The Brutal Reality of Scaling a Card Business - Why We Took a Major Investment

It wasn't very long ago that Sports Card Investor was a new YouTube channel, Market Movers was a new idea and Cards HQ didn't exist. Now we've taken on major investment, combined Cards HQ and Sports Card Investor into one company, and committed ourselves to building something much larger. And that sounds exciting, and it is. But taking outside investment also means giving up part of your company, accepting more accountability and putting yourself under more pressure to perform. So why would we do it? Why now? And what does this actually mean for Cards hq, Sports Card Investor and the collectors who follow us and the hobby as a whole? And is this something that other card businesses should try to do as well? I'll tell you the real story next. The Jeff Wilson show is brought to you by Arena Club, the official home of Slab Packs. Now available every day, Slab Packs offer an exciting way to collect rated cards with confidence. Plus, every pack comes with an instant offer to buy your Slab. Don't miss out. Explore the latest Slab Packs and more by downloading the Arena Club. APPLAUSE Just search Arena Club in the App Store and use promo code SCI for 20% off your first purchase. All right, here we go from the Arena Club studio inside Cards hq. You probably heard the big news a few weeks ago, but this is my first time really talking about it. And it was something that me and my team had been working towards for many, many months, incredibly hard. And of course, the news was that Cards HQ and Sportscard Investor combined together into one company and and then brought in a big outside investment from our investment partners, Shamrock Capital and N1 Ventures. Now I'm remaining CEO of the combined business. The reason why we did this is so that we could build new Cards HQ locations across the country so that we could expand our e commerce and our live selling, expand our breaking, have a larger and broader inventory, expand our Sports card Investor content and get into TCG content, expand our data technology, market movers and all of the different data and products that we have, build bigger events and collector experiences and even get athletes more involved in what we're doing. All of that is now coming to life. And in today's show, we're going to talk not just about what's happening, but more importantly, why it happened, what it means and what you can take away from it. And to be clear, I did not sell the entire company. I'm not stepping away, I'm not reducing my role and none of that stuff. I'm still actually in majority control of the company. The investment that we brought in was a minority investment. This is in no way, an end to the journey. In fact, this decision was to make the journey much bigger. And what fascinates me about this is actually when I think about how we got here, and I honestly think this is just kind of a cool story for anybody, especially somebody out there watching who's maybe just getting something started, whether that's in the card industry or anywhere else. Because the truth is that it was less than seven years ago that I started Sports Card Investor. And by starting it, I literally mean I set up an iPad on a tripod in the basement of my house. I bought less than $100 in lighting and a mic on Amazon, and I started a YouTube show. There was no fancy production. In fact, there was no team at all. It was just me. I was doing my own editing of those episodes. It was as bootstrapped as bootstrapped could be. No investment, no team, just me in those early days. And I say this because there's a lot of people now, if you read the comments, you know, on my posts and that type of thing, there's a lot of people that say I got popular or I built this big business because I was rich, because I had a lot of money. I bought my way to the top. I paid for high quality production and I paid, you know, to. I bought my way into the space. And honestly, that's laughable. And if you go back and you watch the early videos on the Sports Card Investor channel, you will walk away understanding why that is laughable. Because those early videos, they were rough, man. I mean, literally, it was me staying up till three in the morning editing videos on imovie on my laptop. I didn't even buy professional editing software. I just used the free imovie that came on my Mac to edit the videos together. It was bootstrapped. And the first version of Market Movers, when that launched in early 2020, that was bootstrapped too. That first version of Market Movers was rough compared to what it is today. It was very, very simple. But it was the first of its kind. It was a revolutionary product. At the time, no one had ever done anything like that. And I built Market Movers. And by the way, I created the Sports Card Investor content to start because it was the content and the product that I wanted when I got back into collecting in 2018. And I just kind of got instantly obsessed with it. I wanted to consume content about cards. I wanted to understand the dollars and cents behind the card markets and what cards were, how cards were changing in value and how people were investing in cards. And there was almost no content about it. And there was no product that would help you see card charts. It didn't exist. There was no product that would look for, you know, that would show you the price that cards had sold for across multiple marketplaces. It