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steve katzGreat response and terrific ideas! I expected something like this from this forum but this was even better than expected. What prompted me to do this was Dan's lawsuit with PSA in another thread. PSA's behavior was absolutely despicable. In almost any other reputable business, they would have promptly given Dan his money along with a sincere, humble apology.
I've been kicking this idea around all day thinking about your responses and other things. It would take a lot of work but not a terribly large sum of money because again, except for maybe having to hire a secretary or two to coordinate the billing, paperwork, etc., we would all be chipping in to do the hard labor of properly grading the cards.
I agree that our service should be strictly for vintage cards pre-1970. I think there will be a lot of people using us and also breaking open their current holders to get into our holders.
Some quick math...
About 250 working days per year. If we were to get 100 cards per day x $30 per card that is $750,000 per year. A group of 20 members would only have to grade an average of 5 cards per day. $750,000 divided by 20 members is $37,500 each before expenses. And what if we did 200 cards per day? Or 300? Would you grade 15 cards per day to maybe earn over $100,000 per year. Don't worry that customers would be concerned about the money you are making - they are only concerned about whether or not they are getting $30 worth of value for that holder. They will get $30 worth of value and more!
As was pointed out, the key is to have a niche - there are a ton of high end pre-1970 cards out there that are itching for the right holder from respected graders, not the type of graders that are now at other grading companies. We would "send out" in the beginning to get the cards encapsulated before investing in our own equipment. Thermoplastics are inexpensive - if the cost was more than $5 per card I would be shocked and probably the cost is more like $2 per card. Our holder would be so that it would be impossible to open it without easily spotting that it had been torn open. Again, the beauty is that the startup and operating costs aren't that much considering the profits that can be made. I could ramble on for many pages about this idea. Any further thoughts, please post them. If not contact me anytime at the listed e-mail. Again, I can greatly help in setting things up and with other things such as marketing, but the members must find and choose someone trustworthy to be President and CEO of the corporation. You guys know each other from shows, buying and selling, etc. PS: Running a company isn't easy - you have to really want to do it to succeed. So unless we can find a President and CEO who is not afraid of and enjoys hard work - then it's no sense bothering. We would each have one share but maybe we could entice someone to run the company by having 21 shares and giving that person an extra share. No hurry - if not today and you feel like e-mailing me later or 6 months from now, that's fine. Maybe when PSA and the others finally aggravate us enough, then we'll do it.