Passion to Profession: What Outside Operators See in the Sports Card Hobby with Gavin Hoover of Tombstone Collectibles

Foreign. Welcome back to another episode of Passion to Profession, brought to you by my good friends at ebay here on the Stacking Slabs network. It is that time of the week where we dive into the entrepreneurial and operational journey of people building cool businesses in the sports card industry. Today I'm joined by Gavin Hoover, who's the Chief of Stuff at Tombstone Collectibles. This conversation is about someone from an outside industry coming into sports cards and taking what they've learned from the outside to build and scale a business in the hobby. There is so many lessons, so many nuggets, so much awesome insight from Gavin in this conversation. I'm really excited for you to listen. If you want to show your support for Stacking slabs, hit the follow button. Tell a damn friend, run over to the Patreon Group. But for now, it's Gavin Hoover, Tombstone Collectibles Passionate profession, coming at you. All right, welcome back to another episode of Passion to Profession, brought to you by my good friends at ebay. This conversation was one that really started behind the scenes. I have been talking with today's guest about his intro to building a business in the hobby, what he's saying, what he's thinking, and the team he's building. And I thought it would be really fun to bring to you all. So today I am joined by Gavin Hoover at Tombstone Collectibles, and we're going to be talking about what outside operators see when they build real businesses in this hobby. So there's the setup, but without further ado. Gavin, welcome. How are you? I'm great. Thanks for having me. This is a fun talk. Yeah, there's a. I think there's a lot of meat on this bone, and I think we hear a lot about just outside investors coming in and investing in the hobby. And there's a lot of questions like, who are these people? What are they doing? Why are they doing it? And when I was thinking about that, I was like, well, I've been having conversations with you. I think there's probably a lot of insight that you can share based on your experience with the audience. But maybe we start with kind of that, your. Your experience before you jumped into sports cards and kind of where you have been working, what you have been doing. Yeah, I mean, I. Me personally, I've done. I've done kind of a lot. The. If you. If you know my Instagram handle, it's the chief of stuff. And it's. It's not an accident. I didn't give myself that name. Other. Other people did, but. So I've Done a lot in, in my time, none of it was cards. So I, I started in the wireless space working with Verizon and prior to that Air Touch, if anyone remembers that, and then working through Verizon and then exiting Verizon and I spent some time at BlackBerry working for Canadian friends in Waterloo and then left there. I went to a company called Go Wireless and Go Wireless is a, call it an operator for Verizon. I think at the peak we at go Wireless at 800 retail stores in 33 states, you know, very obviously very retail focused. And then, you know, at about 2021 the company was sold and most of the employees went to the new company was a, a full purchase and then I and a handful of others stayed behind to kind of think what we wanted to do next. So in that time, things I've done, I've, I've been the head of training or you know, the manager of training for the better part of California. You know, I was the, for Verizon, that is for the west half of the country. I was the, I think it was the, what do they call, master trainer. So I did a lot of training in employee development at that time. I went over to sales. I did business sales for a long time and managed the Los Angeles market on the sales side. You know, Beverly Hills, downtown la, the skyline, when you think the skyline, that was my territory there. Then, you know, moved over to BlackBerry and handled the T mobile account for the bottom half of California and you know, eventually came over to Go Wireless as a contractor. I had my own training and development business and I got introduced to our owner here, Kevin, who's one of the biggest private collectors in cards in the country. When I started doing training and training evolved into the head of HR here and then the head of HR evolved into this chief of staff, which I think was this kind of placeholder name for you're kind of a smart guy. We'll give it to him and he can do it. So it's, it's like this catch all name for give a guy some stuff because we don't know who else to give it to. But that's kind of been my career path. People ask me, hey, how'd you get here? That's. There's no way to replicate this, Beth. It's not easy. So, so Kevin, kind of leader of business, has a passion for sports cards. As a collector, when did this idea to maybe take some of the experience previously that he has had in building, scaling businesses, investing in business. When, when did you get involved in this idea to invest in a business and create a business like tombstone collectibles. Yeah, you know, it was a very distinct and memorable moment. It was, you know, post pandemic for him. He had the ideas like, like everyone, right? It's the same story during pandemic is when it kind of came up. So he was a collector, he sold cards when he was younger. You know, he would go to card shows, he would do his card sales and that sort of thing. He played college sports and he, you know, he got himself by. Because you weren't allowed to have jobs then. He played, he played, I think the O line for Long Beach State. I think he played on Terrell Owens team before that. That program got. Got blown up. So he knew cards for a long time. But then there was the pandemic. And then post pandemic. I remember sitting at his house and his kids, and my kids are the same age and they're best friends, so they hang out all the time. So I'm sitting there, we're just watching the kids, and he says, hey, I got to go do something. Watch my phone for me. If anyone calls my name, just reply great or awesome or whatever. And I didn't know what I was looking at. And it was, it was a break, right? I hadn't heard of a break. I didn't know what it was. And I'm trying to follow along and with no information, I'm trying to like, what am I seeing here? What, what is going on here? And you know, he tells me, if it's the Giants, the Rangers, the Mariners or the Astros, it's mine. And I'm okay, I gotta remember that, keep track of what I got. And you know, for that little 10 minute moment, I got thrown into the fire there. That was my introduction to it. And it wasn't short. It was shortly after that where he came back and he said, there's something to this. We know business really well. We can do business. We know how to run businesses. I mean, I think at our peak, revenues for Go wireless were like 1.2 billion. So we know how to, we know how to do things right on the business side. And he says, let's just go in. And it wasn't maybe six months later. He pitched it a few times to some other folks and said it was a good idea. And then it was, hey, I want to do this card thing. What do you think about running it for me? And my typical interest, you understand, my last experience with cards was 1989. Ken Griffey Jr. My last experience with cards. You're a smart guy, you'll figure it out. Which is very chief of stuffy kind of response. But, yeah, we just went all in. And there's a little bit of a playbook to starting a business. There's all the regular things you know how to do. Once you've done it, once you can replicate it. I've set up a lot of businesses. I've owned personal businesses. And it's very scary the first time because you don't know all the weird things. How do you set up your corporation or your llc and what does your insurance need to look like? And are you using QuickBooks and how are your taxes set up and all of this stuff that eventually once you do it, once you, you kind of figure out the