Hobby Jobs: Scale Without Losing the Collector

Foreign. What's going on everybody? Welcome back to Hobby Jobs. This is the show here on the Stacking Slabs network for operators, entrepreneurs and industry professionals building things here in the sports card industry. I am so fired up to be here. I love talking business. I love talking about the business side of the sports card industry and what a time it is to do that. That is what we do here on Hobby Jobs is going to be a fun episode. We don't have a conversation with an operator attached to this episode, but I'm working on something in the background and looking forward to bring bringing more of those chats here to Hobby Jobs. But that doesn't mean we stop this. No, we keep rolling. We keep rolling because there's a lot of energy, a lot of motivation, a lot of desire to continue to tell the stories of the people building this industry. I led last week's episode off by talking about the investor group Putting a Lot of Money into Card Vault by Tom Brady There are two ways to read the Card Vault by Tom Brady investor Announcement. The first is the easy way. Tom Brady, Jay Z, Aaron Judge, Connor McDavid, Dana White owners and leaders tied to the Celtics, Red Sox, Patriots, private equity, technology, media and entertainment big names are putting money into sports cards. That's a pretty good headline. It's not the part that I think matters most. The second way to read the announcement is to look at what Card Vault is trying to build, where it is placing its stores, what the new money will fund and what the people around the table can help the company reach. That story is not about a chain of card shops. It is about who will own the relationship between sports fans and collecting. And that should get the attention of every person building a business in this industry. I want to welcome you back to Hobby Jobs. This show exists for you, the builder in the sports card industry. The people, the systems, the decisions, the jobs, the constraints, the things that do not appear in a product announcement or a social post, but determine whether a business earns trust. Last week I said I wanted to spend more time on the investor group announced by Carvault by Tom Brady. Today we're going to do that. Then I want to connect that story to the latest Hobby Jobs newsletter which focused on building proof before you build the company. We will talk about what Card Vault's announcement means for operators. We will talk about about what it means for collectors. We'll go deeper on the way Stephanie Garcia built. Mama breaks one constraint at a time. Great chat with her. You can find that on Passion of profession. Shout out eBay for sponsoring that series that is on the main feed here on the Stacking Slabs network. Then we will use this week's job openings to see where hobby companies are placing their bets. Let's start with Card Vault and what they announced on August 13th, Card Vault announced its first strategic investor group. The company did not disclose the amount raised or its valuation. That matters. We should not pretend we know more than we know. What Card Vault didn't disclose was the roster and the intended use of the investment. We've gone over the group. Card Vault says the money will fund store openings, new distribution channels, hiring across core functions, technology, supply chain, operational infrastructure and the customer experience. Tom Brady bought a 50% stake in the company in February of 2025. Since then, Card Vault says it has grown from three stores to 17. You want to talk about growth? Talk about a story of scaling. There's no better example right now than Card Vault. Its stated long term target is more than 100 stores. It also plans to grow through automated retail, digital commerce, strategic partnerships and other distribution channels. Those details tell us more than the celebrity names. Card Vault is not raising money to test whether anyone wants a card shop. It's raising money to accelerate a model to that has shown enough demand to support 14 additional locations in a little more than one year. Store count does not prove profitability. It does not tell us that the payback period on each location. It does not tell us inventory turns, labor costs, rent exposure or customer retention. We need to keep that discipline. Growth is evidence. It is not the same as sound unit economics. Still, I think the sequence matters. The company opened stores. It tested markets. It developed a retail format. It built partnerships. It created a live breaking operation. It learned enough to attract a group that wants to help it move faster. That is a different from raising a pile of money around a deck and hoping demand appears later. It connects to the operator. Note we'll get into today. Capital works best when it accelerates clarity. Capital becomes dangerous when it scales confusion. We cannot judge Card Vault's economics from the outside. We can see the company has built proof before this capital raise. The next question is what kind of proof the investors believe they are buying. I see it in four parts. The first is distribution. Look at where Card Vault has been opening. There's Chicago store steps from Wrigley Field. There's St. Louis store at the entrance of Busch Stadium, Dallas location at American Airlines Center. There is a Kansas City location in the Power and Light District. There are stores across from Oracle park near MetLife Stadium, inside Mall of America and Mandalay