didn't exist. So I. I started doing the sports card investor content, and I created the first version of Market Movers because those were things I wanted. I said, if. If nobody's creating the content or the product that I want as a collector, I'm gonna go out and do it myself. And I did it. But I did it in a very lean way. A very, very lean way. And this, by the way, is not to. In any way to toot my own horn or to say, like, look what I did. Like, this is just telling you the reality of how it started and why. Now, less than seven years later, I continue to remain amazed and fascinated by how far we've come, because I know how it started. I know how it started. It didn't start with a big investment. It didn't start with a big team. And when you think. When. When I think is I lived it every day. When I think about how lean it was in the early days compared to now, when we're having this conversation on this podcast about taking on this giant investment and opening up cards HQ stores across the country, like, it kind of makes me laugh. It's. It's kind of. It's fascinating. It's like, wow, that's. That's wild. But, I mean, you know, not to get too philosophical, but that's the dream of America, right? I mean, that's the dream of entrepreneurship. That's what everybody out there who's starting a business going down a path like, you're creating opportunity for yourself, and hopefully the opportunity will open more doors and lead to bigger and bigger things, and hopefully you, too, will be in a position less than seven years after starting where you look around and go, oh, my gosh, I can't believe this happened in what is a relatively short amount of time. It's a pretty cool feeling. And it's, you know, it's not the journey that every entrepreneur is going to get to go on. And trust me, this is the, I think, about the 15th business that I've started. A bunch of them were failures. And so, you know, there's plenty of entrepreneurial journeys that I've been on where things have gone the opposite direction, but that's part of it. That's part of entrepreneurship. That's part of, you know, taking the chance Taking the risk. And you just got to hope that even though you'll have some journeys that won't go the right way, hopefully you have some journeys that go the right way. And so that's, that's how things started. Right? And then Cards HQ came along. After we had, you know, after we had built success with Sports Card Investor and we had built success with Market Movers, my team and I started talking about, should we open up a card shop? And then that started to become reality in late 2022 when I met Ryan and Carter and teamed up with them. And then we opened the doors to Cards HQ in early 2024. Now, Cards HQ did require a lot more investment. Sports Card Investor and Market Movers started lean. Cards HQ did require money. It required a lot of money and I was able to provide that to Cards HQ because thankfully I had the cash flow coming in from Sports Card Investor and Market Movers and I also utilized a lot of my own savings that I had built up from other businesses. So yes, I did have an advantage of having money behind me, my own money behind me when I started Cards hq, but I was also taking a huge risk, a massive, massive risk. And by the way, Carter and Ryan put in money as well. We were all taking a massive Risk on a 14,000 square foot card shop. Are you kidding me? A 14,000 square foot card Shop. I mean, the scope of what we tried to build here, the scope of what we built here. At the time, there were a lot of people, a lot of people that said we were going to fail a lot. I just do a YouTube search, you can still find all the videos, if those people haven't deleted them yet. All the videos that they were posting back when we opened up our doors, you know, a little over two years ago about how we were going to fail. And the truth is that me and Carter and Ryan, we were not sure that in fact we were actually, I would say, pretty convinced that the retail portion of the store was not going to be enough to sustain it. We, we did not think, our business plan did not call for our retail sales to be able to sustain, to pay the rent, to pay the bills of having a 14,000 square foot card shop open. Our business plan called for us to go very heavy into live selling, breaking and E commerce. And that's how we were going to sustain the store. And the reason why we chose to do such a large shop was not as much because we wanted this huge retail experience. It was because we knew that by building a huge retail experience, it would Give us this dynamic, incredible playground to create content and to do live selling and to do breaking and to promote sales on e commerce. We were going to use this store as a studio. Now, what actually really surprised us was that the retail sales, the people coming in the door in Atlanta and buying stuff, was way stronger than we ever anticipated. Way stronger. I'm talking multiples, multiple times stronger than what we ever anticipated. And as such, we actually still have never fully realized our vision. When it came to other parts of our business plan like live selling, we had this very big vision. If you've been watching the show for a while, you heard me talk about it. When we were opening Cards hq, we. We had this vision of doing this live selling from the aisles of our store 24 7. That was the original vision. We never actually have done it to the full extent that we originally