basic basics, but as it grows, you need more help. You need lawyers and people to help. Okay, that's not a good idea. You need a controller or a CFO to help you with things. But at its basic level, you know how to set up a business. We just, we started going, and my philosophy is, you've heard somebody say this before, I'm sure, but, you know, perfect is the enemy of good. So let's just be good right now. Let's get this going. Let's be good and, you know, let's work toward perfect, but let's not hold on. Let's not just, you know, sit on our hands until we have this entire thing figured out and then start it. You know, we're going to be months behind. So we just, we just did it. We reached out to. We didn't reach out, actually, I think you reached out to us. But we're ahead of breaking here. He. He and I basically started the whole thing. I handled the business side of things. Kevin handled primarily the inventory side of things and the procurement side. And then Ethan Prior, who handles braking operations for us, just, you know, how brakes work. What does shipping look like? You know, how do you. What do you need for sorting packaging, security cameras? I mean, all of the little logistical things that I was wrapping my head around, you know, it's been an evolution ever since. It's an interesting thing. And I remember sitting here with just me and Ethan still, like, kicking around what the logo should look like and what our color scheme looked like and that sort of thing. And then, you know, we just had an all hands meeting and we don't fit in the room anymore, you know, and now there's actual employee handbooks now, like there's rules and it's, it's it hasn't even been two years yet. We're still two months shy of two years for our first dream. I think the business license was signed this month. Two years ago, 2024 was created, but we didn't. We didn't actually start streaming until July or August 15, 2024. So we were actually at the, the national, working with gts or I love gts. All the guys at GTS and their president, you know, trying to convince them that, you know, we're worthy of an allocation. And he took flyer on us and he said, yeah, you know what, I like you guys. I like what you guys, what you're saying here. Like, where you come from, this is the kind of business that needs to be in the business. And yeah, we're in. And we started getting allocation from GTS initially and that's where it's been going since. I think so many of us think about streaming and breaking and just look back a couple years and we just envision one or two people teams in their basement ripping boxes. And the way you just painted the picture of Tombstone collectibles is like in two years, like, you have grown and you're a pretty sophisticated business with a team of 50, employee handbook, infrastructure, security, cameras. And I think like, that just illustrates, like, where we've been as an industry and where we're going. And I'm curious, just based on the, the wireless days and just that experience, like, are you taking anything from your previous experience and just building and scaling business there and applying it to what you're doing at Tombstone, or is it completely different? It's shockingly similar, and I wouldn't have known it until I got here and saw just how similar it is, which kind of tells me that the future trends are going to fall in line with what the wireless industry did. And this has been the same for in the cell phone world. So there's the cell phone sales world and there's a cell phone handset world, like BlackBerry, Apple, like, you know, you know, and you saw trends there, right? And you saw the cell phone trends. Follow the train to the trends of the video game consoles, right? We had a bunch of video game consoles and, you know, eventually you ended up with two, you know, PlayStation, Xbox, right. And everything else kind of fell off into their own IPs. The wireless world kind of had the same kind of thing. It had a lot, a lot of different carriers and they kind of consolidate down. And then the wireless space you had very much like what you described, which is in the basement, husband, wife, you know, Just me, maybe a green screen, you know, maybe this is my garage, right. And, and that's it. The other side of this table is inventory. Or for a lot of breakers, as much as I would advise them not to do with their inventory, is right there behind them in cardboard boxes, which is not great, look, but you know, teach their own. So in the wireless space there was this consolidation of smaller players because for the carriers, Verizon and T Mobile and so it's a lot harder to wrangle the smaller players into brand representation and following these rules because they're all over the place and you just don't have enough account managers to make sure everyone's doing things as they want to want them done. And then you've got to be sensitive to how your brand is represented. If I'm giving you authority to sell a Verizon and you've got a big check mark on the side of your building, or you know, if you're selling donuts and cell phones or, you know, you know, remember those days where you can go anywhere and get a cell phone, right? All these like mixed stores, they started consolidating into bigger players. So we were what was part of what was called the big six for Verizon. There were six major agents that took up the majority of retail space. We were one of them. I kind of see that happening here where you see this ebb and flow of consolidation for breakers and retail shops and also you see the more stringent rules on brand representation. Topps has their Hobby Shop 2.0 initiative, which is a fantastic initiative. It's, you know, making sure that you've got a data driven point of sale system. You've got a look and feel that's modern, that's easy to get around. It doesn't look like a flea market, that sort of thing. Verizon, it's the same things, right? You were going to kind of come up and there's capital involved. If you're going to look like they want you to look, you might have to remodel your store. You might need a new spot, right? And it kind of squeezes some players out of the game. And you saw that with the breakers, you saw, at least on the fanatics platform, you saw a decline and you saw some people maybe not get re upped for their allocation contracts, but that's, that's the same thing. It happened exactly the same way at Verizon. And if I'm, I don't even need a crystal ball. I can just look at the playbook at what happened there and to see what might happen here. And you kind of see it. You see the, these, these consolidation points. The question is, where are they consolidating to? Right? And with Verizon, it is a very simple thing, consolidating to more contracts sold. The. The revenue, driving up revenue per account for them. Know, if I've got five phones in the account, I want to drive that revenue up per line and per account. That's easy. And then reduce, churn, right? You don't want people leaving. That's it. It's pretty simple. They don't sell. I mean, they don't make phones. So that's just the vehicle to what they need here. It's the. You know, I'm still crystal balling a little bit where I think they're pointing and where directionally I think these decisions are going. I think from what I can tell, what it looks like is they're, you know, the whole industry is pointing more on higher production quality, more recognizable faces that they don't need to spend as much energy trying to promote. Like me, for instance. Nobody knows who I am. It's a lot. It's a faster vehicle to have Tom Brady come in and drive some traffic than it is to get, you know, 250 of me and, you know, see what sticks. And you'll find some. I mean, there's some really, really great breakers out there that have great presence. Stephanie over at Marvel Brakes, I think is fantastic. You know, I think Mojo does a really great job. There's a lot of folks that have them, but that's. That's a lot of spaghetti at