Hobby Jobs: The Collector Is the Business Model

Foreign. What's going on everybody? Welcome Back to episode 18 here of Hobby Jobs here on the Stackling Slabs Network. It is the show for the entrepreneur, the operator, the individual working inside the sports card industry. Excited to be here, excited to dive into it. A lot of fun topics, a lot of things going on across the industry that I'm fired up to talk about. Before we get into this week's episode, I want to share a quick update about Hobby Jobs. I can't give you the full news today. I expect to have more to share next week. What I can tell you is is that I've been working to finalize a deal with a partner that wants to support this platform and help it grow. That matters to me far more than the business side of it because it is validation. Since I launched the Hobby jobs newsletter on March 17th of 2026, I've had a steady stream of conversations behind the scenes. Industry professionals have reached out. Executives have offered feedback. Entrepreneurs have shared the problems they are trying to solve. People who want to break into the sports card industry have told me how hard it is to understand where they exactly fit. The message has been consistent. This part of the hobby is underserved. Vastly underserved. There are people building companies, leading teams, making products, buying collections, operating marketplaces in serving collectors every day. They need a place built for them. They need access to the lessons that tend to stay inside private calls, convention Fleer conversations and late night text threads. They need to hear how operators think. They need to see the range of careers that exist in this industry. They need help connecting the skills they have built outside the hobby to the work waiting inside it. This is what what Hobby Jobs is becoming. The response since March has been a signal to keep going. It has forced me to think about why I started this in the first place. The truth is, the last thing I needed was another content stream. I already had a podcast network to run. I had newsletters to write. I had partners to support. I had a business to grow and a family to provide for. Adding more work did not make sense on paper, but this felt different. For six years I had built content for the Collector. Then two years ago we launched Passion of Profession. That happened at the same time I left my career in technology and went full time on stacking slabs. I started those interviews to learn about the people who had turned their relationship with cards into a career. I wouldn't have been able to do it without the support of ebay. I think it's really important to have these ideas, to have support and to have a purpose. And that is what I brought to the table and continue to bring to the table each week with passionate profession and hobby jobs. What I did not expect was how much those conversations would become a blueprint for me. I was hearing how owners manage cash, how leaders build teams, how how buyers developed an Yu-Gi-Oh how founders found problems were solving, how businesses earn trust from collectors. The conversations gave me a pulse on the hobby from the operator seat. They helped me build my own business and at some point I stopped seeing them. As a series of interviews I saw a body of knowledge. I knew I had more to contribute because I had spent 15 years in business to business technology. I'd worked in growth, marketing, position positioning, revenue and partnerships. I'd also knew that the hobby professional was not being served with enough depth. That was the line in the sand. Hobby jobs would not be another list of openings. It would be a research resource for the people doing the actual work. It would help an aspiring professional understand the work. It would give operators a place to share what they had learned. It would treat building in this industry as a profession. And I haven't looked back. All I've done since March 17th is think about how this platform can help more people and make room for more points of view. The update I'm excited to share next week is the next step in that direction. For now, I want to get into an idea that sits underneath this whole project. If you are building a business in the sports card industry, the collector is not one stakeholder among many. The collector. It's the business model. Every company says it supports the collector. I do not question the intent. Most people working in this industry care about the hobby. Many of them collect. They want the experience to improve. But intent is not the same thing as an operating system. A company can care about collectors and still make decisions that creates friction for them. A company can hire collectors and still reward behavior that works against the collector. A company can use collector first language and still build its product around internal needs. This is where the gap opens. PwC published research that put a number on this problem across business. 90% of executives said customers highly trusted their companies. Only 30% of consumers said that they highly trusted companies. That is a 60 point gap. Think about what that means. The people making the decisions believe the relationship is healthy. The people living with those decisions tell a different story. Hobby businesses are not immune to that gap. They might be more exposed to it. Cards are not standard consumer products. The buyer often knows the product better than the person selling it. The customer remembers release history. They know the checklist they know a bad scan. They notice missing serial numbers. They know when the description hides a flaw. They remember how a company handled a delayed shipment, a damaged card, a grading issue, or a deal that went wrong. They talk to one another. One experience does not stay between a company and one customer. It travels through group chats, shop floors, show aisles, podcasts and social feeds. That makes collector trust an operating asset. It also makes collector friction and operating liability. PwC's 2025 customer experience research found that 52% of consumers had stopped buying from a brand because of a bad experience with its products or service. 