How He Started a $750K/Year Business Selling Sports Cards
would you guys want to start your own sports cards and collectibles business and sell these things for more than two grand of pop while making more than 80 000 a month jimmy and stacey did just that and today they're going to share with you guys how you can do it also [Music] on this episode jimmy and stacy will share how the idea of providing a healthy and positive sports card environment to his collecting community has enabled him to reach a hundred thousand dollars within the first year they launched now they've so far scaled their business by taking it online and are projected to hit more than 750 000 this year you guys do you guys spend any money on advertising no we've had banger days where we've done ten thousand dollars stacy right now is live on instagram and we just kind of hang out on instagram until people are ready to to buy some stuff we have a video go viral with over 900 000 views not many people do that we'll also explore how he was able to beat the pandemic and what kind of skills and experience you guys need to successfully sell sports cards and collectibles what's the oldest card you got here jimmy oldest 1949 a shop like this could easily go for a couple mil you guys stick around because jimmy and stacey will share an incredible hack that will help you guys be super successful in this business all right without further ado you guys make sure you smash that like button subscribe to our channel we appreciate you a ton let's go talk to jimmy and stacy hello you guys i'm paul good to meet you jimmy stacy we look forward to sharing the story [Music] how did you get started and how did you get into the sports cards business um probably about seven years ago i helped run a shop here in bellingham so i got a chance to learn like the insides of running a sports card shop he was set to retire and we knew that the collecting community deserved a shop some place where we can everybody get together fellowship those kind of things it's very important for this business so that's kind of why we started it and uh what was the time what when did you start it we had our doors open october 5th of 2019. you guys we want to give you an up-close view of the entire shop what's unique about it what's special what makes it stand out from all the other competitors so let's go check it out jimmy give us a tour come on in jimmy what do we got here this is this is where everything happens yep this is why people come through the door primarily they want to see what the latest releases are so this is what drives us on instagram drives us on tick tock drives our in-store customers is everything you see here there's such a variety of product um it caters to every type of collector from kids to adults if you're a rookie fan hall of famer fan you just want the autographs you don't want all the the fluff there's product for everybody so yeah and you either do box or packages box or pack we pride ourselves on being a pack heavy shop because shops don't do that why don't they do it do i get more work more products more because you know it takes more time to sell it by the pack than by the box right but the problem is is packs are more economical right especially for the younger generation so one of the things that we decided to do is be pack heavy when we opened up the shop so can i see a couple please you've got a 60 pack here you guys right yep how many cards in here 18 cards and every pack contains one autograph card or you buy a box for 350 bucks yeah so why would i i mean what do i stand to win if i buy a box you um were holding the trevor lawrence card that came out of this product that was two thousand dollars so that's those are kind of the things that you stand to win you know the nice thing is that was one card you have another five autographs that are coming out of this on top of that one so plus all the other cards [Music] what was your initial budget what was the most expensive thing in terms of starting it out i mean can you start from home you can yeah you can do this business from home and a lot of people do for us our biggest expense was product we needed packs and boxes on the shelves for people to buy when we opened the doors we didn't have much of it and we only had about five thousand dollars in our bank account we had yet to pay any of our bills wow so it was a grind but we did it so five grand budget yeah and uh your first month expenses i mean give us a little snippet of what you spent on cards the product and so it cost us about um ten thousand dollars total to put display cases and everything in the shop yeah this location here correct okay um demoing out everything you had to pay those guys to do it because this was a postal store before um so you're looking at yeah it was 10 grand and 5 000 in our bank account that's it let's talk about how you value the memorabilia the cards and how you set a buying selling price so the industry um had a shift during the heyday of sports cards beckett was the ultimate determination of a card price or a piece of memorabilia are they like an organization or something they are they're a company that started where they would figure out what the value of the card is and they would publish their books that people could look and as a kid especially when we were kids we could get the beckett book and see oh this joe montana card is worth this okay um it's kind of shifted now to ebay is the primary really um source of what single cards are valued at there's a few websites that we use that will pull up sold listings on cards and memorabilia what would they be 130.com is what we use quite a bit for you guys um it goes directly to sold listings for ebay ebay makes it difficult to see