How the Classroom Helped Me Build The Wharf

A few years ago, I was a high school teacher and basketball coach making less than $50,000 a year. Today, I’m proud to say The Wharf is a top seller on Fanatics Collect, and we're on pace to do $30 million this year. People want to hear that success happened in a straight line, pointed in one direction up and to the right. It wasn't. But the teacher in me never left, which is exactly why any of the rest of it worked.

The Mahomes Of It All

I got back into cards in 2017, buying and flipping on the side while I graded papers at night.

 Nothing serious, just a fun hobby to give my mind a rest from everything else. 

Then 2018 happened. 

Going into that football season, I bought a stack of Patrick Mahomes cards. Everybody else was buying Deshaun Watson and, if you can believe it, a little bit of Mitch Trubisky. Then Mahomes went on his MVP run, and those cards started going up 3x, 4x, 5x every single week. My wife had no idea what was happening in our house. Honestly, neither did I, not really. 

But I knew one thing as I kept looking at the cardboard in my hands and the prices they were going for. 

This wasn't just a hobby anymore. This could be something.

The Jump

I kept flipping and teaching side by side for a couple more years, especially since summer breaks gave me a ton of flexibility to hit it hard for a few months before another school year began. 

Then March 2020 hit and the schools sent everybody home for COVID, and I just never went back. I launched The Wharf Sports Cards that April and went all in on consignment.

I'll be straight with you, this was terrifying. We had a one-year-old daughter at the time and my wife had just left her job to stay home with our kids. We were living on that teacher and coach's salary, and I walked away from it to sell sports cards for a living. 

There were months we were dipping into savings just to get by. But by that fall and winter, the business was already matching what I made teaching. And it kept climbing from there. Could it really be this easy?

Learning the Business the Hard Way

Nobody tells you that starting a consignment business means you are the business. I was sourcing cards, scanning cards, listing cards, shipping cards, and then doing all the marketing and bookkeeping on top of it. No employees or shortcuts. Just showing up and getting the work done until enough people knew who I was that things started to snowball.

The real lesson came in late 2021, when the post-COVID card market cooled off fast and I got caught holding cards I'd paid too much for. I lost real money, and it forced me to rethink everything about how I bought and sold. I actually stepped away from The Wharf for about a year not long after. I spent that time working inside the industry at PWCC, right around when Fanatics acquired them, and used it to figure out how I wanted to do things differently. 

I relaunched The Wharf in August 2023, and this time I built it around consignment instead of dealing.

That's still the lesson shaping how I run things today. I don't sit on cards for long anymore. As a dealer, you can get caught paying top dollar for a card right before the market turns, and you eat the loss. As a consignor, your fee stays the same whether the market's up or down. You make a little less in a hot market, but you don't get crushed in a cold one. In a business like this, it's smarter to keep your money moving than to keep it parked in inventory.

The Growth Since

The second run started small with some private sales, then limited high-end consignment on eBay. Then Fanatics reached out and asked if I wanted to sell directly on their platform. We worked out a deal, and things took off in a way I genuinely didn't expect. 

That first year back, we did a few hundred thousand dollars. 

In 2025, we did $15 million. 

This year, we're on pace to double that, a figure I already thought was insane.

But I’ve learned that people trust operators who are straight about how the business actually performs, good years and bad ones. That's why I'm sharing the numbers.

Why Teaching (and Education) Matters Still

It comes up constantly because it's still how I run the business. I've got one employee now, with plans to bring on more over the next year or two. Leading them looks a lot like teaching did – showing someone how to do a job, then setting them up to succeed on their own and eventually become leaders themselves. That's the job whether you're teaching sophomores or training your second hire.

Where That Leaves Us

So no, it wasn't a straight shot from teacher to one of the top sellers on Fanatics Collect. There was a rough stretch in the middle, a year spent learning a different side of the industry, and a relaunch that had to earn its way back from a few hundred thousand dollars. 

But the lessons and the growth since then are real, and I think it's real because I never stopped approaching this like a teacher. We will always walk people through something instead of just selling it to them.

That’s our promise to you, and please hold us to it.

If you've got cards sitting around and you're wondering whether they could be doing more for you, whether that's funding your next grail or just getting a fair shake through consignment, send us your list. We’re always happy to look at sports cards.

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