1555 - Father/Sons: Ben Bush and sons Ryan and Sterling

Foreign. Doctor James Beckett Sports Card Insights. Another Father's Day episode, this time with the Bushes from Waco. They've been dealers on the local circuit here, and I've seen them at the National. I've seen them in action. Interesting story of how they do it as a family. Ben is the dad, and Ryan and Sterling are the sons. But thanks. Sponsors Topps Panini, Upper Deck Heritage Auctions, Hugs and Scott Auctions. Mike Stadium Sports Car, Burbank SportsCards, COMC.com and Beckett Media. Beckett Grading. Beckett Authentication broken into two parts. First part is getting to know them a little bit, and then the second part goes a little deeper. It's the essence of who they are, and I wanted to let them say that in their own words. So thanks, Ben, Ryan and Sterling and the rest of the family that contributes as well. So here it is. You guys have an interesting family dynamic that is worth sharing with hobby. So, Ben, is this your total family on the screen? My wife and I, we have seven children all together, five boys and two girls. I know you've met Sterling and Ryan, but as far as the family being involved in the business with cars, technically, there's five of us. Ryan and Sterling handle our shows on whatnot. I'm there as the moderator. Then their sister helps us with the shipping, and my wife helps with administrative tasks. Keeps all the records straight. You got a lot of moving parts there, Ben. Are you the boss? My wife and I, we have seven children. I grew up doing concrete work, and we're married. We started having children, and I had to fall back on the concrete that I knew how to do. So all of my boys have grown up doing concrete work. And along the way, the cards aspect got added onto what we were doing. When the COVID shutdown happened in 2020, okay, we were involved in construction. We became so busy, we had to basically just let everything that we were doing online with ebay, the cards and collectibles, we just had to let it go for two years. Two years later, we happened to stop by the card shop here in Waco just to see what was going on. Things were slowing down a bit with us in construction. So we stopped by and talked to the guy that runs the card shop there. We'd done business with him for years. And we found out in the meantime, while we'd been working, the card industry went right through the roof. So we decided to jump back into cards as a business. And the irony is, at that time, we had never even been to a card show before. We knew absolutely nothing. We knew Cards a little bit. So our first foray into card shows was September 2022 in Dallas. As a vendor, it was all new, and me and the boys, we went. We did this together, and that was the beginning. At the time, whatnot was growing, it was popular, and they checked it out, and Ryan ended up, don't worry, daddy. We're never doing whatnot here. Later, they started doing whatnot, and they did it a little over a year, and the growth was very slow. And they made a couple of changes to their show, and they did that. Their show took off within three months. We're doing that full time. We've been full time for over a year and a half now. Our major income comes straight from whatnot. Ryan's channel is Aikman fan forever. Everything comes through him. But yes, it is a business, and technically, I'm in charge. But Ryan and Sterling are the biggest reason for the success of what we do with card. They know a lot more than I do. And from the very beginning, that's what I told them. You guys have to be making money. Are you reinvesting it back in the business of buying more stuff? Because you're selling fast. You must be buying to keep up. But there's profits. Is it go back into the family or is there payroll? It is a legitimate business still. Just is there a payroll, or y' all just splitting the profits? Because there's family and there's business. And it's part of the interest I have with hearing your story is that I think you guys have a strong family, but I think you've got a burgeoning strong business, too. And I don't know that you have a model that's replicable for a family that doesn't have a bunch of kids and everybody's on board. So what's the secret sauce there? People basically ask us, how can we run our whatnot show? Like, you guys. And I have to be careful giving advice sometimes because for a lot of people on whatnot, it's just them and maybe one other person. We've got my brother right next to me during the live streaming helping feed me cards while requests come in. So we can run cards that people want. Not everybody has that, and not everybody has two other people in the background handling shipping. Like we said, we have our mother doing administrative stuff. So my advice can be a little bit different because it is unique for us in that we've learned to work hard doing concrete work over the years. You work outside in the Texas heat during the summer. That's for real, guys, there's nothing like the Texas summer sun to make you grow up fast. Yeah. There is a payroll. Everybody gets paid. Plenty of the money does get reinvested. And we do go quick because every weekend we go through so many cards on whatnot during the week. Almost every weekend during the year. I would say 40 weekends during a year we're at a card show buying more cards. The constant quake turnaround. It's just a lot of work. People on the show ask, how do you get cards up so fast? It's his. Sterling's next to me feeding