the wall for fanatics and for others. So I think they may be deviating off of that a little bit and going with what the more expensive but sure thing is with that type of representation. But I think that's part of it. I think they're pushing to get more of a broader audience with more media. I just saw the financial Collect podcasts launching. Those are awesome. I think it's a great idea. So in our own way, we're still so new that we don't have the history to really drive that kind of traffic yet. We have great traffic. I mean, we're among the top. It depends on where you look. Maybe the top 10, several measures or metrics. There's not one consolidated market metric. You've got to look at each of the platforms to see what that looks like. But I would say top 10 or top 15 by everything I've seen so far. And there might be some Big graduations to the upper four. So I think that's where we sit. I think that's where I think the industry is kind of going. And then just obviously selling more carts, right? Selling more cards is. Is it? They've got a different situation in the wireless space. I mean, cell phones is in unlimited commodity. You can produce as many as you can produce. Right. Many as people can afford. This is different. This is, this is more market driven. This is more stock driven. There's exclusivity involved here. The, you know, the one of ones are important and you know, you can't just keep producing one of ones. some point people are going to say, well, how many one of ones are there? You know, I look at F1 Dynasty that way. I'm like, well, how many one of one Lewis Hamiltons did I see this week? It kind of loses a little bit of its value when there's a lot of it. But I get the game. I know what it is. You need to produce more but maintain its luster at the same time. That's going to be interesting to see where that all goes. To grow their revenues without expanding the price of the product beyond accessibility. I think we're all in the wait and see mode. And I love the look in your crystal ball. You mentioned that, you know, you've only been at it for two years, but you're, you know, maybe not big four, but a. A top player. And I think that anybody out there who's been in the card business and would admire or would love to be in the shoes of a business that is able to jump on the scene as quickly and as effectively as Tombstone has? I guess I'm curious, like, do you think you have been able to earn your position as a new business as quickly as you have based on kind of the team that you have and the experience that you have in other industries. Do you think that has been kind of a secret weapon for you to be able to maybe jump levels as opposed to some of the other individuals that are kind of stuck where they're at and that's kind of where they'll always be? Yeah, I think so. And it's not something you would see on kind of the front end. It's not something that you would, you would see, you know, on a stream or on Instagram. It's something you couldn't tell that. I mean, the, the place where the business experience and the application of business expertise to a business really accelerates you and jumps you is when you're making the directors your Account managers, all the people that support you, making their life easy. Right. Because their job. And I've had that job. You've probably had a job like that where you're tracking down people and you're hurting a swarm of bees trying to get something done. But when Tombstone is the one that just has it done, like, we do never have to worry about them. The report is in, the file is in, the requests are in. Everything is done. That's a function. That's a byproduct of having structure. Right. And enough overhead to support all the needs of the business. So, yeah, I would say that it's definitely helped us because it's helping your support, it's helping your partners do their jobs the right way. They answer the phone when you call because you're not a problem. You know, like I said, there's certain reports that need to get done. They don't chase us down to have them done. They're already done, you know. And why do we have it done? Because I have an analytics team. The analytics team knows how to produce the report, and I'm not sitting there scrambling or faking the data because I have to get it done today, that sort of thing. So, yeah, I mean that. All that stuff comes with expertise, you know. So, yeah, I think that absolutely has. And earning our spot in that. That top or that upper echelon. Yeah, I think that's a big part of it. The other part is, obviously, it's capital. You have to have enough money to. To buy the product, and then you have to have enough resource to have a platform or the use of platforms where you can actually move the stuff. Right. So if. If TOPS wants to, you know, see us increase, you know, we have to get. Take a flyer on us and provide us more inventory, which means we have to pay for it, which we can. And then once we pay for it, we gotta move it. Right? Because then I've. I've gotta pay for the next. The next shipment. Right. And I think that was another thing. And proving that that's. That's a company we are, and that's where we can. We have the capability to do that sort of thing. And we still have a lot of Runway on that to go. Obviously, I think I understand the why behind the existence of Tombstone and the start of having a leader of the business who's super passionate about cards, who's super passionate about scaling and building businesses, but at the end of the day, like, you have to do this evaluation, right? There's a lot of money involved and you have to, like, say, do I want to take a chance on this industry? What are we seeing? What are the signals? And maybe I'm curious, like, what made the sports card hobby worth taking seriously as an investment category in the portfolio of businesses that kind of. You're working with, you know, so we came in, at the time, we came in, like, August of 2024, and let's just say we started planning February 24th, right. And, you know, roll back time to, you know, what was going on then. I think this. This massive, you know, peak in the hobby is. I. I still think we're peaking. I don't know if we hit it yet. So you were kind of on the, I don't know, three quarters up on where we are now, and it just seemed like the right way to go. And at the time, there was still a lot of, you know, the comparators where there's a lot of people in basements, a lot of people in garages at that time, a lot more than today. I mean, I think that's trimmed down quite a bit. A lot of platforms. Some platforms still lean in heavy on that volume, which is great. It gives people a chance to monetize their lives and make an easy, you know, easier income and work for themselves. But when we're comparing, it just is okay, we can do better. Like, let's look at our competition here. So that was one. Like, these folks are actually making money. We can see that they're making money. We know how to do this. We can improve upon what's happening here. That's the first one. Second is, you know, when. When Kevin sold the business, I think one of the things that went through his mind. He'd been doing wireless for 30 years at the time. Right. He loves it. Kevin just loves working, solving problems, figuring things out. So this turned into less. Less, I think less of a money play and more of a passion. You know, this is. This is fun. Let's do something that we can really put our name on and have some fun on this. And then, you know, it took a little bit of explaining to the other folks that sit in that boardroom of what this means, because they didn't know anything about it. They were like, I was months before that, or they're trying to say, what, now it's baseball cards. Does this make sense? And, you know, the answer is, yes, it makes a lot of sense and grateful that everyone is on board and moving forward with it. But I think we saw the value on the investment. I think we saw the, you know, that people were