Bay. This is not standard retail site selection. Card Vault is placing the hobby where sports fans already gather. The bet is that the next collector does not need to find the hobby first. The hobby can meet the person on the way to the game, during a trip inside an entertainment district or while the emotion of being a fan is already present. And that is what you call a distribution strategy. The investor group makes more sense through that lens. The owners, the athletes, the executives, the entertainment leaders involved have relationships across sports venues, media and fan communities. Their value is not limited to a check. Their value is access. It's access to locations, access to partnerships, access to attention and access to talent. Access to people who do not think of themselves as collectors yet. Now we should pressure test that point. A cap table full of relationships isn't distribution until the company converts those relationships into placements, partnerships and customers. Famous investors do not fix weak operations. They do not make a customer return. They do not make inventory turn. They can open doors. The business still has to perform after those doors open. The second part I think is format. Card Vault is not relying on one way to reach the customer. It has stores, it sells online. It buys, sells, trades and submits cards for grading. It has authorized relationships with psa, Beckett, sgc, cgc. It operates Card Vault, breaks through Fanatics, live ebay, live Whatnot. It's putting kiosks in airports, malls and other high traffic locations. That is useful signal for anyone running a hobby business. The customer does not experience channels the way an org chart does. The collector does not care which team inside the company owns retail, E, comm, live, commerce, grading, trade ins or customer support. The collector wants the experience to make sense. Can I find something I care about? Can I understand what I'm buying? Can I trust the item? Can I get help? Can I sell or trade what no longer fits in my collection? Can I come back without starting the relationship from zero? The company that connects those moments owns more of the collecting relationship. And the third part is talent. The release says the investment will fund hiring across core functions. Do not treat that as boilerplate. Going from seventeen to a hundred is not a real estate project. It is an operating system project. The company will need people who know how to site operations, inventory, merchandising, purchasing, training, logistics, finance, tech, customer support, partnerships, content, community. It will need leaders who can make a store feel consistent without making it feel empty of local knowledge. It will need employees who can speak to the person buying a first pack in the collector considering a five figure card. Those are different conversations. The ability to support Both isn't automatic and this is why hobby jobs exists. Industry growth does not happen because more money entered the category. It happens when people turn money into systems that help the customer. The fourth part is legitimacy. When people with this level of reach invest in a sports card retailer, it tells other capital providers, landlords, job candidates, partners and sports organizations that the category is worth taking seriously. That can create more investment across the industry. It is also helps raise the standard. Once collectors see a national retailer provide grading, access, trade ins, events, live content and a design store experience, those features start to feel less like extras. They become expectations. That is where the announcement becomes relevant to every local card shop, breaker, marketplace and service provider. You do not need to become Card Vault. Trying to copy Card Vault would be a mistake for most businesses, if not all businesses. You do not have its capital, name recognition, access to real estate or investor network. More important, your advantage can come from the parts of the market a national chain cannot serve with the same depth. You might know every serious vintage collector in your city. You might understand wrestling, soccer, racing or women's basketball better than a broad retailer ever would. You might know which kid comes in every Saturday in which set that kid is trying to finish. You might be able to source cards that never reach a large platform. You might create a trade night where people feel known that is not small compared to scale. That is form of protection from scale. The wrong response to Card Vault is to spend money making your shop look more like Card Vault. The right response is to ask what your business can know and do. For collectors, that becomes harder at 100 locations. Then you build around it. Now let's look at the collector side. There are reasons to welcome this investment. More locations can make collecting easier to enter. A fan walking out of a baseball game might see a card from the player they watch that day. A parent might have a place to ask a person how products work. A collector might be able to buy, sell, trade and submit a card for grading without using four different businesses. More competition can force every operator to improve service. It can push shops to create cleaner processes, train employees, communicate better, run better events, and provide more ways to participate. It can bring collecting closer to sports culture. Instead of requiring fans to learn the language of the hobby before