someone responsible for people systems and outcomes he named operating stress points directly decisions impacting other people letting go of control communication under scale cash as a tool for speed hard lessons from hiring culture the tension between still being a collector while also running a business that is not influencer talk that is company building talk and in that company building talk i got a chance to talk with ryan further and i wanted to get some insight from him just as we are there person to person face to face at the columbus card fest i wanted him to provide his insights not only just about the show but building a business so we're going to kick it to that conversation with ryan right here right now

Conversation with Ryan Johnson: 


alright i'm here with the man behind everything ryan your name has come up in conversation in every conversation we've had and i had to track you down and get the skinny from you we're here columbus card fest yeah how are you feeling right now like we're it just started but i want to know like emotionally like physically all the feelings like how are you feeling i feel like i've got to figure something out before fanatics fest in the national because it is way too early in this show to feel this tired so quickly you know thankfully for those shows don't have to run them but yeah like definitely definitely worn out and and for good reason right like nothing nothing bad but you know we were just talking offline it's you don't know what you don't know with running a show of this size like we've run them in shipshewana and we've and i've shared that with you before and like what goes into that but a show like this just being in a convention center fifteen minutes from an airport like some of the luxuries we have here we don't have in shipshewana that just make it so different add complexities that you don't know about until you uncover them so learning a lot and just you know trying to make sure that every person vendor or consumer and hobbyist every person on the spectrum has an amazing time here right and you understand you can't please everybody but the goal is a hundred percent we are perfectionists in that kind of weight you know carries on you to make sure that people are coming out and getting their money's worth again from both a vendor perspective you know people put a lot of money and time away from their businesses and their families to be here and you know consumers have chosen that this is where they're going to spend their money to to park and to come into the show and to spend their time on you know a a weekend and so yeah it just it's it's been a lot in a short period of time like we started this a hundred days ago and thought there was plenty of time and then you get within seven days and then three days and twenty four hours and it's just like wish we had more time so following your content like you document everything right yep i can remember watching your content early and you like hyping shipshewana like being like this show is great it's in the middle of nowhere yep and you provided great exposure to that show then you started getting involved with brad and then so the card collector two brand attached itself to the show scene yep now we're here in you know one of the biggest top fifteen biggest cities in the country at the center you're running your own stand alone show with the help of brad and team and your team but i don't know why shows like why did you decide to invest this much time energy and resources into the show scene yeah i think in a world where everything has gone so digital people still love the the the human in person aspect that shows provide right like at the end of the day we don't all collect nfts and digital collectibles they are items you can hold in your hand and touch and feel and transact on in person you don't have to worry about the mail and there's just a lot to be said about building a community in person right as someone who has built a community online for the past thirteen years of my life there is something special about building something in person and i think growing up i i knew how excited i was to go to shows and what that was like on the weekends and how much i looked forward to it and i think being able to you know provide that here in a city that is where i grew up and where my card show you know my my card journey started is important i you know i think a lot of what i do is trying to provide what i didn't have when i was a kid we had cool shows but six hundred and thirty five plus tables at the convention center didn't exist just like content about how to buy sell trade cards didn't exist and i think that's very important to me and to you know the team i have next to me that we want to provide an experience that you cannot find elsewhere that is important to us putting on a show you said a hundred days right there are people here there are vendors here and it's a lot to manage you've got a team helping you but what have you learned through this experience like were there moments throughout this build that something you were you didn't expect pop up and you that became focus like what was kind of the big learnings from you i think the biggest thing i there's a couple of things people are the most important asset that is true in both the team you have around you from the show's perspective and the people that you put out on the floor from a vendor perspective you can go really far with good vendors i think that's important and i think that's why we've seen a lot of success is you know a lot of these people as you look out here a lot of these people are at grove city kart fest a lot of these people are at shipshewana kart fest and and i think it is something that is mutually beneficial to us both that we can tell the the hobby the general public hey come to the show it's it's it's worth your time and we know we have first you know first in class dealers and they understand that we are doing it the right way and are making it you know putting as much effort into it as possible