Elliot Kallen: Well, good morning, good afternoon, everyone. I’m Elliot Kallen. I’m the CEO of Prosperity Finance Group and your host at Meet the Expert, Elliot Kallen. This is a sports-designed podcast. It’s for people that Love sports. If you don’t like sports, you probably won’t like anything having to do with today. Sometimes we do business for business owners. Sometimes we do wine and avocation. Today, we’re doing a little bit of sports, which I love to talk about considering we’re right now in the NCAA football playoffs. We’re in the NFL playoffs. Very soon, we’re going to be in the All-Star Games for the basketball, football, but we’ve got a very accomplished person with us today, and that is Brandon Steiner. If you’re from the New York market, you knew the old name Steiner Associates, which is now the Steiner Agency and Collectible Exchange. Welcome, Brandon. 

Brandon Steiner: I was wondering, you said you had somebody who was accomplished. I wondered if somebody else was coming on the program, but all kidding aside, first of all, thanks for having me. Steiner Sports was a very well-known collectible company, to say the least, that I built for 35 years and no longer have that. I started Collectible Exchange five years ago. This set the record straight. You know what’s crazy? We have five times the amount of items on Collectible Exchange than we ever did at Steiner, which Steiner was my baby, and I loved it. Now we’ve grown and built something even bigger, I hope better, because we help people sell their stuff. It’s not only the stuff that we put up on there, but it’s like an exchange where we can buy and sell. 

Elliot Kallen: That’s it. For somebody who has several retired ballplayers as clients, it’s exciting. For someone who is a wannabe New York Jets quarterback, I love this. Let me tell everybody how to reach me. If you want to reach out to us, it’s prosperityfinancialgroup.com. It’s Elliot, E-L-L-I-O-T, at prosperityfinancialgroup.com. It’s 925-314-8503. Reach out to us. We would love to get your information about how to reach out to Brandon, which we’ll get his information when we’re all done here at the end. Sit back, everybody, as we have a little bit of fun tonight with what’s going on in the world of collectibles and sports and so forth and so on. This is great. I want to first ask you some of what I call the ketchup and mustard on top of the hamburger, if that’s okay. 

Brandon Steiner: Absolutely. I’m an open book, and I’m hoping that we can get the audience some information that could be helpful, maybe something I could bring up that maybe they didn’t know before the conversation started. 

Elliot Kallen: These are my four favorite types of interviews and people that you’ve met with and people that you’ve talked to. I’d love to get a quick story about them. That would be Yogi Berra, Reggie Jackson, Joe Namath, and Mickey Mantle. I know you’ve been around to watch all these guys and interview them and talk to them. What made these guys so interesting besides, obviously, their statistics? 

Brandon Steiner: Well, there’s players that people like, and there’s players that people love. The goal, I think, in business, and I think in anything, is to get people to love you because nobody remembers people they like, but they always remember and never forget people they love. They’ve all had moments in time, no question, the three home runs, the guarantee. I mean, those are the things that when you step up and God taps you on the shoulder and says, hey, got an opportunity for you, got to be ready, and you got to deliver. It wasn’t because of what they did that day, but it was probably what they did that led up to that day. Then you got to be able to put the mustard on the hot dog. That’s kind of what I think. The difference between a lot of athletes in this day and age, as I’ve been doing this for 35 years, is minuscule. I mean, it’s so small, but the players that are prepared for that great moment and that aren’t afraid to deliver it because they are prepared, they’re doing more than what they probably needed to do, what they ever thought they should do, and then the moment’s caught up to them. And when you meet them, they are all indeed like, well, Reggie Jackson could have easily run my companies. Every time he’s come up, I’m like, this dude could run my company better than me. I mean, Reggie probably is one of those few players that I feel like besides being a multiple sport player, he’s a tremendous athlete, but also a really tremendous business person and really has unique anomaly almost where he probably could have done a million and one things. When you look at someone like Joe Namath, his personality and just something about him, he’s got that it factor. And also, I love the way that he signs his name. You can read every letter in both names. And one of my favorite stories with him is he came up, he said, Brad, two most difficult things when you walk in a room. One, everybody wants your autograph. Second most difficult, walk in a room, nobody wants your autograph. And he never took it for granted. Joe always had a great amount of humility, never took it for granted. And nobody’s ever been kinder that came up to our office to sign. It was just so nice, said hello to everyone, say goodbye to everyone, walked to the hotel. They need a whole car to pick up and all that crap. So it’s the little things that sometimes get you to the big result and a lot of humility and ego and all that stuff, all some mixture of all the above. When 