they're welcome to it. Those are gains. There are also questions. Will access come with price points that make a new collector feel shut out? Will the store experience teach people how to collect or teach them how to chase the next transaction? Will buy offers and trade processes feel clear? Will employees have enough knowledge to guide someone without pushing the product the business needs to move. Will events create community or survey customer acquisition around a product release? Will the same experience that works in Vegas work in St. Louis, Kansas City, Palo Alto and Chicago? Scale does not answer those questions. Scale makes the answers matter more. This is where I want to make a point that applies beyond Card Vault Supporting the collector is not the same as making it easy to buy. A business supports the collector when it reduces uncertainty, removes friction, builds knowledge, protects agency and gives the person a reason to return even when no purchases happen that day. Think about those five jobs. Reducing uncertainty Is the card authentic? What condition is it in? How will it be priced? What fees apply? What happens after I submit it? Where's my order? What happens if something goes wrong? Removing friction Can I complete the task without learning the company's internal structure? Can I buy, sell and trade grade, return, redeem or ship without getting lost between teams? Build knowledge? Does the experience leave me more capable? Do I understand the product, the odds, the cars, the category and options better than I did before? Protect Agency Am I being helped to make a decision that fits my goals or am I being pushed towards the highest margin action for the business? Create a reason to return? Do I feel recognized? Did the company remember the issue? Is there a community, person or service that matters after the transaction ends? That is collector support. From a business perspective, it's not charity. It is how trust becomes retention, referral, supply and revenue. The industry depends on people feeling safe enough to move assets they care about through businesses they cannot control. The card can carry money, memory, identity, or perhaps all three. If the company treats support as a cost center, it will miss the business model hiding inside the relationship. The collector who trusts you might buy from you. The same collector might also sell to you, consign with you, bring friends to you, provide feedback, forgive a mistake that you handled well and remain with you. When another platform offers some type of short term incentive, that is the standard car vault will have to meet as it grows. It is also the opening for every small operator. You do not beat a national chain with a larger sign. You beat it by knowing the collector better and turning the knowledge into an experience the collector can feel. This brings us to this week's Operator Note. The newsletter was called Build Proof before you build the company. The idea came from a pattern I kept seeing people compare the first version of their business with the finished version of someone else's company. They see the marketplace with engineers, the breaker with a warehouse, the shop with several locations, the media company with sponsors or hell card vault with 17 stores in an investor list filled with names that they know. Then they look at what they have. An idea, a skill, a relationship, a problem they understand a small amount of time or money. The gap can stop them before they even start. Comparison does more than just steal joy. It can steal action. The answer is not to lower the ambition. The answer is to shorten the distance between the idea and the next piece of evidence. Steve Blank, one of the people who shaped the lean startup movement, has spent years teaching that the facts about a new business live outside the building. You start with assumptions, then you test them with customers. You listen, you revise, you discard what reality rejects. The Small Business Administration gives similar guidance. Test the idea with customers before investing heavily. Build a smaller version that solves the core problem. Watch how people respond. Sounds simple. People avoid it because a test can tell you you are wrong. A five year plan lets you stay right on paper for five years. A paying customer can prove you wrong this week. This is why evidence is so useful. It protects the business from the founder's confidence. For an operator in the industry, proof should answer a question. Will 10 people pay for this service? Will three of them come back? Can I sell one event before booking four? Can I move one case without training my audience to expect a discount? Can I promise 100 submissions without losing track of a card? Can another person run the process from my instructions? Can I publish every week for three months before hiring someone to help me create more? Those aren't small goals, they're useful goals. Each one tells you what the business needs next. If nobody buys, you don't have a staffing problem. You have a problem with the offer, the market, the price, the message or trust required to make that first sale. If people buy once and don't return, you have an experience or value problem. If people buying orders start going out late, you have a capacity problem. If the work gets done but every decision requires the founder, you have a documentation and a delegation problem. The constraint changes as the company changes. The investment should follow the constraint. This