Stepping into the Elevator

 The elevator pitch exercise during class was a great chance to rethink my business plan. Going into the pitch, I always thought of my business as a side gig. I just wanted an idea that I could make a little extra money on the side. However, going through the pitch, Andrew Fry (my instructor) challenged me to think bigger.

I felt pretty confident giving a pitch. I'm used to having to pitch ideas at work and in volunteer settings. To get other people to commit their labor to something, you have to sell them on the idea. One thing I've noticed through life, is that passion is contagious. If you present something with passion, it will spark others curiosity and activate their imagination. If you do that, you can start to get another person to indulge your passion, or maybe even become passionate about what you're pitching themselves.

Before the pitch, I was mainly looking at small Etsy and Ebay stores as my model. But after the elevator pitch, I was able to go back and rethink my numbers to see what opening a more serious store might look like. It turns out, there is some serious money to be made, though I will admit that Magic The Gathering sales will never quite be the money that some other ventures would be. The secret to my business, in my book, is printing proxies over lower-valued cards to upgrade them into higher-value cards. This allows me to increase the amount of money I make in sales while simultaneously maximizing the value I provide to customers. With these fundamentals in place, all I needed to do was imagine what it would look like to create my own storefront that could be grown a bit bigger. Because of the pitch exercise, I had the confidence in my plan to go back and do some research on what some more serious numbers might look like.