Elliot Kallen: I was a kid, we were a big Joe Namath thing as the New York Jets thing, as my father could afford tickets when we were young. And we went out to Hempstead, Long Island every summer. And we went to the Jets training camp out there at Hofstra College, now Hofstra University. And Joe Namath stood around in a red flak jacket for all of us kids and did not leave until he finished signing something for everybody. And that’s my greatest memory of Joe Namath. And I think that’s why I always found him beloved and endearing, because he didn’t get super snobby and tell everybody, I got to go, I got a dinner date, I got that. He just stood there and did what he had to do. So I have good things to say about Joe Namath. I met him as an adult probably a dozen times. And he was just as gracious and as nice then. Yogi Berra, the person I met, Brandon, I don’t know anybody more lovable than Yogi Berra. So why was he so lovable? 

Brandon Steiner: I think for the most part, it starts with, first of all, he’s an incredibly great, gifted player in an incredibly gifted era where he got to be a New York Yankee with some really other good players. But he kept it simple. First of all, he had a great wife. Carmen, I’ve met a lot of wives and I’ve met a lot of players’ wives, and I got a great wife myself. But she was an amazing partner, great, great partner. And I think that she made him even better than just what he was. And I think the simplicity, he found the unique style. And what people don’t realize that Yogi was an incredibly hardworking business person. His salary as a Yankee, even with 10 World Series rings, wasn’t enough. He’s working, selling you, selling all kinds of different products during the offseason, had a bowling alley. I mean, this is a guy who was incredibly hardworking. And it all kind of paid off as things moved on. He became this kind of beloved, really popular, famous player for an incredibly popular, famous Franchise like the New York Yankees. But always giving back, big charity guy. I was on his board. I was on the board for the Yogi Berra Museum. If you’re around, you go to Montclair State in New Jersey, see his museum. It’s amazing. I got the gift of spending a lot, a lot of days, and a lot of appearances, and a lot of time with Yogi one-on-one and the stories. Same thing with Mickey Mantle, too, for that matter. And never got bored hanging with Yogi. It was just amazing, one story after the other. And just extremely humble guy. I’m glad they did the movie. I’m glad they did this documentary. It just really showed how good a player he was, because I think sometimes it gets overlooked, because he became such an icon of personality. People forgot that this dude is a real, full-fledged Hall of Famer, as well as the championships and everything else. So you’re talking about really one of the greats. They’re also a military guy, did his time in the service. I mean, he’s one of the great American icons. 

Elliot Kallen: So we’re going to talk about Brandon’s business in a second, but we’re talking with Brandon Steiner of Steiner Agency and Collectible Sports. If you’re from the New York market and you’re a Yankees fan, you’re familiar with that name for many generations, even. And if you need to reach me, I’m at prosperityfinancialgroup.com or L-E-L-L-I-O-T at prosperityfinancialgroup.com. Don’t be afraid to reach out for any reason. Let me talk about what you do now, which is the collectible exchange primarily. As somebody who collects jerseys and fun stuff, I feel like I could go to a show all the time. And you know these shows. And I don’t know if I’m really getting a jersey signed by them or a baseball signed by them or a football. Am I not? So tell me about what you do that’s really unique in a marketplace and not really duplicatable like it should be. 

Brandon Steiner: Listen, I think the buyer be educated is more concerned than buyer beware because there’s some price shifts. Authentication is everything. So, back when I got in the business, we were just developing authentication. So a lot of people unfortunately got stuff and don’t have authentication. If you have stuff, you know, we help people get their stuff authenticated. And it’s really important because you really can’t sell it anywhere near the price that it’s worth unless it’s authenticated. And we help you do that and help you value it, make sure that you know what you have and what it’s worth. But I mean, I think you got to be educated. There’s some good companies out there now that have been around for a while. You see my Steiner brand, even though I’m not with Steiner anymore, but again, with collectible exchange, but you see a lot of Steiner. We put out millions of autographs and products and that stuff stands tall still to this day. Stuff that we did 20, 25 years ago, Upper Deck, Panini, that kind of thing. You want to look for companies that have been around, they have the reputation, they have a real authentication process. And more importantly, they stand by their products. Who’s going to be around 10 years from now? Who’s going to be around 20 years? So you make sure you don’t get duped when you’re buying this stuff. But I think the fraudulent autograph is somewhat under control. I’d be careful about buying autograph cards more than autograph jerseys, because unfortunately, there’s just a lot of just cards, even if they’re autographed, they’re not worth a lot. And they seem to be hyped up. And on the jerseys, just understand you’re buying jerseys, but not all jerseys are equal. There are authentic jerseys that are replica jerseys, and then there are these jerseys that are neither, they’re made in the Orient. And there’s nothing wrong with any of them, but they all have different values from a collectibility standpoint. And you should be educated before you start just buying any jersey, because there are differences in the value of those jerseys. 

