Hobby Jobs: Ryan Johnson on Building a Sports Card Company That Lasts

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 Hobby Jobs is for you. This episode is built off of the core idea from the 16th edition of the Hobby Jobs 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 2. I was at Columbus Card Fest last weekend doing some interviews. Over the next few weeks you'll hear those interviews on Hobby Jobs. Really fun chat with Ryan For a long time a lot of hobby businesses were basically extensions of one person. One person's eye, one person's instincts, one person's relationships, one person's tastes, 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 seat 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 threads, if customer experience depends on who having 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 2026 show will be the largest show ever with more than 600 dealers spread across 500,000 square feet. Fanatics Fest says its 2025 event drew more than 125,000 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 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 systems, 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 10 years memorizing checklists and parallels. LinkedIn's 2025 skills based hiring research found that when companies hire for skills instead of matching only on prior job titles, the eligible talent pool expands by a median of 6.1 times globally and 15.9 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 12% of employees strongly agree their organization does a great job of onboarding new hires. Only 29% of new hires say they feel fully prepared and supported after onboarding, and employees are 3.4 times more likely to feel onboarding was successful when managers are actively involved. Gallup also says new hires often take around 12 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 going to 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 system 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 2026, Tombstone launched Toomba 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 their 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 yourself 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 2, 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 2 started as an Instagram page in 2013. He left his job to pursue cards full time and then he bought a sports card shop that he had known for years, remodeled it and reopened it. And over time the original identity grew into a larger business spanning into a physical store, e commerce, buying, selling, breaking and live events. And I can just look at my conversation I had with passion to profession with Ryan in April of 2026 when he was telling his story. He said he did not just set out to build a 35 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 and 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 were 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. All right. I am 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, I don't have to run them. But yeah, like, definitely, definitely worn out 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 Shipshew and we've. I've shared that with you before and like what goes into that. But a show like this, just being in the convention center 15 minutes from an airport, like some of the luxuries we have here, we don't have in Shipshew on a. 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 100%. We are perfectionists. Uh, and 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 weekend. And uh, 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. Then you get within seven days and then three days and 24 hours and it's just like, wish we had more time. So following your content, like you document everything. Right. Uh, I can remember watching your content early and you like hyping shipshew on a, like being like, this show's great. It's in the middle of nowhere. Yeah. And you provided great exposure to that show. Then you started getting involved with Bret ad and then so the Card Collector 2 brand attached itself to the show scene. Yep. Now we're here in, you know, one of the biggest, top 15 biggest cities in the country at the convention center. You're running your own standalone show with the help of Brad and team your team. But I don't why shows. Like, why did you decide to invest this much time, energy and resources into the show scene? Yeah, I think in, 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 and. Right. As someone who has built a community online for the past 13 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 provide that here in a city that is where I grew up and where my card show, you know, my, my car 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 635 plus tables at the convention center didn't exist. Just like content about how to buy, sell and 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, uh, 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. There's a couple things. People are the most important asset. That is true in both the team you have around you from the show 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 Card Fest. A lot of these people are at Shipshew on a card fest. And I think it is something that is mutually beneficial to us both that we can tell the hobby, the general public, hey, come to the show. It's worth your time. And we know we have first class, 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 to 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. Like 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 think here, when you have a show that's 15 minutes from an airport is one of the 15th large, you know, 15 largest cities in the United States. It's. 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 going to do a lot of it And Brad does 90% of it anyways. Like, he is the best of the best. But I think one thing I jumped in 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 87, Tori, 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 Cardbol to come out. Shipshawana, a little bit challenging. This provided that opportunity. And I think I underestimated the, 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? I 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 that they don't make decisions in 100 days. That's a pretty quick timeline. We asked some of these people here to be here 50 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 I view you as like top B to C, 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 B2B side of like, I need these brands to show up, I need these services to show up. Like, what have you learned in building Columbus Card fest on the B2B side in this V1 of this show? 