sold listings so when you do a search it'll pull up what people are asking for not what they've sold for that seems to be a misconception in this industry you have to get to the soul to know the real value the current value right and it's on a moment by moment basis you mentioned some off camera can you mention that again in terms of how cards can vary in price one minute the next hour super crazy but you know you can watch a baseball game and use an example one i was using with you is manny machado was up to bat and if he hits a home run and you go and hey he has a super great game right the next day you'll see a lot of his cards go up and about you so you know and it's nav sucks but if he could strike out four times people are gonna dump his stuff you know it's crazy but a lot of it is on a moment-by-moment basis so [Music] how important are like real relationships in this business cause i'm seeing this threat of like community fellowship coming out it is absolutely vital integrity is everything in this business people buy from you because they trust you they trust you on the valuation when they come in i'm not going to sugarcoat it good bad i found that you know local collectors they appreciate that kind of interaction i mean they know you're making money pretty seriously absolutely i mean it's there's no secret right you know all the guys have seen the shop grow you know we've reinvested into our business and but you've got to be honest with your what i call my people okay our customers so i love it you guys stick around for the end of the video because jimmy and stacey will share an incredible hack that will help you guys be super successful in this business do you guys spend any money on advertising anywhere else no other than the aquasoc sponsorship is considered advertising money we don't spend any money on social media advertising or advertising newspapers or anything like the community yeah good for you guys it's the relationships and the culture you've created absolutely touch on culture again you look at the big box stores you mentioned walmart you know nordstrom all this seems like culture is lost in a way how important is culture within these brick and mortar stores for the sports industry i think it translates to not just sports cards and memorabilia shops but any small business people coming through the door are not numbers you know they are people and people want personal relationships you know and those things are important um i mentioned earlier know your customers names know their kids names get to know their buying habits the stuff they like what they don't like i mean if you don't do that you're doing a real disservice to the success of your business i think [Music] you guys let's talk about the seasonality of this business one's super busy once it's super slow how do you adjust and then what's a good day bad day in terms of sales i know it's a loaded question so so i think seasonal wise there isn't really if you have an online component and you get slow inside the shop okay it's very easy to get busy again when you go live on instagram or turn that phone on right exactly so our busiest times in shop are usually january and february because people get their tax returns and yeah all kinds of crazy stuff happening yeah absolutely okay the stimulus was really good stimulus did that help you guys yeah stacia what's a good day bad day in terms of sales then for you guys what would you say like oh man this this day would just be between instagram website ebay and in-store shoppers you know our kind of an average day is in that thousand to two thousand dollar range in store um it all kind of goes in the same pot between all the faucets uh if it's really slow and it's a quiet day we can turn on the instagram and make our day so a good day would be a couple grand a good day would be in that 3 000. we've had banger days where we've done 10 10 000 um that's happened a couple different times so you popped the champagne bottle going home yeah i mean you definitely are eating a steak dinner that night you know so and then when did the top ramen nights show up when the 500 day hits and and people are off doing other things on instagram and everything so yeah that does happen from time to time so but on those slow days and we can just post more cards and focus more on different aspects of the business in terms of an e-commerce platform what's been really productive uh efficient what do you love using and that's helping your business grow i think i mean we talked about instagram obviously but um our website on shopify um yeah posting our single cards it's gotten a lot of attention because it's not done very often we have over 4 000 single cards on our website i think that was not only doing business but it was an advertising mechanism people were rumor like hey they're doing single cards go take a look and we get a lot of traffic talk to us real briefly about because i'm not familiar with it at all why single card is a world changer game changer a new thing why isn't everyone else doing that because it's a lot of work you know you have to take pictures constantly you have to find the right title for cards i mean there's so many variants of cards it's like what is this opposed to this and you got to kind of know what you're doing it's very time consuming i spend most of my time here doing that but you can't be afraid of the work the grind is the meat and potatoes of this business and i love it thank you members your numbers speak for it i'm sure that's hugely to do with that right yep talk about revenue right with profit margins is that even a right question to ask for this industry because of how things vary so much if i can what is it then it's hard because it varies