with three friends—he decided that he wanted his next act to be in cards. His attention soon turned to Collectors, which, through PSA, had been his brand of choice. “It was them or bust,” Turner says.
In January 2021, Turner’s group raised its offer by about $150 million, narrowly winning over shareholders. The issues came into particular focus as demand escalated. After years neglecting technology, the company had few options but to try to hire more graders to deal with the additional submissions. But the labor market was tight, and this was a position that required expertise. The submissions began to pile up.PSA had a grading capacity of about 22,000 cards per day. Nearly 100,000 were coming in.
Collectors has budgeted for 680 net new positions in 2022, taking its total headcount to nearly 2,000. Turner, who remains based in New York City and travels to the California office every other week, says he’s also worked to fix an “upstairs-downstairs culture” that developed between management and employees, placing his own desk in the grading room.
Card holders will gain new security features. Future products might include an app that would allow a collector to generate a crude grade of their cards at home so they could figure out whether to spend the time and money on a professional grading service. The Collectors team is also considering NFTs—not necessarily to sell them as digital collectibles but to use them to improve the tracking and transacting of real-world items.