Elliot Kallen: You’ve been doing this for quite a while. So what have been your greatest challenges? 

Brandon Steiner: The challenge always is, I mean, the greatest challenge always was just getting people to respect this hobby into a business. I mean, I like to think I had a little to do with maybe converting that hobby into a business, putting some structure in it, showing players they could put collections around their entire career, as opposed to signing, whatever it is for the day, showing a player’s entire career from high school, college, all the different moments. But I think the biggest challenge now is getting people not to get into this rich, quick scheme thing, getting people to realize that these trading card thing could be a little bit of a scam, and being careful about that. I get really nervous when people are spending a lot of Money on stuff that I know isn’t going to add up at the end. It’s the same thing like you do with financial assistance. The worst thing you want to do is have somebody buy into a fund, or buy into a money market, or buy into a stock that you know, after all the experience you’ve had, is not going to show much on a dividend, not going to go up in value. If anything, it’s a risky proposition, and the person’s going to think they’re going to make a big score. I want people to buy stuff because they love it, because they love that team, the player, they want to remember the moments. And then if they’re lucky enough, it will maintain value. And if they’re super lucky, it can go up in value. But when you start buying a Tom Brady home for $3,000, you’re never going to see that money back. You’re not going to get even break even on it. And even though he’s a goat, people think because Michael Jordan’s stuff went up through the roof. But you could say the word Michael in any country in this world, China, Singapore, anywhere, you say Michael, they know Michael Jordan. You say Tom, they don’t know Tom Brady. Tom Brady’s a great quarterback, but he’s not Michael Jordan. He’s not world renowned. He doesn’t have the same kind of connection that a Michael Jordan does. So that’s why Michael Jordan is an anomaly. So don’t just because you’re buying a goat, whether it be Gretzky or Tom Brady or whatever, expect it to have the same kind of price sensation as Michael Jordan did. And that’s my biggest challenge is just keeping people’s expectations. And the second biggest challenge is getting the players to opt in. There’s still always a challenge to get different celebrities and some of the bigger name athletes to participate in this sport of collecting and to also understand it so they’re overcharged and they’re reasonable about what they want to do and understand what they want to get out of it besides just the money. Because there’s a tremendous brand build when athletes get into this collectible thing. You’re talking about getting thousands and thousands of kids to put something up in their room about you or collecting a card that’s about you. Anytime you could brand extend and get paid for it is a no brainer to opt in. But a lot of players don’t opt in. A lot of players don’t understand the collecting part. But if you want to have a Legacy and you’re trying to build a brand, the collectible category is one of those real categories that they should be opting in and full force. 

Elliot Kallen: We’re talking to Brandon not just because of sports, but because he’s also a business owner. So as a business owner, what do you think some of your great successes are? 

Brandon Steiner: I thought you were going to ask me what some of my biggest failures are, which is usually more of the conversation. But I like to think that making the collectible business, being able to explain it and being able to take it into so many different areas, taking the collectible area into Neiman Marcus, into American Express and their membership rewards, getting the Yankees to partner up so that all the other teams would follow and creating these partnerships with Notre Dame, the Red Sox, Yankees, the experiential part, getting athletes to do clinics and Q&As. I was like one of the first to do that. And my goal being getting fans closer to the game is certainly something I’m really excited about that I was able to do. But you know, listen, having a Marriage for 36 years, having three kids that still like me and that have grown up and that are representing good, solid, the good, solid citizens that are looking to make the world a little better is probably my biggest accomplishment. But very proud of my kids and excited that my wife is still going to keep me around. I mean, those are really important things too. So it’s hard to start a business for 4,000 bucks and keep it around for 35 years. And this new company, Collectible Exchange, even at the age of 60, I started with not a lot of money. And I think it’s a very big, it’s a misunderstanding. A lot of people like, they come up with an idea and the first thing I want to do is raise a lot of money. The last thing I want to do. I started this company with a very small amount of money and built it the same way I built Steiner. And then hence, you know, here we are growing and, you know, 150,000 SKUs on our website and just been an amazing run. And I think that the one thing I want to impress upon anybody that’s listening is to say that it is true. Building stuff, the process of building something great is much more rewarding than the result. Putting time into something that you really enjoy, that you love, it trumps everything. And I’ve been fortunate enough to be able to do these things and still be able to do them and not get so result-driven. We live in a world where everything is now, quick results, but, you know, process and building and practicing, I always say does practice make you better? Yeah. Well, practice everything. It’s kind of like my favorite thing. It’s like, I tell my guys, they’re like, let’s practice everything. 