planned to do it. The reason why is because the retail sales have been way, way, way, way, way stronger than we ever thought they would be. When we first opened this store, we never thought we were going to open up more retail stores. We thought that Atlanta would be the only Cards hq, but that we were going to lean really heavily into online and content. And so we were going to bring cards HQ to the world through content and through e comm and through live selling. That was the business plan. But then things changed. Things changed because as the store went month after month after month, and as we saw the retail sales grow and grow and grow, and as we saw the power of community, of local community, that. That came around the store, the trade nights, the tops rip nights, the events that we did, the. The Saturdays in this store when this place is just absolutely packed. The kids at the breaker arena opening up packs, the. The families at the dollar bins spending hours going through the dollar bins, all the people browsing the aisles. And as we saw that come to life, and we saw it get stronger month after month after month, the question shifted. It was no longer, can this work? The question became, can we reproduce this in other cities without losing what makes Atlanta special and how do we do that? And that's the question we started to ask, Ask ourselves last year once we had been open for about a year, and we saw the numbers just growing and growing. That's when we started to ask those questions and started to say, okay, now's the time to rethink the bigger picture of what we're doing and to think beyond just Atlanta and the timing of doing this, the timing of taking on the investment and getting ready to grow right now the timing feels right. The industry is booming, as we all know. Record sales volume every single month. Pokemon as hot as it can possibly be. Investment pouring into this space. Fanatics taking over the licenses for the NBA and the NFL. This, by the way, makes us even more confident. That's a huge deal, in my opinion. A huge deal that you've got fanatics marketing engine now tied into all of the major sports leagues here in the US That's a big deal. All of these factors came together to give us the confidence that now is the time. But even more so, what was even more important than those external factors was that internally we felt like we were starting to figure things out. The first year that we were open was a lot of scramble drills and a lot of survival. As it is with any new business, you're in this entrepreneurial stage where you're figuring stuff out and there's a lot of stuff going wrong. And that was definitely the first year of Cards hq. But then we started to mature, we started to get a little more savvy about our operations. We started to build systems, we started to have better people in place, we started to have better structures in place. And by no means does this mean that our operations are silky smooth today. They're not. We're still improving them, we're constantly improving them. But I feel a lot better about where our operations are today than where they are two years ago. And I think we're moving in the right direction. And I think we have. We know where we're going, we know what needs to be done, and we know how to get ourselves ready for store two and beyond. And we can only, you can only do that through the experience of going through the journey and making the mistakes in the early stages. Moving too early, taking on investment, opening up additional stores too early would have been reckless. But moving too late would allow the opportunity to pass. And we'll talk more about that. But having one successful store does not automatically create a scalable company. And that is where a lot of our work and focus is now having to go. I am a serial entrepreneur. And as the true definition of a serial entrepreneur, I like to jump in head first and get my hands on everything. And Carter and Ryan are the same way. And the three of us, the first year of this store were really just hands on, grinding, like building this thing out. But in order to scale, you got to think a lot differently, you got to act a lot differently. Can't be about the entrepreneur anymore. The entrepreneur has to become the CEO. You have to build Systems that work without you. You have to hire leaders instead of individual contributors. You have to figure out how you're going to maintain standards across multiple stores in multiple cities. Consistent buying, pricing, inventory, events, customer service, these are all tough things to figure out. When you have one store and some hands on entrepreneurs, you can control it, you can make it happen. But when you go wide, which we're about to do, you got to figure things out. Because growth makes every operational weakness more dangerous. If you have weak inventory controls, inconsistent buying, poor financial reporting, bad hiring, lack of standardized training, if you've got security risks, inconsistent customer experience, technology that only works for the, you know, one store and is not scalable, it's not going to work. You're not going to be able to grow beyond what you are currently doing. And growth, particularly with a physical retail store and any business that is inventory heavy, that is inventory centric, requires money. A big card store has to have a big breadth and depth of inventory. Customers expect fair prices and they expect