turning a profit with fewer resources than what we have access to and we can improve upon it. The thing is, we didn't. We. We knew that there was, you know, some big players out there that had really high ceilings in terms of revenue. And, you know, we had some indications, word of mouth on where that could be. So we knew where the top end was or what we were told the top end was. So that was another indicator like, okay, that that's out there. And then, you know, we didn't know initially where, where we would be. I mean, obviously we're still growing and probably, probably turning thinner margins right now than what we, we would be if we had decided this is our, this is our top end. We're not going to invest anymore. We're going to sell right in here and this is going to be it. We're going to thicken out our margins from here. But we're still in the investing phase, we're still in the growth phase. We're still growing what we're doing. So that involves more spend, more growth. We started with two rooms. I think right now I have 11 rooms, 11 studios running now every day. So I think on every single platform that sells cards, except for probably Facebook Live or if any, anything that has its own point of sale built in, we're probably on that. If I need to path them out to, you know, Venmo or something, I'm not doing that. But everything else is, is on and so far so good. And I tell people with the cement is not even close to dry on this foundation yet. We are still, we are still waiting for the foundation to get dry, probably pouring concrete still. This industry has grown up quite a bit and like you mentioned earlier, it is becoming more and more reliant on individuals that are recommending are the faces. You know, you mentioned Tom Brady. It's a lot easier to sell Topps, Chrome, Football when Tom Brady's, you know, going on live streams telling everyone, oh, you know, if you pull up one of my autos, you know, I'll get on a FaceTime with you. I mean, that's just not. We didn't see that, you know, three, four years ago. But I think about like the business that you're running and, you know, 1112 rooms, right? That, that there takes individuals and talent to be the face of the business and the face of tombstone collectibles. Like how, how challenging has it been as a business that's been in place for two years that scaling that, you know, you're finding a lot of different opportunities. How, how challenging has it been to get the right people in those seats to be front facing to build and develop the brand, which then obviously means acquire customers and keep those customers coming back like that, that like on air talent, personality, role. Like talk a little bit about that. Yeah, that would initially that that's one of the biggest challenges. And you can put anyone in these seats and you know, have them talk to the, the folks. But there's so many tools that go into this job. I mean baseball talks about the five tool player, right? This is probably a six tool job. I mean you've got to have this natural charisma on camera, which is not something I can teach you. Right. So for me, that's job one. Right. It's got to be. You have to have a charismatic person. That's either genetics or your parents taught it to you. I can't fix either of those issues at this point when I meet you. So that, that's my first thing. Second is there's gotta be a sales drive. You've got to be interested in moving the needle on what you're selling. So you've got to have some sales chops there. Then you've got the, you know, the understanding of sports, whatever sport you're selling or could be tcg, but you have to understand what the sport is. And then you've got to understand the product which is different than the sport. That's a different thing entirely. And then you pivot over these other screens which you can't see here, but you have to understand and have a technical acumen where you need to understand obs, you've got to understand and how to manage the platform for wherever you are, how to post a break, how to change pricing, how to list your products. And then you've got all of the calculations. You have to have a math acumen to say, am I solvent? Am I getting cooked on this break if I'm in whatnot? For instance, what are my auction bids need to be for me to actually not lose money today? So there's this math thing that happens and there's probably a few more things I'm forgetting about. But all of that has to be happening at the same time for these folks, for me. And unless you're hiring someone from another braking company, which I'm not a big fan of, doing them, not because I don't want them, but I like to play nice with folks around. We've had people reach out to us, but you know, I don't knock on doors for folks. Then you're really looking at someone who's got the skill sets or the intangibles that I can't teach. And I'm starting there because if I have someone with a bad camera presence, bad chemistry, bad work ethic, you know, any of the things that mom taught you, it doesn't matter in what you know about the product or cards, anything. You're a bad person to have in my office, since I just can't have that. But if I can find someone who's got those intangibles and the capacity to learn the others, right? I mean, if you're just not very bright, you know, I just don't think you can absorb this. I mean, no fault to you. It's, you know, everyone's got their own levels of genetics and their brain power is what it is. But if you've got the capacity to learn, the willingness to learn, and these other, other, you know, intangibles, it's probably a good hire. So that's kind of where we leaned in a lot. And we have two seats here, right? We've got a seat one and a seat two. This is your primary breaker. This is kind of the, the host of the show. And then you've got seat two, which for a long time function is you kind of your training seat. It's. Some people will call them a sleever, right? But they handle all the computer stuff and. But it's a good training spot. So some of those folks with those intangibles would sit in this seat to learn this job. And then you've got to swap them around to other rooms because the breaker, you know, I might be a really robust, loud, jovial kind of guy. That's not their thing. So they're going to try to say, good, that's. I don't feel right doing that. It's not me. But I might need to have them spend time with someone who's a little more folksy, a little more down to earth, building rapport, that sort of thing, they feel more comfortable there, okay, that's more your style, right? So you have to have a good training program there. Initially, all this was very hard. It was very hard to get people in the door to train. Most of our breakers probably came from sorting jobs and just being in the office, getting more comfortable seeing like, oh, they've got a personality. And then you put on my camera and you've seen this before doing a podcast, like someone you know outside of camera and to someone, you know on camera. Maybe two totally different people, right? They Freeze up. They can't, they can't perform on camera. But if all that works, you know, you put them on and they, they go. Lately that's changed though. So it's turned, it's took a dramatic turn in the last four months. I think it coincides with presence and, and maybe word of mouth. But I've always had the philosophy everywhere I've worked in a leadership role is to create a job too good to lose, right? And then after that introduce risk of losing that job, right? Which means there's standards, right? So, and that's what I've tried to do here. Just creating an environment and a job that I, I don't want to quit, I don't, I want to lose this job. I love this job. I love what I do. I get paid fair. It's fantastic working here and then. But there are standards, right? I mean you've got to perform, you got to do the job you were hired for. So I think that word of mouth has kind of brought people in the valley here that, in the Vegas