is the part that gets lost when people raise money, hire, buy inventory, or build software because those actions make the business look more established. An expense is not progress because another company has the same expense. A hire is not progress because another company has that role. Tech is not progress because a manual process feels embarrassing. Each investment should remove a constraint that evidence has made clear. Card Vault offers a useful example. At a different stage, it did not announce one store and plan for 100. The next day it built a format expanded from three to 17 after Brady joined opened in different Topps of markets, added breaks, built grading relationships and tested locations tied to sports and entertainment. Now it is bringing in money and relationships to accelerate again. We do not know the unit economics. We we should not turn the company into a case study that proves more than the public facts support. The sequence still gives builders a lesson. Proof creates options once demand is visible. Capital as a job Once the bottleneck is visible, a hire as a job Once the manual process breaks under the real volume Software as a job. Before that, those investments can create weight. Here is a short exercise for anyone listening who is building something. Name the next result you need in the next 30 to 90 days. Not grow the brand, not build awareness. Name a number 10 paying customers, three repeat consignors, one sold out event 12 newsletters without missing a week, 100 orders, no fulfillment error. Then ask what assumptions the target will test. Will it be demand, trust, price, retention, capacity, repeatability? Then you decide what you will not build until you test that evidence. No employee yet, no custom software, no long term lease, no inventory position, no paid campaign. The last decision is part of the strategy. Every dollar carries a future obligation. The point is not to avoid investment. The point is to earn a reason for it. Stephanie Garcia's story gives us a clear example of Today, mama breaks has 12 people and produces millions of dollars in revenue. That is the finished picture people see. It did not begin with a clean org chart, a warehouse plan or a large inventory purchase. It began during COVID Stephanie was teaching remotely, raising two young children and spending nights watching breaks. Her husband told her she should try breaking. She did not declare that she was building a breaking company. She created an Instagram page. Then she set a threshold. If the page reached a thousand followers, she would run her first break on Instagram Live. It reached that target within a few months. She ran the break. Then she set out the next goal. I want to pause on the 1000 Fleer target because there is a useful distinction here. Followers are not customers. A Fleer can become a vanity metric and it can give the founder the feeling of progress without proving anyone will actually pay. For Stephanie, the target worked because it had commitment attached to it. At a thousand, she had to go live and offer the product. The Fleer count was not the business proof. The first break was the next test. Would people buy? Would they stay? Would the experience give them a reason to return? That is where her background as a teacher entered the business. Stephanie had learned how to hold attention through a screen during remote teaching. She did not have the energy of a classroom she had to speak to people who are in different rooms, dealing with distractions and deciding every minute whether to remain engaged. When she watched Breaks, she noticed host sitting in silence while they waited for spots to sell. The dead time looked normal inside the format. Her experience told her it was a customer problem. The collector's time still mattered because the cards were open. She knew how to ask questions, explain what was happening, keep the room involved and make people feel included through a screen that became part of the product. Mama Breaks was not selling access to boxes alone. The business was selling a place where people wanted to spend time. That is a form of collector support. It happens before a support ticket. It says the person's attention has value even when the transaction isn't moving. It says the host has a responsibility to make the format understandable and welcoming. It gives a new person a way into the room. Stephanie also stood out as one of the few women breaking the difference earned attention. Her ability to create energy, teach and build relationships turned attention into return behavior. This matters for anyone trying to move from another career into the hobby. Your past work is not baggage you leave at the door. It might hold your advantage. A teacher can understand attention and learning. Logistics manager can see failures in sorting, shipping and inventory movement. A CS leader can see where a platform loses trust. A finance professional can see capital Tribute in inventory. Sales pro can understand the relationship behind the consignment. Software Engineer can see where manual handoffs create errors. The question is not whether your resume says sports cards. The question is whether you can translate your skills into an outcome that the collector or company can feel. Mama breaks kept growing. Then 2023 Bowman Giraffe created a new problem. Stephanie went from selling and shipping one case per day to filling four cases per day. She was able to run the brakes. She was not able to run four