immediate availability. Sealed products, singles, graded cards, sports cards, tcg. We have to have it all and we have to have expertise in all of these areas. Inventory can lose value. Some inventory turns quickly, some can remain tied up for months. Tying up your cash and your capital. It's, there's a lot there with inventory management. And of course opening up more stores is more than just growing inventory and putting a lot of money into it. It's real estate expense, it's construction expense, it is expensive, multiple millions of dollars to get a new store off the ground. So we knew if we were going to do this we would need money. But why go get outside investment? Was that necessary? Well, we could have done a second store on our own. I'm pleased to report that Cards HQ is very profitable and we're cash flowing and we could have saved money and done store two on our own, but not store three, four or five, or at least not as quickly. And speed right now, speed's important. I said earlier we didn't want to wait and let the moment pass us by. There's a race taking place right now in the hobby. There's a lot of investment money coming in and there's a lot of card shop operators that are getting aggressive about wanting to grow this. The hobby has transitioned from being a small, a series of small mom and pop businesses to something much bigger. You're getting more savvy operators, you're getting more growth minded companies in the hobby. And I felt that if we wanted to grow something really big and special, we have A window to do so now that may not exist in a few years. And I also felt like it was our obligation to grow Cards HQ beyond just Atlanta. It started to really feel that way to me after we had been operating for about a year. This. This may sound, I don't know what the right is, may sound a little silly or flippant or something, but it's the God's honest truth that this store has made the lives of many collectors in Atlanta better. And you may be like, Jeff, what are you talking about? Like, a card shop's not making people's lives better. And I would invite you to come into our store and to stand in the aisles and to watch the reaction of the people and how much they just love it. I would invite you to go read the Google reviews of our store and see the people in the Google reviews that talk about how much of a pleasure it is that they have this store in their hometown and how it has really enhance their collecting experience, which is part of their life. And when you start to see that, you start to say, you start to realize, like, man, what we're building here, it's more than just like, you know, a cool entrepreneurial venture. It's something that actually makes the community better and makes the hobby better for the collectors in this area. And then you start to feel like, man, we got an obligation to put this in other areas. And that's a sentiment that is shared between me and my team. So we wanted to do it and we didn't want to miss the window of opportunity. So we knew we needed money if we were going to scale beyond, like Store two in somewhat of a quick manner. Now, we could have taken on debt instead of equity. You know, we debated that should we try to go get a loan now? And. And that could, by the way, be difficult for a young business. Even though we've proven ourselves over the first two plus years. Still difficult to get debt. But we could have gotten some debt. We could have gotten, we could have borrowed some money, but we decided to go the route of equity. Equity limits downside risk because you're not taking a bunch of debt onto your books. But also, and more importantly in this situation, for me, if done right, it brings in a strategic partner or strategic partners to help you with the operation and scale of your business. One thing that I've learned throughout my entrepreneurial career is that the best entrepreneurs, the best CEOs, recognize that they don't know what they don't know, and they're not afraid to ask questions. And they're not afraid to defer to others and they're not afraid to say, I don't know, I'm not sure. I don't have experience in this area. There's probably other people out there that are smarter than me or know this better than me. And that is, I look, I'll be the first to admit I have never scaled a retail brand nationwide. My retail experience in general is somewhat limited. I, I owned a couple ice cream stores, a couple of Ben and Jerry's stores 20 years ago. But you know, besides for that, and by the way, those weren't particularly successful. Besides for that, like I haven't, I don't have retail experience. My whole career was digital. It was web and apps and marketing. It wasn't retail. And now I'm trying to build this retail business nationwide. So I'm quite like, quite aware that I need experts on my team who are smarter than I am, better than I am, no more than I am and no, no more than I do and know how to scale a business at this scale. Right. And so bringing on equity investors gives you the opportunity to bring people in who are not just going to add money but are also going to add expertise. And that's exactly what I believe we got with Shamrock and N1, which, which are our investors here. Shamrock, Shamrock Capital. They were originally started by the Disney family. They were actually the Disney family, Roy Disney, his private office, his private investment office, his family office. Eventually it spun off from that and became Shamrock