Valley. And. But lately I've forgotten 2, 3, 4, 5, the last six breakers I have that came on we didn't get from posts, job posts. We got really high quality. I have two people that came on as referrals, word of mouth from someone unrelated that are television personalities. In fact, both of them are nominated for Emmys this month and they have to go and see whether or not they won their Emmys. Two of them are radio DJs that leave their morning time, drive time, radio DJ jobs and they leave that job to come here to do it here. So we have Gooch, which is a great radio name, who's on the morning here in town. We've got Carlota here in town who does a morning radio show. I mean, and she's. They're both great. All of them are great because they're helping me actually show what on camera and on microphone needs to look like from a professional's perspective. I've never done it before. I can tell you what I like and I don't like. But now I've got a group of people who say, hey, when you were interviewing so and so because you had a visit, let me give you some advice. I mean, Carlota's interview, Ozzy Osbourne, Metallica, you name it. Gucci is a stand up comic and he's done a lot of that too. So it's been different recently where I'm getting just people with real chops approaching us saying, hey, this is a thing I want to be a part of, you know, how do, how do I get in? And I don't want to say they're seeing now, but I'm like, you were already in. You don't just tell me anymore. But you know, well, let's just see. Right, but of course. And they're, they're, they're professionals. And what needs to be where we end up with all of this, which is. I've heard this said before, but I've adopted this. You know, I've told my production team that our competition for production value and for on camera presence is, is not the best breaker. Like, they'll find me the best breaker and go after that. My competition is Netflix. That's your bar, right? Because consumers don't give you a pass because, oh well, they're as good as the best breaker, though they don't to a consumer's eyes, they're comparing you to what they see on screen and the best is the best and anything less than that is not the best. Right. So they don't give you a pass because you're just public access or you're just, you know, local. You've got to be the best if you want to be the best. So I set my eyes on Netflix, on network television as production value. What needs to be. And we're very early in that revamp here and rebuilding each of these studios to fit that studio in terms, you know, also in the retraining of the training and scaling up of the people we already have on camera. I'm sure your team has probably heard you repeat the Netflix phase or phrase a lot and you know, that's a very dream big mantra. But this hobby is moving quickly and there are so many options and opportunities, I guess, like to have those massive aspirations to be competitive with a Netflix and then also to think outside the box and bring in radio personalities that your city knows well or Emmy award winning talent on. Like, that's not conventional. Like, what's conventional is, I'm gonna go take this breaker from this other company because I hop on their streams and they do really well and I can see them constantly selling. Like, do you think that just mindset and mentality that you have and organizing around the business, whether it's talent and production, do you, do you find that to be a differentiator for you and Tombstone as opposed to kind of what else you're seeing across the industry? I think so. I think so. And I have to say I think so because I've not spent a ton of time with other leaders in this business talking about those types of ideas. So I don't know if they think they're. Or if they're hindered by capital or funding or other things. So I don't know why they're not doing things like that. Or maybe they are, and maybe they're hitting certain roadblocks that I'm not hitting. But for me personally, I think it's a differentiator. And for Kevin, it's a differentiator as well. I mean, I used to. I remember I did training for a long time. So, you know, teaching problem solving in business. One of the things I used to teach was, you know, when you're approaching a problem, right. We tend to approach the problem from the place that is our perspective, right. We're. We're approaching it from this angle because I'm a breaker and I approach this problem from a breaker side. Right? But. But how would. How would a plumber approach this problem? And people would ask me, like, what do you mean a plumber? What does that have to do with anything? It's exactly the point, right? So you have to think outside the box. And one way to do that in activity is just to pick any unrelated industry and ask them how they would approach this problem. I heard a story recently where there was a hospital that was doing heart transplant work, and they were having a mortality rate that was higher than should be. And one of the doctors or a couple of the doctors had this idea to bring in an F1 pit crew to watch what they were doing. And they did. And people thought they were crazy, but they brought an F1 pit crew in and they operationalized and fixed all the inefficiencies, and it changed. But there was such. And I learned that after I had my thing. So I said, that's the perfect illustration of how to rotate a problem and look at it from someone else's perspective. That's kind of where I approach these things. You're limited only by the two. One of two choices where you're choosing to stand in relationship to the problem or your willingness to rotate the problem and look at it from another side. And you start to see how things really just open up when you do that. I've always had that. The challenge with that is if you're in my position, you don't always have permission from your leaders to do that. Right. Not everyone thinks that way, but leaders sometimes like, no, that's too unconventional. We're going to stick to this way. So I remember years ago when I came on to Go wireless. And I was ahead of training, and I was trying to get in 33 states, I don't know, 5,000 employees, whatever it was all trained, new hire training, Right. Well, I don't have that many trainers, so I have to bring them into certain clusters to bring them in for a week, which means hotel costs, and I have to have some sort of a conference space to train them. And, you know, and the costs start piling up and trying to solve it. And this is where I learned I had permission to think this way is when Kevin dropped this on me. Why don't we just buy a hotel? Why would I have thought that? Right? And it was just this for me, it was so refreshing. I go, oh, that's the boundary. Like, that's where I'm allowed to think here. Because at other places I've worked, won't name names that you don't think that will. You think in widgets and you think in boundaries and you think of rules and you think of red tape. And that decision like that requires 12 layers to getting done. This was, well, why don't we just do that then? And it was just boom. And that's. I've taken that and I've run with that mentality ever since. That's an incredible position to be in as someone operating a business, to have that sort of Runway and to have that sort of mindset mentality. When you're, like, when you were jumping in, like, rewind the tape two years ago, and you're. You're just getting going, you're talking about logos, you're trying to just figure it out, you're assessing what's happening. Like, was there any specific thing you saw across the industry that you just deemed this is inefficient or this is something that I believe where money's being left on the table. I'm curious, just from your operator lens, and although you're used to kind of the wireless space, like, what were you seeing early, especially with that kind of financial backing, where it's like, anything is possible? Like, what are some of those things you saw early when you were getting going? Yeah. So, I mean, taking the money aside, right. Because that. That solves a lot of problems when you have money spent. Right. So just putting that aside, I saw, I think, probably two big problems. And, you know, our owner kind of taught me this when I asked him this question a long time ago. You know, what's the biggest challenge in scaling? Right. And. And his answer was very quick, immediate, almost. It was trust. Right. So to scale you, you as the leader of the business are going to be, let's be go from one operations called a store, studio, whatever it is, that's not central. It goes from 1 to 2 and 2 to 3. 