29% had stopped because of a poor online or in person customer experience. That should get the attention of every operator. In this industry we sell discretionary products and services. Nobody needs a sports card. Nobody needs to submit a card for grading this week. Nobody needs to consign with your company. Nobody needs to break with you. Visit your shop, use your data, product or list on your marketplace. The collector has another option. They can also stop spending. That means the collector experience cannot live inside one department. It cannot be assigned to the person answering emails after the decision has been made. It has to influence how the company operates before the problem reaches support. I think there are five places where a collector first operating system becomes visible first. What you choose to measure Revenue tells you what happened. It does not tell you what the customer had to tolerate before paying you. A business can hit its revenue target while trust is falling. That is the danger of reading only the scoreboard. Look at repeat behavior. Look at how many customers come back without a discount. Look at how long issues stay open. Look at repeat complaints. Look at referrals. Look at the reasons collectors leave. Then take one more step. Pay attention to the people who don't complain. Qualtrics found that consumers have become less likely to share feedback after a bad experience. Silence is not satisfaction. Sometimes silence means the collector has made a quiet decision to use someone else. 2. How you design the incentives. Your values do not control behavior when the compensation plan rewards something else. If a buyer gets rewarded only for a margin, the collector becomes an input. If a sales team gets rewarded only for volume, fit becomes secondary. If a content team gets rewarded only for reach, trust gets traded for attention. If customer service gets rewarded only for closing tickets, resolution gets replaced by speed. You have to ask what behavior the business is paying people to repeat. Then ask who carries the cost of that behavior. If the answer is the collector, the system is not collector first. Third, where you decide to remove the friction, one of the best signals of respect is giving someone time back. The ebay and PSA partnership was built around connecting, buying, grading, storing and selling. The point was not to add another hobby feature. The point was to remove steps from the collector journey. Haystack works from a related promise. The company helps hobby businesses image identify and list cards with less manual work that supports the operator. It also supports the collector when cards reach the market with better images, better data and less delay. This is an important distinction business to business. Technology in the hobby still has to serve the collector at the end of the chain. Efficiency that helps only the company is cost reduction. Efficiency that improves the collector's outcome becomes valuable. Fourth, how to handle the moment when something breaks. Every company will make mistakes. Cards get delayed. Packages get damage. Listings contain errors. Technology will fail. People will make a bad call. The collector does not expect perfection. They do expect ownership. Tell them what happened. Tell them what you know. Tell them what happens next. Give them one person who owns the outcome. Do not force the collector to restart the story each time the issue become moves to another employee. The recovery often tells the collector more about the business than the original transaction. And fifth, whether the collector knowledge has power inside the company or not. Many hobby businesses hire people because they collect. Then they fail to use what people know. Collector knowledge becomes decoration. It shows up in a bio. It does not show up in the decision and that's a waste. The employee who spends every weekend at shows can tell you why a policy will fail on the Fleer The buyer who has spent years in a category can spot a change before the data catches it. The customer service employee can tell you which issue keeps coming back. The content person can tell you where the language sounds like a company speaking at collectors instead of a person speaking with them. Give those people a path to influence the work. Collector first does not mean the collector gets everything. Everything they want. Businesses need margin teams need limits. Not every complaint is fair. Not every requested feature should get built. Supporting the collector means making the trade offs with a full view of the effect. It means explaining the decision. It means refusing to extract short term revenue in a way that damages the relationship. Here's the test I would give every hobby operator listening. Take one decision your company made in the last 30 days. Pricing change. New service promotion policy? Maybe a new hire. Walk it through four questions. What problem did this solve for the collector? What new friction does it create? Which employee heard from the collector after the launch? What change because of that feedback? If you cannot answer those questions, you do not have a collector first problem. You have a collector first claim this brings me to the conversation I had this week with Shane Walls, lead buyer at IndyCard Exchange. His story shows what collector knowledge looks like when a business gives it a job to do. Shane spent almost 16 years at GameStop. Then he took a year away from the work. He did not leave his experience behind. He brought it into the sports card industry. Today, Shane serves as the lead buyer for IndyCard Exchange, one of the most prominent hobby shops in the country. And I'm fortunate to have IndyCard exchange in my backyard. That role sounds simple until you think about what sits inside it. A buyer has to understand cards. A buyer has to understand people. They have to assess demand, condition, price, liquidity and risk. They have to make decisions with the company's capital. They have to build enough trust for someone to put a collection on the table. They have to know when the market is wrong. They also have to know when their own conviction is wrong. The headline from my conversation with Shane was his acquisition of the 2018 Select Tom Brady Black Prizm 1 of 1 He bought the card for $600. Years later he sold it for 96,000. It is easy to turn that into a story about profit. That is the least useful way to hear it. The useful question is what allowed Shane to see value before the market validated it. It was not one thing. He understood the player, the card. He understood how little the market respected that part of select at the time. He had enough conviction to act when there was no crowd confirming the decision. He also had relationships that put him closely to the opportunity. That is what professional instinct is. It is compressed experience. It is the ability to process a group of signals because you have seen related situations before. People often want to want the outcome without the reps. They hear 696,000 and start searching for the next card that can produce the same result. But that misses the point. Shane's edge was not a list of cards to buy. His edge was the work that shaped his judgment. Years in retail taught him how customers behave. Years as a collector taught him how categories form relationships, gave him context that does not appear in a sales chart. Repetition