Capital. Its own entity with its own investors. It spun away from the Disney family. But that was the roots of Shamrock Capital. That's how it started. And that is why that most of Shamrock Capital's investments are in media, entertainment and sports. They're based in la. They get a lot of Hollywood esque investments, a lot of stuff in music and different forms of entertainment. They were one of the early investors in FanDuel. So they've done a lot of great stuff in adjacent spaces. And we felt like they could help us a lot with things like breaking and live selling and, and that type of commerce because of their background or their connections with other companies. And then they brought in N1 Ventures which is a combination of two groups, Entrust and One Team Partners. Entrust is a big financial investment group. Billion. You know, we're talking the billions of investment money and impressive group of people, very financial oriented. But then One Team Partners is the investment arm of the Major League Baseball Players association, the NFL Players association as well as other players associations are involved with it as well, like MLS soccer for example, wnba. So you've got all the players associations or most of them. Most of the players associations are part of One Team partners. N1 is a combination. It's an investment fund that was put together by NTrust and one team and they invested alongside Shamrock. So we've got the connection to media and entertainment, we've got the connection to athletes and we've got the connection to a lot of financial backing. Those are pretty powerful partners who can open up a lot of doors for us, give us a lot of connections and also teach us a lot of stuff we don't know about how to most effectively scale this business. So we saw the combination of money plus expertise as the reason why we wanted to take on equity investment. Now what those investors saw in the industry is that they saw collecting was becoming a blend of commerce, entertainment, community, data and fandom. They saw that cards are a tangible connection between fans and athletes or characters that they love. But they also saw that the industry still has many fragmented and outdated customer experiences. And they saw that while the industry, while physical retail is a big part of the industry, it it increasingly works alongside digital commerce and content. And that data and pricing transparency are helping make collectors more sophisticated and that live selling and live breaking in social commerce are making are turning opening products into entertainment. And that sports cards and TCG attract different audiences, but they share infrastructure and they share collector behavior. They saw all of these things and all of these things excited them about the opportunity of getting involved in the ecosystem through investing in us. And they chose us. What they were most excited about, what the investors told us that they were most excited about was the flywheel. The flywheel that we have created at Cards hq, Sports card investor market movers. What, what does this mean? We've put together a pretty unique combination of things that all builds off each other. We have content that introduces and educates collectors. We have data market movers that helps research and value cards and track collections. We have commerce cards HQ that that gives a place either in person or virtual to buy, sell, break and participate. We have events and live, you know, both in person and live events, live content that help build community and all of these things build on each other if done properly. That's the flywheel. That is the flywheel is the content helping promote the data and the products and the data and the products helping promote the commerce and the commerce helping promote the events and the live aspect. All of it in the events in the live aspect helping promote the content and it goes on and on and on and on. And it all builds upon itself. And that was what got the investors most excited about what we have built at Cards HQ and Sports Card Investor. They did not want to build five unrelated card businesses. They wanted to build one collector ecosystem in which every part makes the other parts better. And they found that in us. Now I say all of this, but I don't want to romanticize taking on investment because you got to give up a lot as well. And we gave up a lot, first and foremost to get this investment. We gave up a lot of sleep. We gave up a lot of sleep, man. The process of getting this investment was crazy. It took forever. Like we, this, this process of, like we, you know, we put together an investment deck. By the way, we brought in shout out to Ezra Levine, the founder of, the former founder of collectible, great guy in the hobby part of the founding of Mascot. Ezra is super well connected. I brought him in as a consultant to help us with the investment process and he knocked it out of the park. He's a super sharp guy, added a ton of value, very well connected in the sports card hobby. And look, this is about utilizing resources and once again, kind of knowing what you don't know. I knew that in order to go out and do a successful fundraise and to really go get the right investors, I needed somebody helping me with that, opening up doors, helping with our pitch and our deck and all that kind of thing. And Ezra did a wonderful job. Some people typically if you're, if you're selling your company, you're