on a moment-by-moment basis you know so if somebody were to want you to determine what your exact profit percentage is it's almost an impossible number to figure you just look at the year-to-date basis i mean our boxes that we buy change in price from day to day even from the distributor from the distributor yeah interesting yeah so so you have to deal with the price fluctuations just like everybody correct and the customer your biggest profit margin that you earn as the initial release so if a distributor gives you 10 boxes on release day you're paying really good prices and that's your biggest profit margin once those 10 are gone and you have to reorder those then they go okay well you bought those for 100 a piece but we're now going to charge you 250 and you have to kind of battle through that that's kind of but that's the model today what an interesting industry yeah wow well show us around the shop let's maybe start with this you've got uh sure one of the most important things in a card shop is you've got to have discounted guards so over here we have cards that are range anywhere from 50 cents 25 cents up to about four dollars okay everything is separated by team you got to be fairly organized you know make it easy for customers to come into the shop to be able to sort through yeah so that's a huge this is one of the most popular areas of the shop really just because it's like the cheapest discounted stuff you can still get some pretty good stuff really good names for discounted prices yeah absolutely tell us what we see here so what's important is you want to have local sports right we're very big with seattle mariners seattle seahawks right unfortunately the seahawks are super popular and so it's hard to get refills of cards of seahawks nobody wants to give them up for a decent price but here we decide to put local sports up front everything you see is seattle based um everett aquasoc stuff seattle mariners you know prospects hall of famers current players you name it nice austin chen for instance in the case he's from bellingham he's in double a ball right now but he's from bellingham and people want to come to see his stuff [Music] jimmy walk us through exactly what you do on instagram for for your followers so on the back desk what we do is we set up camera usually it's my phone and we have a menu similar to this it is what we provide everything by the pack and by the box gosh you got the pricing on there yep when we go live most of the time they know we're going live to sell some product okay and so they'll come on and say hey i want to see what you have for football we'll send the football menu over they'll say hey i want this pack this pack this pack they send the payment via paypal or venmo okay we rip it to them on camera and then once a week we ship out everything that people rip with us what do you mean rib um opening rip okay that's a slang industry term for some means it's like wax right there's no wax we're ripping packs but it sounds a little bit more violent than it really is so um and that's what we do now one of the things that's important is we ship for free not many people do that and so they're chatting with you via instagram while you're live and say hey jimmy i need this this this and that's on the menu and then what we do is it's really cool they're wanting packs of a certain you know type of card we'll put the box with the packs in front of them one of the things that we are obsessed about is letting them pick their packs so if we have five packs in it we'll say there's one through five and they want three of them give me three numbers one through five and they'll actually get to pick their packs gotcha and we'll show you guys that with the walk around and tour of the entire shop a little bit later so stay tuned for that [Music] how important is a location for people looking to start a sports cards business you know talk to us the importance on that and why you did this versus starting out of your garage for example i started my business in sports cards online at home i did that for several years location is vital you have to be able to be close to freeways because people want convenience of getting off and getting on right you have to have decent parking the shop i ran before it was a very touristy town and so parking was difficult and so we didn't see a lot of collectors and i knew that central location and parking was vital to getting people through the door [Music] what did you do to your shop to transform the culture as compared to maybe other competitors so most of the shops that i've been in here especially here in the state of washington it wasn't designed for the collector you have to have them in mind in order to provide a good place for them the center table in the shop was vital for that no shops do that hardly around here so we knew that was going to be a focal point because it's much easier to look at this stuff in your home we built this for the local local collectors so so the idea is to come in and just really hang out here like you said fellowship and check out whatever you want to check out happens all the time sports on tv we sit around and talk about the new things and maybe rip some cards so interesting okay yeah [Music] the next case i think is important is you want to get it sport by sport this is football this is current football everything in here football everything is football right and it's current players um anywhere from recent draft picks to you know tom brady who's been in the league 99 years which we have a couple i got a brady rookie floating around in here um okay and then basketball now for unfortunately for us basketball is not a real big um item in our shop so we have to kind of divide this up so we have