taught him the difference between conviction and impulse. Now that judgment serves any card exchange. The company is not hiring his fandom. It is hiring his ability to make decisions that matters. For anyone trying to turn hobby knowledge into a career, knowing cards is not enough. You have to convert what you know into a business outcome. Can you buy inventory at a price that protects the company and treats the seller with respect? Can you explain how why one card has demand while another card has Only attention. Can you identify what will move before cash gets Tribute Can you tell a collector no without losing the relationship? Can you document document your thinking so another employee can learn from it? Can you admit when the result tells you that your thesis was wrong? That is the move from collector to operator. Your taste becomes useful when it can support a decision. Your relationships become useful when people trust you enough to tell you the truth. Your knowledge becomes useful when it helps the business serve the next collector. There's another part on the buying role that I think deserves attention. The buyer often has more information than the person across the table. That creates responsibility. You can use the information gap to one-of-one one deal or. Or you can use your knowledge to create a relationship that produces many deals. The short term operator asks, how much margin can I get from this transaction? The long term operator asks will this person want to call me the next time they are ready to sell? It does not mean paying more than the business can afford. It means being direct about the offer. It means explaining the work and risk that sit between acquisition and resale. It means treating the seller like a person instead of a source of inventory. Shane's story gives aspiring professionals a framework for building instinct. First, choose a category and stay close to it. You cannot build pattern recognition from a distance. Second, record your decisions. Write down what you believe, why you believe it, and what would prove you wrong. Third, study outcomes without rewarding, rewriting your own history. If you're wrong, name the myths. If you're right, find the signal that mattered. Fourth, build relationships before you need a deal. Access follows trust. Fifth, learn the business around the card inventory. Turn matters. Cash flow matters. Customer fit matters. The right card at the wrong price can hurt a business. The right card for one customer is can be dead capital for another company. This is why Shane's story belongs on Hobby Jobs. It is not a story about getting lucky on a Tom Brady card. It is a story about what happens when years of collecting knowledge, retail experience, relationships and judgment meet. A role that knows how to use it. This is the opportunity in the industry. You do not have to discard the career you build outside the hobby. Bring it with you. Then prove how it helps the collector and the business. If you want a chance to dig in more to that conversation with Shane, you can check it out on the Stacking Slabs network. Passionate profession. Very, very fun conversation. I'd highly encourage you to check it out. The role I want to highlight from this week's Hobby Jobs newsletter is the senior buyer of trading cards at Target. This is a useful role to study because it shows how far a career in cards can reach. This is not a job built around owning the most cards or having the largest social following. It is a retail job at one of the biggest retailers with category responsibility. The person in the seat has to understand the customer, manage vendor relationships, make assortment decisions, watch performance and place bets on where demand is going. Collector knowledge can help, but it will not carry the role itself. The business needs someone who can turn that knowledge into planning, negotiation, forecasting and results. That is a lesson for aspiring hobby professionals. Do not describe yourself only as passionate. Translate your experience. If you work in retail, show how you can how you manage the category. If you work in finance, show how you've evaluated risk and deployed capital. If you work in operation, show how you've improved a process. If you work in technology, show how you've turned customer feedback into product decisions. If you work in marketing, show how you've earned attention and connected it to revenue. Then connect that proof to the collector. The companies hiring in this industry do not need another person who says they love sports cards. They need people who know how to work, who know the customer. They need people who can make sound decisions when the answer is not obvious. That is what shane brought from GameStop into IndyCar exchange. That is what a senior buyer has to bring to Target. That is what every aspiring hobby professional should be building right now. I want to leave you with one question. Where does the collector have power inside your business? Not where does the collector appear in your mission statement? Where does their experience change a metric, an incentive, a product decision, a policy, or a hiring choice? If you cannot point to that place, that is the work. The collector is not the last stop in the process. The collector is the reason the process exists. This is true whether you run a card shop, buy collections, build software, grade cards, operate a marketplace, create content, or manage a trading card category at a national retailer like Target. Supporting collectors is not separate from building a business. It is how the it is how you build a business that earns another transaction. It is how you build a reputation that travels. It is how you give the right people a reason to work with you. It is how this industry grows without losing the people who make it possible. If this episode helped you think about your work in a new way, make sure you subscribe to the Hobby Job newsletter. It's free link is in the show notes Tell a damn friend that you're enjoying hobby jobs that you're enjoying the insights, the stories, the perspectives here. The newsletter comes out each Tuesday with an operator note a story from someone building inside the industry and a resource that you can use for open roles. The latest edition of hobbyjobs was Turn left and bring your instincts. You can find it in the link in the show Notes. I expect to have more news about the future of this platform next week. Appreciate your support, appreciate the passion, the insights and the validation you give this platform each week through the messages, the sharing and everything in between. Until then, keep doing the work, keep listening to collectors and bring the experience you already have into the room. Excited for more hobby jobs? Happy building. I'll talk to you next week. Oh.