me cards. And that's different than a lot of shows on whatnot. It's a unique position. We're all blessed in that regard because we operate a lot on the low end. We're able to win a lot of cards really fast because more than one person doing it. People always want to know what the secret ingredient is so they can do the one thing, but it's truly the way you put the whole thing together. Yeah, a lot of little things. After working with you guys for some different shows now, I can see that when I go through your dollar box, it's anything in there is not gradable and it's not what notable. But other than that, it's a pretty good card. And so there's still some stuff for me and for rich to go through there. But at the end of the show, that dollar box is gone. Yeah, you need to replenish. Whenever I'm there at your table, your dad's there and you guys are out on the prowl for buying. Okay, so do you guys like buying better than selling? Because I hated selling. I loved buying. And the selling is probably pretty exciting with whatnot because some stuff goes low, but some stuff goes high. Buying is fun. I don't know. I agree. Sterling, you buyer or seller? Seller. It's fun when you get a whatnot show where everything's going high and every auction's going good for hours on end and you can't put up the wrong parts. If you try, that's after you guys paid your dues for a year. And Ben, what did you say you're doing? Are you moderating? Yes. Yeah, He's a moderator. I'm the digital bouncer. That man can cause trouble. I get to take care of him. Did you always have this in mind, Ben, that this was going to happen, that it was going to keep growing? Because my brother in law was in concrete and that's a steady business in Southern California. There's a plot of action there. It was a tough business, but a good business. Part of the reason my sons have been successful in what they're doing. They did learn how to work, doing manual labor, physical labor, because there are times, especially in this Texas heat during the summer, it's mind over matter. You have to keep going. Even though your body is saying quit, your mind is telling you to quit. You can't quit until the job's done. There was a lot they learned when they were younger that's been transferable over into this business. Ryan and Sterling, they're both very detail oriented in how they think and how they operate. So while Ryan is doing the show, it's all laid out. Sterling's behind him. Everything he does is all laid out. Without that organization, they would not be as successful as they've been. That is a huge asset. And no, I did not have this plan. We've had discussions since we stopped doing concrete work, and we're all on the same page. We have no problem not doing concrete work right now. The funny thing is, when we actually went full time, we had made changes and our whatnot was doing better, but we didn't think our business was ready to go full time. It just happened that concrete shut down for like a month or something, and we didn't have any concrete work to do. And so we were doing cards and we started doing so well that we just never looked once later. It was like, this is what we're doing. We're not. We're not going back to a concrete work. I'm looking at three guys that are enjoying working together, and I'm just wondering, is one of you more of a risk taker than the others? Or you all, let's go get it. We can do this. What's the mindset that you have? Because a lot of times in a family, somebody's more aggressive, somebody's more steady. But are y' all on the same page there or is one of you guys pushing the envelope a little bit? I tend to be a little bit more of a risk taker overall when it comes to buying. But me and Sterling talk about stuff and checks and balances. I'll throw questions at him just to run by him and see what he has to say. We see things from different angles a little bit. But there's a good check and balance thing there though. So none of us gets out of hand going too much one way or the other. I think it's a good balance time. You do need to be aggressive, and there's times take it Easy for whatever reason, different situations. But if I had to pick one, I'd say I'm more aggressive. As the show has grown, the risks have increased a little bit more. But also the body of work that we do down the lower end has also gotten bigger. So the business has grown as a whole and allowed us to do little bit more here and there. When I was building my business, other people thought I was doing risky things, but to me, it didn't seem risky at all. It seemed, hey, we can do this. This is going to work out. We've got reasonable profit margins and a good sales pipeline. So do you guys feel that way? It seems like I'm hearing a lot of confidence. You're not thinking about the risk, you're thinking about. We got this. One of the things I hear a lot since we got back into cards, going to card shows and talking to people, there's this idea that nobody really cares about low end trading cards, dollar cards, $5 cards, $10 cards. And what we found in reality is totally the opposite. Plenty of people care, which is on our whatnot show, we're running dollar cards, $2 cards, $3 cards all day. If people buy them, they like them for whatever reason, the player, the style of the card, it's shiny. That's the majority of what we do is low end. And there's a form of stability there because whatever income you're on, whatever financial situation you might be in, you can