Elliot Kallen: Well, you’re mentioning, but I love about what you’re saying, Brandon, and we’re talking to Brandon Steiner of Steiner Agency Collectibles, a New York icon in a world of sports collectibles here and which I love and our paths have crossed more than once, which is wonderful in the New York market, is that he’s a business owner like all the business owners we deal with. He’s got successes, failures. I’ll ask you that question in a second about failures since you brought that up. He’s got challenges. He’s kept his family in perspective. And I think that’s so important because character counts, keeping your kids there in perspective. Some of us work 100 hours a week, and it is impossible on a daily basis to balance out your family, being a dad or a parent, being a spouse, a great spouse, being a great business owner. You have to choose on every given day. So this is great that you’ve done that. And at the end of the rainbow, you have something to look back on with a lot of pride and congratulations on that. A couple of failures. What do you think are the greatest failures as a business owner here that you could teach our business owners who are sometimes much larger than you and then aspiring to be you and so forth? I 

Brandon Steiner: I mean, the truth of the matter is I’m failing all the time. I guess a lot of the failures are all based on what your expectations are. So some people would look at it that way. But look, even losing Steiner, as much as it’s painful, like I was about to buy Steiner back, that’s my name, 35 years. I probably failed in that transaction. I probably could have handled it better, no question. I’ve lost a lot of big deals that I probably could have and should have had and failed at the execution of them, especially when you start doing larger deals and bigger deals. The failures become bigger, and picking yourself up is harder because of the drop. I think I could have signed when I probably could have signed Aaron Judge. And I passed on that, messed that up. What an idiot I was there not to be able to get him signed. But you learn from it. Sometimes it’s just the timing. Sometimes it is even you. Sometimes you fail, and it wasn’t your fault. But the most painful failures are the ones where you weren’t as prepared as you should have been. I was just telling my staff this morning at a meeting with my staff, and I was talking about this speech I’d given to this, there was a bowling, there was a regional bowling convention, about 250 bowling owners or bowling centers. At first, I started the speech, started calling them bowling alleys, and I just spent two years trying to rename and refocus people to a bowling center, which meant that a restaurant, game room, as you see bowling centers now, it’s not just bowling, it’s games, it’s food, it’s where you have a party and all that. Back when I was a kid, it was a bowling alley. It was bowling, and maybe you got some snacks. But I went into that speech, and they pulled me off the damn stage. I speak around the country. I always remember in 1992, I gave this speech, and they actually came up and said, you’re good. They took me off the stage. That’s how bad I was. I’m like, oh, my God. Now I get $20,000, $25,000 to speak. It’s funny. But if you’re not failing miserably, I always tell people, I wouldn’t invest in anyone that was starting a company who hasn’t failed on a pretty high level previously. To me, it’s like, because that failure, if you’re able to pick yourself back up that learning from the different failures of not getting certain players I should have got, not being able to retain Steiner and keep it, even though I did sell it, made a lot of money, I wanted to buy it back. I should have been able to figure that out.

I got it the right way, the path I took didn’t work. As it turns out, which is a valuable lesson, I wanna end that particular question on, which is sometimes the most miserable things that happen to you in life, and they are miserable, the most hurtful, the worst things, you have to fall in love with those things. You have to find a silver lining in all those things. And if you do, and only until you do, you can get to even bigger and better things than you ever thought of. And like the day that I lost nine in sports, I was devastated, and in shock, and I was so bummed, but I’m so happy that that happened now. I’ve fallen in love with the fact that that happened because it gave me this opportunity to build this new company the way I really wanted to build it, knowing what I know, learning what I learned, not making the same dumbass mistakes that I made at Steiner. Even though I did a lot of good things, you tend to remember the bad things more than the good things, and I’m getting a redo. 

Elliot Kallen: I think that’s great attitude, commitment, passion. I think it’s all coming through. And as we wrap this up here, Brandon, let me just ask you a question that I get asked all the time because you probably have a good perspective on it, and that is the world is going to DraftKings and gambling everywhere. Everything is about money and gambling on every sport, everywhere, every time, all day. Is that good or bad for sports? 