basketball we have star wars we have hockey in this case okay before we go on to the next case you mentioned something about your your shop that's different and stands out from others what would you highlight on that light it up the biggest people want to see what you have you know so many shops or lighting isn't very good it's very dusty dank you know it looks like a basement we i mean we're very big on lighting the cases making sure everything's clean well organized that's the biggest thing um you don't want to have a stack of stuff and not know what's in it that makes sense every card in here is sorted so nothing is just put in a box and you know throwing aside so that's where the 80 hours a day comes in it does you have to you have to put that uh you have to put that kind of work in so [Music] jimmy let's talk about your marketing strategy for the business as a whole for turf and dirt and then if there's a difference between your your website and then brick and mortar how are you marketing here versus online et cetera well it's all tied into one social media is vital um the one thing we've kind of had to learn on the fly is tick-tock has become huge right and so you have to post on social media constantly okay but you've got to be creative in what you're posting if you go on social media today and you look at card posts everybody's just posting cards you know that gets to be redundant after a while right so you got to come up with new and inventive ways for people to go oh i like how they think i like what they're doing i like their content so and don't be afraid to produce content give us an example uh on how you're using tick tock exactly what's going on there and maybe instagram you mentioned that as well so instagram for us was you know all of our pack and box sales moved to there when we were shut down and with the country shut down you know casinos everything else people are looking for entertainment they found us and we were able to provide that um tick tock you know is interesting because you don't ever know what's going to be popular what's going to go we have a video go viral with over 900 000 views and it was just unboxing memorabilia and it's really reading the trivia you know because they'll come with facts in the box and i'll turn it into a trivia contest and interesting and that catches fire so we're still learning that platform some but i think social media is just vital in in the whole program of of a shop [Music] where do you get the memorabilia that you sell and then the second part of that question you know about how much of this comes from individual sellers and then people in the same business where else do we source this stuff so there's two segments of how we get our stuff individuals will come in with single cards and want to sell them to us so a lot of our single card inventory come from that okay our packs and boxes they come from our distributors is very important when you start a sports card shop is you've got to get a distributor you've got to be able to secure product that's what brings people in they want to buy packs so majority i would say 95 of my inventory for packs and boxes come from our distributors how do you any tips tricks on that in terms of building those relationships who to go for i mean so there's anything there's nine major distributors in the country we have three different accounts with three of the distributors so you know we have three sources to piece our inventory together allocation is huge right now because there's so many so much product and so many people demanding the product that you can't get everything that you want and so you have to kind of battle through that um you could have a hundred thousand dollars to spend and your distributor that you have will say that's cute but we'll sell you a thousand dollars worth of boxes right now our allocation went up tremendously because of the coveted shutdown all the local shops quit buying but because we were moving product on instagram ours went way up and so i kind of i kind of equate it to being on the freeway all the other shops or cars stalled on the freeway and we were in the fast lane doing 90 miles an hour passing them nice and now we get quite a bit of product through our allocation this is our baseball case everything current baseball massive yeah you know it just makes sense i'm a baseball guy so this is an important one for me back here if you want to guys want to come on back we have our supply section that's important you want to carry as many different supplies for sports cards that you can one of the things that we implement here at turf and dirt is we have a supply membership now it sounds kind of strange but when people come in and they just buy supplies that kind of puts a stranglehold on supplies for your local collectors so we have a supply club that you automatically are enrolled in if you buy anything other than just supplies so if you buy a couple packs a box you'll get a membership card and if you see on all of our supplies we have two prices oh yeah yeah you show the membership card to whoever's behind the counter you'll get the cheaper price and that's saying thank you for supporting the shop so very well it's a great idea and then this is a focal point with kids yeah nba jam they're going to pay for it no it is free nice um one of the things you want to do is that the parents are into cards and the kids aren't that's true you want to occupy their time right because you want the parents to be able to look through stuff so yeah this does that what are you actually taking home reinvesting not reinvesting so i think the key with the sports card business and i've never owned a brick and mortar business in my life so i can't compare it to others but