to make it worth their time money and energy to you know travel and set up at our shows i think that's super important i think the other thing i realized when i went into it is you know brad isn't a phenomenal showrunner like he's he's the best of the best and i think what i didn't estimate so early on was maybe how much i would have to be involved and i think that is i think what brad and i would probably agree on is just understanding the scope of it and how much different it was than shipshewana just you know in shipshewana it's harder to convince a major company or institution to come to a card show in the middle of nowhere a venue that has horse parking and is an hour away from any airport where you have to rent a car it's really hard to convince people to do that there's something special about shipshewana and it is a very unique show it's one of the coolest i've ever been to and i would have said that i did say that before i ever owned it or was a part of it i i think here when when you have a a show that's fifteen minutes from a an airport it's one of the fifteenth large you know fifteen largest cities in the united states it's you you can make this a destination and that attracts a whole different audience and then then it becomes okay well who are some of the major players we can get in the space that might have a little bit more trouble getting from boston massachusetts to shipshewana right like that's trickier than boston to columbus so i i think i just went into this idea that like you know brad's gonna do a lot of it and brad does ninety percent of it anyway like he is the best of the best but i think one thing i jumped in on on this that i didn't quite anticipate so early on was really some of the the people management the relationship side of the business just from being in it for so long like again you and i right like this is something that you know we we had talked about before dc sports eighty seven tory kyle and and the team there you know our friends at card vault those are just conversations we had never really entertained before grove city didn't make a ton of sense it's more of a local show in a high school gym it's great doesn't make sense for card vault to come out shipshewana a little bit challenging this provided that opportunity and i think i underestimated the you know what who we would be able to bring out to this and then how much time that would take right like for instance it's like who could you get out here one day would love to have psa ebay whatnot fanatics like you get on the list right there's there's major companies a lot of those companies know where they're going the rest of the year they they don't make decisions in a hundred days that's that's a pretty quick timeline we asked some of these people here to be here fifty days ago yet alone you know months and months in advance like some of these companies need so i think that was one of the the the bigger things i didn't really understand and grasp when we when we got into this so you i view you as like top b to c like content business personality to consumer like you've got a massive audience everyone knows who you are you've worked hard to establish that you are just getting into from our conversations this the b to b side of like i need these brands to show up i need these services to show up like what have learned in building columbus card fest on the b to b side in this v one of this show that what have i learned in the b two b side i would tell you give me a sec i wanna give you a good answer on this because this is a phenomenal question i love i love this question hey ron cut this down so when ryan addresses the question we cut out all this area i think the biggest thing i learned is that the biggest brands and businesses in the space their biggest value add is not monetary it's not a dollars and cents thing it is a brand and awareness and they are draws to the show that are are a whole another level and when those companies can show up and and can support and and be involved and active and and are are just as interested in making it a success as you are it's a it's a it's a huge value add again outside of the monetary like it's having a davin adams a a premier one of the biggest most long standing card brands in the space for them to say we're going to come out here we're gonna bring hip parade we're gonna set up we're gonna promote it we're gonna donate items to trey knight and to the vips you just can't put a price on that when you're trying to get a consumer you're trying to get a hobbyist here to say oh this show looks awesome let me check it out oh davin adams is gonna be there that draws a different level of attention and something you can't put a price on cardball by tom brady i mean you're talking about the largest retail store chain in the entire industry right like there's nobody bigger i mean they have sixteen shops now right like fifteen it's fifteen or sixteen i think kansas city was the most recent it's just hard to put a price like everybody in this building knows who card vault by tom brady is if any promotion they do we did that really cool clip with chris where we flew out there for a day the value in those companies being there you you you just cannot put a price tag on it's when you're trying to build a show this big those companies are instrumental in success again the autograph signers we got that's awesome we love the variety we got there we've got a great vip lounge by our friends at card ladder like vip bags kids packs like a lot of the things we can provide at a shipshewana but when you can bring those premier brands those staples in the industry they they are extremely important to the longevity and success of a show i think when rian johnson card collector two comes up in conversations in the hobby a lot of people immediately think like one of the biggest hobby personalities that we have through your youtube show through your social presence i know you through kind of the other side where i know you as the builder but i don't feel like the hobby and