cases. Sort every card, package every order, ship on time, answer questions and remain the on air person. Customers came to see the work exposed the constraint. That is when the first hire made sense. Not because a multi million dollar business needs employees. There was no multi million dollar business when the decision started. The hire made sense because demand created a workload that one person could no longer handle without damaging the customer experience. The first hire protected what customers valued. This is the test I would use for any early hire. What proven demand does the person help us serve? What customer promise is at risk if we don't hire? What work will move away from the founder? What result will tell us the higher work? If those answers are unclear, the role is likely too early. Stephanie now works backward from targets. If Mama Breaks wants to reach a revenue number, how many cases does that require? How many live hours? How much sorting? Shipping? Customer questions can the support team support the volume without lowering the experience? This is where a goal becomes an operating plan. Revenue is not one number at the top of a spreadsheet. It creates units of work across an entire business. If you can't translate growth into labor, inventory, cash, time and customer impact, you don't have a growth plan. You have a wish. Stephanie also took larger product bets in categories she cared about Star wars, wwe, Marvel. She built large break formats and communities that were not receiving the same attention as core sports. Those bets were not safe because they involved inventory. They were informed. Years close to customers gave her a view of where demand existed and how those collectors wanted to participate. That is another reason to start small. Proximity creates information. When you serve the customer yourself, you hear the same questions. You notice what fills you see where the people leave. You learn more. Products require education. You find the categories where passion is stronger than available service. The danger comes when the company grows and the founder loses contact. Mama Breaks has reached that stage. Stephanie is the CEO and one of the people customers come to watch. Time spent managing the company competes with time spent creating the experience that helped build it. The next constraint isn't sorting. It is founder dependency. Can other leaders run parts of the operation? Can other breakers create energy without copying Stephanie? Can Mama Breaks teach the principles beyond its experience without turning every host into the same person? Can the company keep learning from collectors when Stephanie is not present in every conversation? This is a harder problem than the first hire. It's also the problem growth helped earn. There's a lesson here for Card Vault too. At three stores, founders can influence many details through presence. At 17, systems matter more. At a hundred, culture has to travel through hiring, training, incentives, data and management. The company cannot write collector first in a press release and assume the words will appear with each interaction. The operating system must make Collector first behavior easier for the employee. That means clear pricing, training, escalation, pass authority to solve problems, feedback loops, local knowledge measures that help reward behavior and trust, not transaction volume alone. Supporting the collector must become a process without feeling like it's just a script. That is the work. This has been a fun episode. I've really enjoyed digging into this. Make sure you're following us at stacking slabs across everywhere. If you're enjoying this, hit follow on the feed wherever you're listening and also make sure you get our newsletter Hobby Jobs it is free Link is in the show notes. We produce a new newsletter every Tuesday where we talk about these sorts of things. I want to close the main part of this episode by looking at this week's jobs. Job openings are strategy documents. They tell you what the company believes it's holding back this week. The roles point to five constraints across the industry. Trade Post is hiring a founding growth lead for the hobby. The company says it launched sealed Pokemon and sports cards in March and is doing more than 5 million per month in volume. It wants the person to bring more breakers, wholesalers, shops, dealers and consignors and into the marketplace, then help them launch markets for graded and raw cards and live trading. The base salary of this listing is 135,000 to 175,000 with revenue share and equity. That compensation tells you the company is not hiring a social media voice who knows cards, it's hiring distribution. The person needs relationships, market knowledge, sales ability and enough operating judgment to turn early wins into a repeatable playbook. If you apply, saying that you love the hobby one-of-one separate you. Bring a market map. What accounts matter first? What does each side need to trust that platform? How will you create enough buyers and sellers for a functioning market? This is how you show you understand the role. Courtyard is hiring a director of operations strategy. The role sits across finance, product and operations. It covers inventory strategy, category expansion and buying decisions and of course, risk. The constraint is capital allocation. Inventory can create the customer experience and destroy the balance sheet at the same time. For a candidate, Hobby knowledge is useful when it