i know that the successful models to reinvest you want to grow your business as much as you can that's most important growing your business as you do that your allocation of product will go up you know there's fringe benefits to doing that a lot of people might not be interested in doing that but that's what we've chosen to do the first two years okay reinvest everything to grow it and then on our two year anniversary we determine how much are we gonna pay ourselves i think with this year we could probably take home you know a hundred thousand dollars um but that's a hard number to do because the margins are so crazy they fluctuate so much so that's a very hard question to answer but there's definitely money to take home [Music] this this is the newest addition to the shop this is the card score you talked about the card score kiosk we had a tech from texas flew out on monday to install this so basically what this does is this will scan a graded card the card that's already been graded okay if you happen to disagree with the grade what this does is it will submit the images high res so this scans in 2400 dpi right which is very detailed and the reason for that you need to be able to zoom in on the corners surface edges this goes out to over 100 different collectors and card collectors will score this rather than non-collectors who are just doing it as a job or whatnot so okay it's they're brand new we're only the fish shop in the nation to have one of these um we're the first on the west coast that's pretty cool so we're excited to to experiment with this it's the beginning yeah absolutely jimmy you have partnered with aqua socks uh how did that happen and how has that impacted your business so the everett aqua socks partnership um and if people aren't familiar they're a minor league affiliate for the seattle mariners part of it was because i love baseball and i thought it would be such a cool thing to like sell baseball cards in a baseball stadium right and i figured a minor league you know situation would be affordable for a small business and we approached the aqua socks and negotiated a deal and believe it or not we get quite a few customers that met us there in everett and come up here to frequent our shop as a result so what i hear is you weren't afraid to ask right absolutely not you just went ahead be bold i mean that's the thing and and the funny part is is the general manager when we were first negotiating he started laughing and said it never dawned on me to have people sell baseball cards in a baseball stadium right like duh so this is our vintage both football baseball you want to have definitely a vintage section because there's that segment of collectors out there wow yes what's the oldest card you got here jimmy um what do you think oldest uh 1949. i see a 1944 there oh that's done that's 1959. okay yeah so
it's you know this is important but this is probably the most the hardest cards to get really they don't come through the door very often to buy now one of the things that we saw in shops that we toured in other areas was common card section people want set fillers you know they wanna they need an obscure number 250 from top series one and you know it's a no-name player but they need it for their set well they come here and you know ten ten cards for a buck you get to rummage through all of your are they are they in there now yep oh i see okay so a lot of times they will take the box and take it to the table and sort through it what else would you say has really contributed to your success so far um what would you highlight and single out or i you know aside from the creativity because that's kind of a wide brush to paint um i think specifically we partnering up with the right people or the right companies um for example we partnered up with card score you know they're a a new startup but they're going to be revolutionary in the industry once they get going they're going to be huge and so you get a lot of business feedback business promotion through your partnerships um you know we're part we're partnered with leaf and tristar um those are manufacturers so we're able to promote our business through other companies and i think that has really gotten our name out across the us instead of just locally and this is um guessing and this is more of a personal space where you do a lot of stuff right this is where we spend most of our time it's going good this is where we have our website ebay this kind of stuff happens here okay stacy right now is live on instagram oh wow yes we're doing live she's you know people on on the live are going to ask for menus which she's going to provide she we wear gloves when we rip a lot of people want to grade their cards and every little thing that you do to touch a card affects a card like a fingerprint a piece of dust and so we make sure that we lint roll everything we wear gloves so we don't get our gooey fingers on their product yeah so what does she do now she's looking at a screen on the ipad is that people writing her yeah so they'll message and say hey you know summer small talk summer hey show me what you have in baseball or football and we just kind of hang out on instagram until people are ready to to buy some stuff how many hours a week did you work when you started and has that changed yet yeah so i was working less hours when we first started just because we had less to do we weren't quite built up but now that we are what we are and we're only a two person shop you know i'm working 80 hours a week i mean yeah i'm here a lot so every single day i don't i don't not be in the shop really yeah on sunday sunday we're open monday is our closed day but that's my day to get administrative stuff done shipping that kind of