3 is about the max, right, that one person can handle. And you have to have trust when you get beyond three because you have to have people that you trust to get a job done that aren't you anymore because you simply can't handle it. So scale is a big problem in this where people reach a scale cap because they're the ones, you know, kind of strain with control on what it is that they're trying to do. So they, they reach the scale cap. And the ones if, if you probably notice, if you look at the ones that have grown, they probably have, you know, the owners probably give greater latitude and have trust in layers below them, probably not the red tape layers of a corporate entity. But they've got a small team that they trust to grow. So I think the ones who don't grow, I think probably try to maintain control and don't invest in that level of scale and skill set and then they end up trying to do everything and that's not really possible. The other thing where I see a big gap is just in terms of data numbers, right? I mean you kind of are reliant on the numbers that you're getting from the carriers or maybe from your Shopify or Square account, which is very, very limited. Right. I mean they're easy to use programs, but they're, you know, we went another way because I needed more robust data to come out of a point of sale system which we use point of sale systems concurrent to the platforms. The platforms are where customers transact. That's not where I transact. I, I use it all from my inventory systems, I use other systems and we use business intelligence. We drop it all in there and you know, with data tells a story, right. And, but you need enough of it over enough time with consistency to help tell a story. So we're telling useful stories now. The, the consolidation of licenses has changed how that story is written, I guess because seasonality is out the window. Right. So you know, if I'm looking at January to January, well that's not the same look anymore. It's kind of like if Apple bought Samsung and their release dates are now not what we knew for 12 years. I don't know what that looks like now. So I got to wait a whole nother year to see what seasonality kind of looks like. So the data is still up in the air. But we have the data. We have, I mean, tons and tons and tons of data. And you know, using AI is extremely helpful. People should be using that more often because although we have a team offshore to help me with data analysis, we have people here to do that. AI is a super useful tool to just throw in a spreadsheet and say, hey, tell me a story. I mean it'll, it'll kick it out. And it's not just, it's not enough to just have the data because, you know, you stare at a spreadsheet. And I used to talk to my salespeople when they were trying to find their, like the customer they're supposed to call and I'd sneak up behind them, they're looking at a spreadsheet. Well, what you doing? Like how. I'm just looking at the, I'm looking at my customer base. We're trying to find out which one it is. It's not a magic spreadsheet. The customer, he's not going to come out of there. Right. You got to call them all. That's how this works. You gotta, you gotta do it all. So it's really helpful to have these resources. And to me, there's no shame in using it. A lot of people poo poo it. It's almost the John Henry versus, you know, man versus machine kind of mentality where there's a little bit of shame in doing that. I'm like, well, I'm going to be the shamed guy all the way to the finish line. That's, it's just take advantage of the resources you have. Yeah, I think just specialization of time is really important, especially when you're scaling. And if there is a tool that can help you be more efficient, I'm always going to jump and use that and see how it can help me. I want to make sure, I want to. I think like this is such a fascinating way to think about like a business like yours. And just that example of like having a salesperson looking at a spreadsheet and you're recommending, well, you just gotta call them all. It's like, I'm not sure too many people think about a business like Tombstone and think about professional salespeople that are trying to get the word out about the events that you're running and the products that you're going to have. And that was like the first thing that stood out when we first started chatting. It's just like this kind of outside sales mentality that you have layered into what you're doing. So I. I'd love for you to maybe share some perspective on just like that and just anything you want to share on Tombstone's business model that you can share? Like, what do you think about how are you looking to achieve profitability, those sorts of things? Yeah, I mean, it's. I was a bit surprised about it. So I've run. I've run retail and worked in retail, and I've run and worked in business sales. I mean, large business sales. I mean, some of my clients in the past were Epson, you know, Applebee's. Big, big names, right? Big companies on the business sales side, a lot of bigger than that. Names that nobody would know because they're law firms and so on. But. And then I've worked retail, right. You know, for big, big retailers and the retail space. When I teach retail people, and then when all retail people that are good at sales, they say, well, I want to go to business sales now. Right? And I said, well, you know, why. Why do you think that's a good idea? Because I can sell. Like, okay, what do you think selling is? Right? And they have this misconception is selling is presenting and doing most of the sales stuff that we could think think of as sales, you know, persuading someone to buy a thing because it's useful to them, right? But the trick between retail and business sales, and I always tell them this is say, well, where are you going to find those people? And that's where they go. Oh. Because that's the big difference is that if B2B people, business salespeople, had a place where customers just came to, and all you had to do is just walk in and talk to them. Well, that's called retail, right? I mean, it's the marketing team's job to bring people in there. Your job is just close it, right? B2B people have a different job entirely. Most of the job is finding someone to talk to. That's the majority of the job. That's most of your day, right? That's that spreadsheet that's not going to solve itself. That's calling everyone in your salesforce, right? And then, you know, they would come back. Oh, I. I call. Hey, what are you doing? Did you call your customers, call your clients or your. Your prospects? I called them all yesterday. You done? Now you call them again. But I already called them yesterday. I understand. You have to. McCann, you got to keep doing it, right? You got to keep going. Oh, so, you know, I say that to say this is very similar. So I Came into this on the breaking side thinking that this is going to be much closer to the retail environment, right? Or you walk into this virtual retail room. People come into the retail room, they see what you have to sell. It's kind of like retail slash entertainment QVC style thing, right? And I quickly learned that the most skilled salespeople that I have are the ones that build relationships and are really helpful to people on their, on their personal side, you know, offline through DMs and things like that, and reaching out