when we're talking about the hobby we're being very general but just like the masses i feel like they don't see that side of you but you're grinding like you're in the background you're not just like getting up in front of the camera and just like breaking boxes or walking a show doing deals you do that and it's fun but like that's not that's not your brand to me like that's perception though is that perception accurate do you think like how do you think about those two sides because i think a lot of people know you as the personality but maybe fewer know you as like the builder someone building something like columbus card fest yeah very fair point something i've put a lot i've i've definitely started to realize a lot more over the last you know six to twelve months you know i it's a lot easier to talk in the context of like a shop right like we have a retail store and i'll hear the comment about like ryan wasn't in the shop and i think that we talk about that internally where it's like i think the content helped us grow in a sense of building brand awareness brand awareness allows you to run cool shows and to run events and to have a retail store and a website and online selling we've done a lot of cool things under the brand but that's definitely one of the things that look as you grow the brand add way more people and at some point along the way it went from card collector to five states in five days fifty thousand dollar spending challenge videos where we're just gone grinding building content to you know i have almost forty full time people it's not like i'm just in the shop chilling pricing value box cards all day it's i'm running a show we have a podcast we have a a good sized youtube following we have a website that we have lots of things for sale on we are on multiple live selling platforms it's just it's a lot different than it was and i don't we've just been a little bit more guarded around the operational side of the business and what we share right i think it's i i definitely enjoy the content piece of it buying selling and being the inspiration for the next generation that is what i want to do i did i didn't set out to create content about how to build a a forty person good sized company like that's not what the content i set out to create was so i think that's just something that like you know we we talk about a a lot online is you know because you create content and because you put yourself out there that like you're just super extroverted and you just wanna show everything i'm a i'm a pretty introverted person at heart like i'm i'm pretty pretty guarded these days on like just i post what i like i post you know the content i enjoy that but i i definitely think that's one thing i i would agree a hundred percent on it i i enjoy posting that i don't i i've been a lot more guarded and reserved again just it's who i am at heart i i don't yeah it's just it's it's a whole different world for me and we definitely haven't opened that that you know pandora's box on what it had it i regret it a little bit right because like i look back on it and it's like you know we had six you know i bought the shop in twenty nineteen in january january of twenty twenty covid hits the us by march we were closed by the state like the state closed you down like no businesses could be open we were a day shy of of two months we had to be closed it was like curbside pickup only by the end of the year i had six employees that was the end of twenty twenty you know today six years later five and a half years later we have thirty nine full time employees so i wish i would have documented a little bit more of that process i would have loved to have seen little bit more of of that journey but so much of our content and our goal was to inspire the next generation and that just we focused a lot more on the deals content at shows and not as much around what it's like to to build the company so you're someone who has been very upfront about saying when i graduated from school and i got in the work force like it wasn't for me i was listening following gary's content it was an inspiration to build a business around something you love you did that and you have you know continue to scale up and then now you're at this position right now where there are like layers within your organization like you are having to hire you're having to find people to hire like you're having to build structure like this isn't something that i think you've ever done you've ever done before like how are you how are you making these decisions like for the first time and making sure that like as you're building this business and investing in stuff like columbus card fest that you're like doing the right thing or is it always maybe not the right thing it's a learning experience like how do you how do you go about the decision making yeah mean with really good help right like i have people really close to me that i believe in and i i trust and understand that like what got you here won't keep you here mhmm so you know resting on your laurels isn't going to you know move everything forward and i think definitely leads to a lot of like sleepless nights right you know the the responsibility is a lot different when it's just you and it's just you know a couple content people and you're traveling and you're just trying to figure it out you got thirty nine people a wife and a son and you you got a lot of people counting on you that that pressure is a lot different right like pressure at twenty seven with no mortgage no son you know three four five six people that's that's a whole different world now it's you know i think the the the pressure is a motivator for sure but man i you can only go as far as the people right next to you like and i we we built something cool with a couple people we we couldn't have done ninety percent of what we've been able to accomplish and will accomplish without good people the branding the cards i bought that i got lucky on and have appreciated in time the allocation whatever you could say is man those things are