stuff so yeah um i'm here every day and it's been that way for a year and a half what if what if i just really want to still see you and come in on monday would you open the door i absolutely would i don't turn down anybody who wants to give me money so that's a true businessman right there [Music] so you mentioned creativity right limited when you're an employee managing something unlimited when you're self-employed sure give us an example of that creativity like specifics what does that look like um i think the biggest thing is you know it's when you do social media a lot of it's very cookie cutter you know a lot of social media ads or posts and things like that they all look the same okay so you really have to stop and go what do we do different here that's the biggest thing you got to be different give us a different example so one thing that we've done differently is we have done trade nights where we invite local community collectors to come into the shop open it up after hours and they just trade amongst themselves they'll trade or buy cards amongst themselves maybe they'll buy a pack or box to open but it's not about us it's not about us making money off that event it's about providing them a space to form those relationships with other collectors and it's a sight to see i mean to watch to sit back and watch them do that you guys serve drinks we do we provide food and beverage for them and um it's a lot of like when you were a kid trading your baseball cards back and forth but this time we have 40 year old men doing it amongst each other so it's kind of a neat thing you know now that i understand in this industry more i wish i would have traded baseball cards when i was 10. sure some of them and then the other event that we've done is we partnered with ultra pro during covid and we opened and did a kids break so we opened the shop up to kids to come in and teach kids about collecting cards and how to care for cards and gave them the opportunity to be able to write packs and we did that we provided them a bunch of product and everything and then we got to do that we had over 25 different kids well yeah so this is where you operate stacey earlier was showing me how she unboxed some cards here and she was putting them in this plastic is that consignment we we take other people's product and sell it for them this is kind of where we do that this is stacy's workstation um she does a lot of right now we're putting a graphic together for we're going to offer a two-day special okay of a percentage off kicking off going to nationals the national sports collectors convention in chicago so we're gonna offer 15 off everything in the shop for two days so um that's where she works primarily um we house everybody's instagram sales here so these are orders already paid for people have ripped on instagram or their website sales um we put stickies on for the names yeah you can grab those um and so jordan reached out and said i want to buy this card jordan actually reached out and said hey i want to buy some packs of this and that's what was coming out of it so you're going to get it soon jordan [Music] you mentioned something about this business in terms of the plan can you mention that on camera for our viewers i think that was really as far as in terms of building it and then well i think the the biggest um thing that card shops do is not necessarily what they see as what you take home each month i think the key is when you build it and then you decide you're going to walk away and you sell it that is where you make the most of that money um and you're talking about a shop like this could easily go for a couple mil couple mil right and when you're getting up there in age and couple mil sounds good you know you take that and go yeah [Music] any other tips that you want to share with them uh people looking to start this kind of business this kind of shop let's look at them and tell them a couple highlights couple pieces of advice um once you get going stay in your own lane don't worry about what other people are doing just do you that's the biggest thing we sometimes get too worried about if we have competitors in the area or you know competitors online we're worrying about are they doing better than us it's irrelevant you just keep doing what you're doing stay in your lane and you'll be just fine okay jimmy thank you and you guys remember i mentioned earlier in the video there's a hack tip that jimmy and stacey are going to share well here it is so jimmy give it to us what's like the most important thing so i mentioned it earlier um focus on what's in front of you not what isn't and what i mean by that is a lot of times when people open a box of cards they're expecting that one one in a million card they're waiting to see it come out of a pack and if it doesn't they're upset oh this box is garbage well you know but sitting in front of you all that product that's still money sitting on the table people kind of tend to forget that grind it out grind it out man there's still money to be made out of that so don't focus on the thing you didn't get focus on what you did get because that's what you have to deal with so so simple and that's a soup i mean that is the best advice i can give with anybody in the card industry i hope you guys enjoyed this amazing episode with jimmy and stacy here at turf and dirt small little shop in bellingham but you've got almost a million dollars in sales going through this place what an incredible interesting industry where you can make a lot of money i hope you guys enjoyed it like this video subscribe to our channel we appreciate you watching hit that bell button as well and check out other videos that we've got for you thank you so much
2021-08-04 20:21