Brandon Steiner: Oh, it’s horrible. I’ve spoken about this. I’ve written about this on my social media. I know it’s not popular because there’s so much money to be gotten and most people are money-grabbing, but if you’ve ever had a family member or a good friend is an addict, whether it be alcohol, drugs, sex, whatever it is you read about, and now we’re adding another funnel. Now we’re adding another lane to that addict highway. Alcohol, drugs, sex, gambling. And there’ll be all kinds of buildings made for these gambler-holics. You’re seeing kids getting pulled out of school now, losing hundreds of thousands of dollars and their parents have to come and bail them out. The amount that they’re pushing. Imagine if they were pushing marijuana, alcohol the same way they’re pushing gambling on every commercial, every play, during the games. They’re just daring you to put, you know, it’s so addictive. Having a mom who was a degenerate gambler, she’d say it proudly. I grew up in a house with my mother with poker games and running poker games and running to Atlantic City. I saw so many people have kind of lost their way. And that was before things were legalized. I know it’s a big money grab and, you know, people are not, I mean, you’re not betting on these games and these companies are not spending all this money on all this advertising, promotion, losing money. So they’re taking somebody’s money. And I wish somebody would figure out how to go protect the fan a little bit and protect these young people, especially, who are gonna definitely be the ones that are gonna lose their way faster than we’ve ever seen with any other kind of addictive type of situation. I’ve spoken about this many times, right when it happened. And, it’s such a bummer that it’s spiraling out of control. It’s just crazy. And I wish that somebody would get a handle on it. Imagine when we were growing up, you wouldn’t be able to watch a beer commercial in a game, an alcohol commercial in a game. And now everything, from, I mean, everything’s in these games. And these games are what people, you know, so little bit of live TV, so these games are extremely impressionable, particularly to our youth. And we should be careful about what we’re advertising on there, what we’re pushing our youth to think about and do. These kids are sitting at home, they’re playing games, gambling, masturbating, and watching porn. Now, nothing wrong with any of those on a small scale, I guess, but they’re doing it every day. You see young 20-year-olds that are completely lost their way. They’re socially inept to some degree. I’m not the only one talking about this. There’s been a lot written about this. And I just wish that we would understand the responsibility and accountability that comes with sports, along with the profitability and all the whole mystique and the ego and everything. I mean, sports is great, but understand their accountability and responsibility that comes with it. We’re pushing on to our kids and pushing on to people. And the gambling thing, as you can tell, it gets my nerve, it gets me going. 

Elliot Kallen: We’ve been talking with Brandon Steider of Collectible Exchange and Steider Industries. So if you’ve got anything to do with sports, memorabilia, trading, exchanging, collectibles, antiquing, whatever that might be, Brandon’s your guy. Brandon, how do people reach you? 

Brandon Steiner: I don’t know, man, this brain has been lost for a long, long time. Oh, you mean on the platforms? 

Elliot Kallen: Yes, right now, how do they reach you? 

Brandon Steiner: I’m a big social media guy. For a 65-year-old, I’m posting multiple times a day. And we do a live show as well on my Facebook with eBay. We do a live show, so you can see me on TikTok. I answer everything. So you leave me a message on LinkedIn, it’s my favorite platform. But I’m on Instagram, Twitter, all those handles. And follow me, I put out some good content. Love to hear from you. Love to hear your perspective, if you have any ideas. I’m a serial entrepreneur. So I’ll be looking for ideas until they put me in a box that’s six feet under. I’m always looking for one more idea that I think could maybe make the world a little better or make the business I’m in a little better. 

Elliot Kallen: And if you want to reach Brandon for any reason, just give me a holler at elliot, E-L-L-I-O-T at prosperityfinancialgroup.com, 95314-8503. People like Brandon, business owners, this is sports, but business owners, we love to talk to because they’re passionate, they’re unique, they bring a great perspective. You can hear the attitude in here. We all can learn from someone like Brandon who has not had a straight line in life. It’s been crooked, it’s been backwards, it’s been upside down sometimes. But he’s come out the other side of it. Brandon, thanks for being part of this today. 

Brandon Steiner: Thanks for having me. Good luck, everyone. Enjoy, stay warm. And let’s pray a little bit for these people in California going through probably one of the most miserable, horrific periods I’ve ever seen. Let’s hope they all end up on the right side of it when things settle down. I’m praying for them, for their safety, and hopefully for them to find their way. 

Elliot Kallen: Thanks, everybody. Thank you, Brandon. Have a great day, everyone. We’ll see you real soon.