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 nother level. And when those companies can show up and can support and be involved and active and, and are just as interested in making it a success as you are, it's, it's a, it's a huge value add. Again, outside of the monetary, like, you know, it's having a David Adams, 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 going to bring Hit Parade, we're going to set up, we're going to promote it, we're going to donate items to Trade night 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, David Adams is going to be there. That draws a different level of attention and something you can't put a price on cardboard 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 16 shops now, right? Like 15. It's 15 or 16. I think Kansas City was the most recent. It's just hard to put a price. Like everybody in this building knows who cardboard by Tom Brady is. If any promotion they do. We did that, that really cool clip with Chris where we flew out there for a day. The value in those companies being there, 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, like the autograph signers we got like that's, that's awesome. Like 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 ship Shawana. But when you can bring those Premier brands, those staples in the industry, they, they are extremely important to the, to the longevity and success of a show. I think when Ryan Johnson, Card Collector 2 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, I, 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, that's perception though, like. Yep. 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, 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 12 months. It's a lot easier to talk in the context of like a shop. Right? Like we have a retail store and I, I'll hear the, you know, the, 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, of building brand awareness. Brand awareness allows you to run cool shows and to run events and to have a retail store in a website and you know, online selling. We've done a lot of cool things under the brand, but that's definitely one of the things that like as you grow the brand, you, you add way more people. And at some point along the way it went from card collector to five states in five days, $50,000 spending challenge videos where we're just gone grinding, building content to. I have almost 40 full time people. It's not like I'm just in the shop chilling price and 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. I'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, I didn't set out to create content about how to build a, a 40 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 talk about 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 want to show everything. I'm a pretty introverted person at heart. Like 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 definitely think that's one thing. I would agree 100% on it. I, I enjoy posting that. I don't. I've been a lot more guarded and reserved. Again, just, it's who I am at heart. I don't. Yeah, it's just, it's a whole different world for me and we definitely haven't opened that, that, you know, Pandora's box on what 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 2019. In January of 2020, 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 2020. You know, today, six years later, five and a half years later, we have 39 full time employees. So I wish I would have documented a little bit more of that process. I would have loved to have seen a little bit more 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 and the content at shows and not as much around what it's like 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 workforce, 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, I mean, it was 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. 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 39 people, a wife and a son, and you got a lot of people counting on you. That, that pressure is a lot different, right? Like, pressure at 27 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 pressure is a motivator for sure. But, man, I. You can only go as far as. As the people right next to you. We built something cool with a couple people. We couldn't have done 90% 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 39 employees. Like, that is key to moving this thing forward is 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 on this 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 going to 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. 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 is like, hey, was this a success? 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. 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 was 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 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, the 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 90% 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 in what we're told, hey, I didn't like this. This needed clarifying. This was too expensive, Right? If we can, if we can make those things better. You know, I think you, 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, Shawan is the greatest example there is, Right? Like, I remember when Brad ran that with 40 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 Mac and weren't sure we could fill the Mac and now we have, you know, in, in I would imagine, I'm not sure it'll be in August, but I would imagine in March of 27 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 branding piece. This just like the big brands, the car, the, the, the, the card vaults, the card ladders, 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 collector too. 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, 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 going to happen tomorrow, maybe to close this out. There is so many changes in the industry and it is an industry. Like there this, 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 2'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 have. And it is definitely Something, you know, we've shared a lot of conversation. You know, you got to talk to him yesterday. And Gaby, 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 17 stores. I don't want to 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 I can support my wife and son and be happy, we'll figure it out, 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 want to open stores in 17 different cities 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 want to take it and if we keep hiring good people and adding good talent to the team, we'll see where, where we go next together. But all I care about now is, is, is finding the right people for this team 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 want to 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 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 Hobby's parent company describes the distributor as built around a service relationship, depth and expertise across the hobby. But the actual job posting pushes this much further. It says the role is responsible for how Southern Hobby and Sales first 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. Collector says it operates across psa, Beckett, SGC and card ladder 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 outside of the hobby looking to get in, stop disqualifying yourself because you 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 system capable. That decision is what Hobby Jobs is here to document. Because the business knowledge in this industry is still way too scattered. Too much still lives on phone calls, conversations, text, DMs between operators. And if Hobbyjobs does its job well, this becomes a place where knowledge gets surfaced, 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 HobbyJob 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 card 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 to you want can find me stacking slabs across all socials. Email me at stacking slabs gmail.com really appreciate all of the interest, insight and passion I'm getting from Hobby Jobs. Happy building. Talk to you soon.