Scout Patch Collectors

Friday Scouting Hot Finds Newsletter May 31, 2019

I guess I’ve known for some time that Chris would use contacts to help him grow his store. It wasn’t just the people sitting in his warehouse that did all the magic. Maybe it was one trusted person who could identify and roughly price OA. Maybe another person would take eBay consignments and get some collections up for sale at a %. I’m not going that far but a step in that direction.

When I lived in eastern North Carolina one of my college girl employees was from Charlotte. She was the sister of one our babysitters and was attending the local college. Fast forward and now we are both in Charlotte. She works in mortgages but agreed to take some of my inventory and scan and type it into a spreadsheet for a fee. It’s something she can do while I’m at camp all summer. So if all goes well presto I will have hundreds of neckerchiefs ready to throw up on eBay when I get home.

It’s very hard to scale a microbusiness if you don’t create processes and train other people to take some of the load. I still struggle with that. It’s also tough because Scouting memorabilia has a very weak sell-through rate. So no matter if I could get thousands of items added every month I couldn’t afford to pay all the extra help to make that happen.

Today I have a collection arriving via UPS that is in 4 boxes. I have almost no idea what’s in there as the man was willing to ship it to me and let me evaluate it for a purchase offer. Now the only bad part of that is I will only be home for 3 days over the next two months! That’s precious little time to play with patches.

My crowd is on vacation for a few days then a week from tomorrow I report to Camp Barstow for summer camp. So far our registration is really up and we hope to reach a 25% increase in overall attendance by the end of the summer.

CLICK HERE TO OPEN THE MAY 31, 2019 ISSUE OF THE SCOUTING HOT FINDS NEWSLETTER