cool those things are helpful those are great people is the is the best asset you could ever own you could ever have like having good people you know many of which the the the the some of my favorite people here have been here the longest right like these are people that were here at nine employees they're here at thirty nine employees like that is key to moving this thing forward it's people that have seen it at every iteration it's been at and will continue to be at as we're kind of rounding the corner conversation i'm curious this like what do you want to learn from columbus card fest what do you want to learn from this experience i know we were talking a little bit about it last night but like how are you evaluating this like are you trying to evaluate it as this is a success we're gonna do it again like what's your measuring stick that's a that's a wonderful question i don't know if i have the answer to that i don't know if i have the answer to that right now yeah i mean we take a lot of feedback to heart from this you know thankfully we have very you know i just said it earlier we have great dealers and ones who will give very honest feedback i think attendance numbers you know that's the easiest thing to check it's like hey was this a success but yeah i'm not we'll see you know i i i think i don't think i'll find out the answer to that question tomorrow mhmm i don't think it'll be sunday i i think it'll be in time the amount of time effort energy capital those things that go into a decision like this you know math is math but if we make money and nobody else does and everybody else's experience is miserable i'm very very keen on positive experience for others i'm a people like brad and i like care that other people enjoy it and and find success if we make money and everybody else is miserable and didn't like it and hated it and it was their worst show ever and wouldn't have done it that's bad running that again those people those same people aren't coming back they have a negative taste in their mouth from the first time that's not what we want right so if we hear from ninety percent or more of the dealers that it was great amazing show they would they would do it again and we learn from what we see internally that we could have improved and what we're told hey i didn't like this this needed clarifying clarifying this was too expensive right if we can if we can make those things better you know i think you i i think we have the proof from other shows on let's run it let's get a little bit better and let's build it i mean shipshewana is the greatest example there is right like i remember when brad ran that with forty tables buy one get one like i wasn't at the first one i was at the second one and i remember what that was like and then i was at the barn and then the barn got packed and then we moved to the mech and weren't sure we could fill the mech and now we have you know in and i would imagine i'm not sure it'll be in august but i would imagine in march of twenty seven we'll have the entire hundred thousand square foot building in the middle of nowhere indiana so i think we've you know we've got a really good team in place able to take feedback improve little by little and understand that like this is a long game like that is the biggest thing in this is i'm not if this show makes us super rich tomorrow we have failed right like this isn't a money play this is a longevity piece this again like you said earlier the the the branding piece this just like the big brands the car the the the the cardvaults the cardladders the dc sports the dave and adams it's not a monetary thing it's a it's an attention thing it's a brand awareness it's a it's a man card collective two wow like you said he runs big shows he's got a podcast he's got content he's got a shop right his website experience is great i want everybody's interaction in here i want it to be different in the long run right now it's it's definitely a hey i love watching his videos but in the future i hope it can be that guy puts on some of the best card shows in the midwest that is what i want and i think in time we can get there but it's not gonna happen tomorrow maybe to close this out there is so many changes in the industry and it is an industry like there's this people will say it's a hobby well it can be both like it's both like if you're working in this space infrastructure is forming like businesses are making real hiring decisions there's just a ton going on it's fascinating for me as a collector it's fascinating for me as a business person as you're seeing this industry take shape professionalize itself card collector two's brand is right there in the middle of it you're building your company like what's what's your vision like what's your vision for the next three to five years involving this show involving your brand like where where are you placing your big bets i wish i had a really great like key one word answer the the best bet i'm making right now is in people i learned that later than i should've and it is definitely something you know we we've shared a lot of conversation you know you got to talk to him yesterday and gave me great example good people can take you really far and you know i've shared with you personally we've had a lot of one off offline conversations and you know we've got to know each other a lot more over the last couple of months and we've just had some great conversations and and i've really enjoyed that and i've shared with you that like i don't i'm very open like i don't want the card vault method right i love chris and the team like you know that that's awesome i love one store and i love a podcast and i i love improving and getting better i don't want seventeen stores i don't wanna have a card show in every state in the world like one day at a time we'll get there we'll figure it out what it is tomorrow if if i can support my wife and son and be happy we'll we'll figure it out we'll we'll find out what's next i don't have a i don't sit here and tell you i've got this big five year plan on i wanna open stores in seventeen different cities in in ohio and this is the city we're going to next got some some good people we'll see what life throws at us we'll see where those people wanna take it and if we keep hiring good people and adding good talent to the team we'll see where where where we go next together but all i care about now is is is finding the right people for this team and and they'll they'll help us go there the people is the product ryan johnson the man behind columbus card fest appreciate the time man thank you for having me