afford those cards. Maybe you have $10 to spend that day. Let's go buy five cards on whatnot and have fun with it. You're not out pricing everybody with the cars you're running, that allows more people to participate. And I think without the economy totally going in the tank, that will always be there. So there's a reason to have confidence when you're buying and selling. Ryan, you're killing me. You're creating competition for me. You're making it look good and I do not appreciate that. But I will say one thing. I think if the economy got bad, that lower and mid end of the market could actually go better. Yes. People may move away from the more expensive stuff and have just as much fun doing $10 cards. Maybe not just as much fun, but you'd recalibrate and say, I'm gonna go to the show or on whatnot. I'm gonna set some new limits that allow me to enjoy the hobby without going after big whales. But what do you guys do when you have huge cards? Because sometimes you gotta be buying collections and having some bigger cards in there. Sometimes we run them on auction, on whatnot. We'll just start them at a dollar, let them rip whatever they go for, and other times we put them in our whatnot store or ebay store for a set price. We try to diversify a little bit and always have something bigger somewhere, whether at auction or in the shop. Just so you try to attract everybody. If you're looking for a bigger card, go to the shop, check it out, you got something cool there. But we try not to get carried away in that end. One piece of advice I got early on was when you're do when you're buying a bulk and moving as many cards as we don't get into the mindset of trying to make money on every single card because on whatnot it's not going to happen. I don't care what kind of cards you're running, it's not going to happen on every card. If you do that, the customers won't come back. They're coming back because there's some occasional really good deals there. So don't engineer all the chaos out of there because that's part of the dynamic appeal of what Sterling, when you and your brother are out there buying, you're a huge Dallas Cowboy fan, do you collect or pull aside some great Cowboys or is that a separate thing for you? It's not weird. I don't tend to collect that much every now and then. I'll keep one, not many, but when we buy. I'm a big Cowboys fan but I don't get emotionally carried away. I have to have this Cowboys card and I have to run it because I love the Cowboys. I tend to cut the emotional aspect into being a fan, out of the business mostly. And just what would I get for it on whatnot? Now the fun part is the Cowboys are so popular that we can buy a lot of Cowboys cards that we couldn't buy for other teams and we can make good money off it because so many people like cowboys. That is one fun aspect. We probably sell more cowboys than any other team because they're so popular. One thing about whatnot we learned quickly after joining was there's been a negative reaction toward whatnot from certain people that jump on there. And the thing that irritates them is that some of these hosts and they're not a big percentage, but there's some out there that yell a lot. Okay. And not only do they yell, they talk down at their audience a little bit. And I thought looking back, it's very interesting because for us, one of the things we did in construction over time was we started doing remodeling interior of houses and we're going into multi million dollar homes. We're dealing with homeowners taking care of their property while we're destroying part of their property too. But dealing with people trying to take care of their interests. So we're learning to deal with people. And then we put it into a trading card context. The very first time I ever went to a card shop was in 1998, right after Christmas. We had gotten a box of 98 Tops football, which I thought it's awesome. I love 98 Tops. But we go to the card shop and I'm a big Troy Aikman fan. So I go into the shop, Bankston's in Waco, Texas. I love that shop. And I talked to Brent, they're the owner and I'm asking simple kid like questions. I liked traded rookie better than the score and I couldn't understand why the score was valued more. So he's trying to explain all that to me. But Brian treated me with respect, sometimes explain things and teach me. He treated me like a person, how you wanted to be treated. And I think all those experiences have translated to us on whatnot because I try to make the audience feel welcome. Okay. I don't yell at all. I don't get upset if a card goes lower than I thought it's going to happen. They're part of the family whether they're bidding or not. You can just hang out in a chat and crack jokes. Some people in my chat, they write poetry, believe it or not, crack me up. But I think inadvertently our approach was contrary to some of the negative things I've heard about whatnot. You know what the golden rule is? Yes. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Yeah. The rule in the hobby and for many car shop owners, their golden rule is do unto others as they have done to you. And so a lot of them have been treated crummy on the other side of the counter by kids asking questions and being persistent. So the real golden rule really works. You need to treat people the way you would like to be treated, not the way you have been treated. And you sound like a nice family where you've got good values but not everybody has that is doing all of that.