going to use like an investment broker if you're raising money. It's harder to get an investment broker for raising money because the numbers typically aren't as big. So if you can find like somebody in your space who's done it before, they're a good person to lean on for introductions and expertise. And that's what Ezra, as Ezra provided. But I mean it was, it was what, like a, about an eight month process. I think from when, eight or nine months from when we started working with Ezra to when we actually closed the investment and there was, you know, building the deck and sending it to a bunch of different investors and lots and lots of conversations with different investors. And then once we kind of honed in originally on Shamrock and said, okay, this is, this is the group we want to go with, the due diligence was crazy. So I mean like they dissected every part of our business, you know, down to the penny because they were putting in a big investment and they wanted to make sure we were who we said we were. And they wanted to also make sure that they had a really strong case for the future. They wanted. They wanted to be convinced that the opportunity ahead of us is as big of an opportunity as I was telling them it was. And thankfully, we got through that successfully. But we lost a lot of sleep in the process. And by the way, we're going to continue to lose a lot of sleep over the next several years as well. So sleep is something you give up when you take on outside investment. We. We, of course, also gave up ownership. And that's a big deal, right? Like giving up ownership in your company. That was something that I thought long and hard about. Am I willing to do this? And there's a lot of entrepreneurs who maybe don't want to do that because it means that you're no longer making every major decision completely by yourself. We have a board now. We have increased accountability. We have ambitious growth expectations, pressure, a lot of pressure. We have to operate with more financial discipline. And we have to realize that the moves that we make are now going to affect a much greater number of employees, their families, customers, investors. It's bigger pressure. Taking investment does not remove risk. It changes the risk. It gives us more resources, a lot more resources, but it also gives us more responsibility and much higher expectation. I felt like this was the right time to do it, but I had to get myself comfortable with it, and I had to make sure that I felt comfortable with the risk. And I asked questions like, could these investors push us to prioritize profit over collectors? That was the big concern. After really getting to know Shamrock and N1, I became comfortable that we were all in it for the right reasons. But not every investor is always going to be. I was worried about our company's culture. How would that change with taking on investment? Could we actually scale and hire and train enough talented people and do it without compromising our culture? What happens if the card market cools as we're expanding? That could happen. By the way, that's a very real risk that we face and that we've been thinking about every day. Will other Cards HQ stores perform differently than Atlanta? Can we maintain fair pricing across all of our stores while still being profitable at the level we need to be? The worst outcome to all of this would. Would not be opening fewer stores than planned. The worst outcome would be growing and losing what made us special as we grow, turning us into just some corporate behemoth that loses the essence of what has made cards HQ and sports card investor so special. But I believe we have the right investors and I believe we've got the right setup and the right structure. And I think we're going to do it the right way. And what we're going to do is open more stores. One this year before the end of the year. We haven't announced the location yet. We'll announce the location in a few weeks. Two stores next year, hopefully, and then more after that. We're going to be doing more buying more inventory, more breaking more live, selling more content. We're going to push into TCG content a lot harder as well, which I'm really, really excited about. More enhancements to our products, better data, a better version of market movers, continued continued development in a lot of different ways, all with the mission of raising the bar for the collector experience, setting the standard, setting the bar high for what the collector experience could be and what the collector experience should be. We're going to continue to be a collector first. We're going to continue to have fair market pricing. We're going to continue to discuss difficult industry issues when we need to on our shows. We're going to continue to have a passion for cards to be the physical gathering place for collectors. And. And hopefully we can do all of that at scale. Hopefully we can do all of that in multiple cities. That's what we want to do. That's the mission that we're on and that's where we're going. All right, I want to wrap up by giving some takeaways to anybody out there listening who may be thinking that maybe they want to grow their business or, or become more ambitious, open up a card shop. If they haven't yet, take, maybe take on an investor, anything like that. Here's my advice. Having gone through this process and knowing what I know now, operating this store for the last couple of years, first thing