i hope you enjoyed that chat with ryan i know i did it's so awesome to get some time with him and really appreciate it at the event i wanna do more of that be face to face with an operator record an episode put it in hobby jobs and hopefully add some additional value before we close out this episode we gotta speak about some hobby jobs this week the role i wanted to spotlight was southern hobbies senior manager of marketing the reason is simple this role reveals how one of the industry's core infrastructure layers is thinking about value southern hobbies parent company describes the distributor as built around a service relationship depth and expertise across the hobby but the actual job post posting pushes the this much further it says the role is responsible for how southern hobby and salesforce shows up to retailers brands in the broader industry it is about using data tools and content to create value for stores beyond just shipping product it includes sales materials event strategies website email ownership and then gets extremely specific benchmarking reports on store operations merchandising guides financing overviews white papers and business planning templates designed to help stores run better businesses that is a massive tell distributors used to be evaluated largely on access allocations and relationships and those still matter but this rule says the distributor increasingly wants to become a consultative layer for retailers this means the industry is demanding people who can synthesize data build narratives support a sales organization understand retailer pain points and create assets that help partners better operate that's not hobby fluff that's real b2b capability so if you're listening and you come from trade marketing distribution account enablement category marketing crm management merchandising life cycle marketing or retail analytics this is your sign that you may be more relevant to the industry than you think you do not need to have grown up memorizing precious metal gems for you to get a role in this hobby trust me you need to be able to solve business problems and i'll say that a million times in the newsletter and on the show because it matters then you build hobby fluency on top of that and if your skills lean more on content and community there is a parallel signal in the market too collectors says it operates across psa beckett sgc and cardladder and a much larger global infrastructure footprint and it's opened a director of social media role that shows that social in this industry is now sitting inside scaled multi brand systems rather than being treated like side content again same message the market is not just hiring hobby people it's hiring builders so my takeaway for this week is this if you're an operator already inside the hobby the work in front of you is to turn what you know into something your team can repeat without you if you are a collector trying to become a professional your next step is not just to learn more about cards it's to identify the business function where you can become undeniably useful if you are of the hobby looking to get in stop disqualifying yourself because you have not worked in cards before start asking instead what problem do i know how to solve and how fast can i develop hobby fluency around it that's the bridge and if you run a business in this space i think the challenge is even more direct you cannot say you want to scale and keep every important decision trapped inside one person's head you cannot say you want more consistency and then treat training as informal osmosis you cannot say you want better hires and then only recruit for a shared obsession instead of actual functional strength at some point every growing hobby company has to decide whether it wants to remain founder dependent or become a system capable that decision is what hobbyjobs is here to document because the business knowledge in this industry is still way too scattered too much still lives on phone calls conversations texts dms between operators and if hobbyjobs does its job well this becomes a place where knowledge gets surface organized and shared with the people trying to build the next layer of the sports card industry that was the mission when we launched this product project in march and it's still the mission now so if this episode hit for you do two things first always subscribe to hobby job link is in the show notes it's free i will be providing operator stories real world breakdown and a clear view of how the industry is professionalizing that is where i'm building it second send me what the market is doing if you're a company hiring if you see a role that operators should know about if you're building something interested if you are seeing a shift in how shops breakers distributors marketplaces or brands are working send it to me the whole point is to make the business side of the hobby more legible for the people trying to build in it and i'll leave you with this because i think it's worth repeating and i've said this product knowledge can help you start systems help you scale the next wave of winners in the sports car industry need both always get at me if you're a business looking for more insight if you want to collaborate participate partner in on hobby jobs you can find me stacking slabs across all socials or me email me at stacking slabs gmail dot com really appreciate all of the interest insight and passion i'm getting from hobbyjobs happy building talk to you soon