improves a decision. You can show how you would separate a category with attention from a category with durable demand. Show how you would size a test. Show the triggers that would increase exposure, hold it or or reduce it. Show that you understand inventory as cash with a clock attached. Goldin an ebay company is hiring an account manager. The work centers on client communication, problem resolution, coordination, satisfaction and retention around consignments. The constraint is trust across process with many handoffs. A major consignment is not one transaction, it is a chain of promises. Receipt Cataloging Photography Description Auction Timing Communications Payment Issue resolution the account manager helps the client feel that one person understands the whole relationship, even when several teams touch the work Trove is hiring a customer support lead. Trove lets collectors open packs through a digital experience. Then keep, sell, vault or redeem physical card. That model creates points of uncertainty. Did the digital pull map to the right physical card? Where is the card? What is the condition? How does the redemption work? Will it ship? The support lead is not there to Answer the same question faster for the next year, the role should turn repeated questions into product policy and process change. That is the job I want to highlight today because it sits inside the theme of the episode. Customer support is one of the places where a company learns whether its promise survived with the collector. Every support conversation contains an operating data. What confused the customer, where the handoff fail, what is missing, what policy felt unfair. The weak support team closes tickets. The strong support function reduces the reasons tickets exist while keeping the human relationship intact. If I were applying for that role, I bring a simple plan Create clear issue taxonomy, define response and escalation standards by risk. Identify the issues that put trust at risk, not only the issues that create the most volume. Build a weekly loop from support into product and operations and measure whether the problem returns. That is how support becomes part of the product. And I caught a cool job on Instagram from a good friend that I want to highlight here. Ryan Johnson, Card Collector 2 is looking for a social media and brand manager. The constraint there is founder led attention. Ryan and his team have turned the daily work of a card shop into content people follow. The next person has to increase output and consistency without sending away the voice that created the audience. That is not a posting job, it is a translation job. The candidate has to recognize stories inside buying trips, collections, trade nights, product decisions, customer moments and all the work of the team. The person also has to build a system where more stories can move through the brand without requiring Ryan to touch every step. Look across these openings growth, inventory, account management, customer support and brand. Each company is trying to own part of of the customer relationship. Trade Post wants to improve liquidity. Courtyard wants to make better inventory and category decisions. Goldin wants to protect the consigner relationship trove, wants to make digital the physical product trustworthy. Car collector too wants to scale attention without losing identity. This is what industry maturity looks like. The jobs become more specific because the problems become more specific. For anyone trying to work in the hobby, this is your opening. Do not present yourself as a collector who wants a hobby job. Present yourself as an operator who understands a collector problem and has the evidence that you can solve it. Bring the plan, bring the work sample. Bring the example from your current industry. Translate your skills into a language of the business. That is how you become useful before you receive the title. The card Vault announcement gives the industry a signal. Capital believes collecting can reach people through stores, venues, digital commerce, live content and new forms of distribution that will create jobs, it will create competition, it will create new entry points for collectors. It will also test whether businesses can scale without losing the relationship that gives the hobby value. The companies that last will not be the ones that place the word community in the most marketing. They will be the ones that turn collector support into operating decisions. They'll reduce uncertainty, remove friction. They'll teach protect trust, use feedback for the next version for an early operator, the works starts with one piece of proof. For a growing company, it starts with the constraint that the proof exposed. For a large company, it starts with systems that help employees keep the promise at scale. Different stages, same responsibility. They serve the collector well enough that the growth becomes a result of a relationship, not a replacement. If this conversation helped you think about the business side of the hobby, subscribe to the Hobby Jobs newsletter. Every week I break down the people, system roles and decisions building the sports card industry. You can find the newsletter through the link in the Show Notes. If your company is high, hiring, scaling or trying to market how you work, I'd like to hear from you. You can email me at stacking slabs gmail.com follow me across all social channels at Stacking Slabs. Happy Building. Take care. We'll talk to you soon.