and letting them know and building these really, really strong personal connections. And I think some of our, some of the best friends of our breakers ended up being their clients. And that's, that's another thing I lean in on. I want to find, I want people who can do that and are genuine about it. You know, this isn't just for me, you know, I'm not just calling you when I need you, you know, to buy something from me. I'm calling you when I'm gonna see how your kid's surgery went. Because you have a real connection there. That's the difference between a business person and a retail person. You kind of need both in this space here. Some of the platform, not all the platforms are the same, right? Some platforms are very, very transient, right? You'll have some platforms where it's just in and out. You're not gonna see the same person a lot. So you have to have that almost carnival barker, kind of know, steak knife seller kind of mentality at the, the swap meet kind of thing. It's fast, it's going. You got to be entertained, got to keep people on, keep their eyes on you. And that's great. There's a need for that because that, there's a certain customer base that that's what they're looking for. I don't want a friend. I'm not looking for this. I'm just looking to get my thing. I'm looking to have fun. I'm looking to beat an auction and that's it. And then you've got the other side, which is, I'm going to be in here probably every night of the week and I want to find someone I'm comfortable with, to talk with, to chat with, to make fun of, to yell at when I'm pissed. So you really need both, both of them. But for my big learning, my big aha was that, oh, there's a heavy, heavy business sales acumen for top, top sellers in the space. So, yeah, I think that's, that was my aha that's kind of where I landed after it all. You know, that was my misconception early and was thinking it was just, it's going to be like retail. I think it's interesting to hear you talk about the different segments especially within one organization and how and skill sets that it takes to attract certain groups of people buying into breaks. I think a lot of people just think about breaks as a very singular thing. But it's. And I, I honestly like I didn't really understand the full complexity until we first started having conversations. Do you maybe on the high end side and maybe the more enterprise sales rep, if we can call enterprise sales reps, like what are the, what are the touch points? Like I know you mentioned like relationship building, being there outside of just selling but like what does that look like in motion? Like what are the types of things are you seeing through your best salespeople and the activities and what they're doing to maintain the relationship with the biggest spenders in the space? Yeah, I think above all, I mean the first thing that it, it always comes back to and this is usually the answer most people don't want to hear because it's not an operational answer. It's. It's that people want to find someone that they connect with that's first. And you'll have big spenders and big buyers that I just don't connect with you them to us that is right. They don't feel that link, that bond. Just not my kind of guy. So I think that's first and that's probably the biggest hurdle is finding people that he's got my sense of humor. He clowns with me. And that's kind of the first biggest hurdle. After that it's really understanding the products that they like, products that they're interested in. They're finding their tolerance for trying new products that I think you might like. Maybe you're not a football guy, but why don't you try this football product. I know you're not a football guy, but this is a really cool one and it kind of looks like another product you really like. So you know, let's, let's give it a try. What do you think? I'm not, you know and I'm not steering you wrong. I, you know, they would say okay, I can understand it. Yeah, I'll give it a shot. So it's really understanding your client and their personal preferences and then reaching out to them regularly. Hey, we're breaking this. This is coming up. We're going to be going in on this we're about to do a buy. Are you looking for a certain number to begin with? Because we'll pad our, our, our volume on our purchasing. If you know we were going to get 50 cases, maybe we get 60 because we know someone is someone that's in for it. So that's sort of just regular touchpad and just keeping them part of the process. And then it's just the regular touch points. The other thing like the on stream stuff, it's just making a big deal about them when they come on. Right. It's not fake. Like when you watch the stream it almost like for me as a guy who was trying to protect my client base, right there's all this NDA stuff like don't share customer data, you know and like the, the, the corporate me is like why are you saying customers names on camera? That's crazy. Right? Don't do that. But you can't, not in this business. You know you have to highlight them to the point where I have. You'll start seeing them here pretty soon. But for the, the national and for Fanatics Fest, I've started printing custom cards, custom lanyards for their screen names. So when they get there, I mean you're. This is not one of them. This is a doc super factor. This is our mascot here. Similar to that but more in a garbage pail kid kind of thing just to. But those, those images actually when they come in the room, the stream deck will allow you to press the button and their card comes up on screen. So they're part of personal touch. Yes, the personal touch there. So all of that stuff matters. Yeah, I mean I'm sure there's more that they're doing on a daily basis but I think those are the big swaths. I want to maybe hit a couple more before we get out of here. But like we discovered a lot of ground and there's a lot going on at Tombstone. I think it, what my goal was is just to give listeners some insight and information on like what is really happening behind the scenes. That some of the biggest breakers in the nation. And so one of the things that I'm very curious about is with all the action, with the multiple rooms with multiple breakers with inventory in, inventory out sales, new customer acquisition, all this stuff that's happening under your roof, like what is your, what is your dashboard look like? Like what is, what are the like main metrics, the main things that you're looking for at on a regular basis that indicate like where you need to move or where you need to invest more. Like what, what do you wake up and what do you check out on your phone when you're thinking about kind of the, the business analytics and metrics? Well, right now at the place we are, you know, kind of the evolution where we're growing allocation, we're, we're moving our inventory levels. The first thing is our sell through, right? And we just spend a lot of money on, on inventory. And how fast is it moving? Is it moving fast enough so that we can meet terms and pay this all off to do the next one? So, and that's, it's kind of a byproduct of where we are right now as allocation are growing. If you're, if we had decided, like I said before, we're going to sit where we are, we're happy at this level here, we're not going to grow anymore, then I wouldn't be looking at that so much because that purchase budget is kind of set now. And now it's about growing the, the margin and putting our fingers in other pies. But as we're growing, you know, if I want to grow revenue, I have to grow up. I have to grow allocation, right. I can't grow revenue without having more to sell unless I'm raising prices. But that's not my choice, right? It's a market, right? So I don't control that so much. And you, you play in it, right? You play in that market. You don't, you don't control that market necessarily. Some days you can drive it, some days it's being driven, right. Depending on who's first with the product and who has it