is prove the model before accelerating it, doing the next big thing, taking on money, opening up a store that is not going to fix a business model that is not already proven to be working. Well, a lot of people say to me, I'm thinking about starting a card shop. What advice do you have? And I say to them, are you. Have you already proven your chops of being a successful dealer at card shows? And have you already started to build a following on social media? Because those two things I think are prerequisites or close to it to opening up a card shop. If you want to go big and open up a shop, you need to prove yourself first by becoming A successful dealer, which you can do by going to card shows and start to build up a social presence so you have a base of people to market to and you have customers you've already established relationships with. And if you have a card shop and you're thinking about opening up card shop number two, I would ask, have you proven your model with card shop number one? Is this successful? Do you have the right operating procedures? Do you have the right people in place? Do you have the right financial discipline and rigor? Because you need to prove the model before accelerating it and taking the next step. I would also say know what kind of company you actually want. Success is not the same for everybody. Not every card shop needs to become a national chain. Look at what Rob Veres is doing out at Burbank. Rob has no interest in opening a second store, but Burbank is extremely successful. It's a family business. He wants to keep it as a family business. He wants to keep 100% ownership. He wants to be able to do things his way. And I respect it. I respect the heck out of it. And if that's how you want to do it, do it that way. You got to do what is best for you and your lifestyle and, and what you're hoping to achieve. And that does. It does not necessarily mean growth, and that does not necessarily mean, you know, you have to do what you think is next, right? Do what's comfortable for you. Growth requires different skills from when you start. Big time entrepreneurial energy can launch a company, but systems and leadership scale it. Do you want to be that leader? If you're in love with serial entrepreneurship, maybe you want to start the next thing or maybe you just want to be doing what you're doing today and stay hands on with everything. But that's not going to be what helps you scale. I think you got to be real honest about that. You should never raise money without knowing exactly how it's going to help you, what you're going to spend it on and what that means for your growth. We, you know, we waited until we had a really clear plan, until we knew what was successful with Atlanta and we had all the financials and all the understanding of how we could take that to other markets and duplicate it, that's the best time to raise money. Once you've proven it out and you've got the plan and now you can say, if we could just get some money, we will add fuel to this fire. That's the best time to raise money. And of course choose a partner who can provide more than just money. I talked about the importance to us of going with Shamrock and N1 and why we went with them because of the value we felt they could add just beyond their capital. Get comfortable with the emotional cost of giving up ownership, of no longer fully being in control. That's a big deal. It's not something I would have done with a lot of my ventures along the way. It was something I was willing to do now because I felt like without it, we wouldn't be able to achieve the growth and the goals of what I wanted to achieve. And I felt like the timing was right. But that's not always the case. So don't take on, you know, don't take on the money and give up the ownership unless you're really comfortable with that trade off. Preserve the thing that made the business valuable. And this was really key to us as we were talking to investors for Cards HQ and Sports Card Investor. It is a trust with collectors. It is the collector experience. It is the culture that we've created and that we are now on a mission to bring to other cities across the nation. Look, I have been an entrepreneur for most of my adult life and I have made plenty of bets. But this, this is the largest and most meaningful bet that I have ever made. It is a bet that the hobby will continue growing. It is a bet that collectors want better shopping experiences, better tools, better content and and stronger communities. It is a bet that Cards HQ can take what worked in Atlanta and bring it to collectors across the country. But most importantly, it is a bet on our team and on the collector community that has made all of this possible. There will be difficult moments. We will make mistakes. And I intend to keep pulling the curtain back and sharing what we learn. Not just the victories, but the brutal realities, too. This investment was not the finish line for Cards HQ and Sports Card Investor. It was the starting line for what comes next. All right, all right. We covered a lot of ground there, guys. I hope you got some good takeaways from this episode. I would love to hear your reaction in the YouTube comments. And don't forget, all of the episodes of the Jeff Wilson show are available not just on YouTube but also on Spotify and on Apple Podcasts. So make sure you're subscribed everywhere. Thanks for watching. We'll see you soon with our next one. Take care.