on day one and so on and what you can buy it for. So I think that's probably first right now is just where our sell through is and where the revenue is. Because that tells me, okay, do I need to, you know, go lower on margin on another product? Because we're, it's not moving as fast. Some products just don't move as anticipated, right. I mean there were certain products, namely product names, but we know some products came out and you know, everyone was bullish on it and it didn't move and everyone was kind of sitting with a big chunk of inventory. And you know, in my, in my business, if you're sitting on inventory and you know, I've got board members who are used to cell phones, right? And cell phones depreciate like a dollar a day, right. And they never come back up. Yeah. An iPhone 14 is never increasing in value, right. This is a different world. Right. So maybe something like Cooper Flag gets hit while our product is in transit. Well, that dropped the value of the entire bulk inventory boot bot. Right. So now you're in a situation. Okay, well, now we're underwater on this product, but not forever. This will come back. It's just the attention of the market is off of it right now because other things are coming back and then you have to wait it out. And this is where data is really important. Products like Wax status, to me, al@wax debt does an awesome job. I, I love Wax Debt because you can look at market trends and you can see where, where things were and where they're coming back. And what's the history on this product, how many months before you start to see it come back? But that's something that I have to teach my. You know, the board here is like, no, no, no. It's, it's not a commodity. It's not a bag of flour. It's. It's a, it's a market. And the values and are going to increase again. So we just have to wait it out. That doesn't do much to help you with your cash flow because now I'm sitting on inventory. I don't want to move. So I find other things to move to kind of juggle a little bit because I don't want to take a hit on margin that I could be getting later. So that's probably like first and foremost that I, that I think about is just that most of our operational things, they're great now. I mean, I think we have our hands around trust and safety and our shipping, that's all handled. Our, our inventory is, is beyond clean. I'm, I'm like shocked at how good our inventory I think we had on all of the inventory we have, which is substantial. I think we had $250 in shrink on millions of dollars in inventory. And because we look at inventory every single day and we have the tools to do it, it's easy because we get. Well, Marley, if you're watching, it's not easy. You're so there's that and then, and then the other one for me is just, what's, what's the perspective? What's the perception, I should say, of the audience on Tombstone? Are we being looked at the right way? Is the brand being managed and curated the right way? I'm very sensitive to kind of sideways posts that somebody says, hey, I'm going to go make my own AI version of our logo and put it up. Don't do that. Stick to the brand, hold the brand. And I've got people here, you know, hired to manage brand, manage production and let people know what you can and can't do with it. Because to me, brands very, very important. It's who you are. It's, you know, when you start to deviate from that, it's just. It lacks. It lacks consumer consistency. They. If you don't know who you are, they certainly don't know who you are. You're preaching to the choir. Gavin. Before I let you get out of here, I sense a few things. Number one, like, a professionalized breaking operation is happening at Tombstone right now based on experience, outside experience that you and your partners have, which I think is really exciting for anyone building or participating in this space. I think that's part of the reason I've enjoyed so many of our conversations is just understanding that that is actually happening within this space. The other thing I sense is that, you know, there's competition, but you, You're. You're. You view it almost at a way of, like, we can learn from each other. And if. If I'm doing well, you're probably doing well. And the more of us doing well probably means good things for everyone. And I'm just curious, as we close this out, like, what do you think happens if more groups or more individuals from the outside, like you all, are coming in and pouring more money into this space and building more businesses, whether it's a breaking operation, technology, platform, marketplace, whatever it is, but more outside money coming in and building and building in the space. Like, what do you think that does to an industry that's already really, really strong? Like, what's your perspective of what's possible? Yeah, I think it depends on where the money's coming from and what their passions are, you know? You know, hopefully those groups that come in maintain or lean on the passion of this. This hobby, which is, you know, and I never want that to get lost. And so one concern I would have about big money coming in is that the hobby gets lost in the whole thing and it turns into an investment platform. And this is all looked at with stock markets. And then you've got this. What will eventually happen is this bifurcation of these two things and what ends up being the investment side of this business and the hobby side of this business. And you see that a little bit today, where hobby shops still are hobby shops, some breaking platforms are still breaking, but definitely some that lean heavy on investing. And the ones who lean super far that way, they don't blend super well back over to the hobby passion. And I think the TOPS Industry conference did a really nice job of talking everyone's personal story about why I'm in this this last April. I thought it was a nice lesson. Pictures they drew of their own personal card vaults when they were the card vaults. Probably not the right term, but a vault where cars were in their house. But car vault's good too. So that's my. My concern about it is that making sure that their intentions are hobby equal. I won't say hobby first, but hobby at least hobby equal. Where they're maintaining that to bring kids in. Our new shop that we are putting. Putting up here in Las Vegas. We were just in the middle of that. You know, it's. It's intentionally very near, you know, two very heavy parent child anchors, right? Where mom can say and have a hard time saying no, hey, mom, can we go over here? Right? And I want that. I want them to go in and to sit down and just hang out and give mom a comfortable place too. That's not hovering over the kids to just let them go and hang out for an hour, talk to some, you know, other kids that I'd never met before. You know, share or play Yu Gi. Oh, pay Pokemon trade cards. You know, the panini sticker events that we've seen recently have just blown the doors off the place. I think we broke our air conditioner in there. That's really. I hope that the hobby stays the hobby because it's. It's really the core of it and I never want to see that part of it go. So that's really it. I hope that investment and bigger businesses aren't in it for just the dollar. They're in it to grow the hobby in new ways. This was Gavin Hoover, chief of stuff at Tombstone Collectibles. Gavin, really excited that we got a chance to do this and looking forward to more conversations down the road. Likewise. Thank you so much, Brett. I appreciate it. You do a great job. Love the show. Talk soon. Love that conversation. I think I could have had another hour or two hours with Gavin to really dig into the way he thinks and operates. He shared a lot in this episode. Maybe we'll do a part two at another date. I found it extremely valuable. Hopefully you did too. Shout out ebay for putting on passionate profession. Excited for more of these chats coming up. You all take care. Happy collecting, happy building. Talk to you soon.