"I come to Bury Obama, Not to Praise Him."

[MineralMan]

58. No, not exactly. I left because I could no longer offer high quality

mineral specimens at reasonable prices. That was the basis of my business. Pure supply and demand, along with a business principle I wasn't willing to change.

My business was based on finding rare minerals and aesthetic specimens at prices I thought were very reasonable. I then offered those to other collectors with very modest markups, so they could enjoy them. In the process, I enjoyed having an extensive mineral collection to study. It changed constantly, so there was always something new to learn about.

My customers were all serious mineral collectors with limited budgets. I had very interesting and sometimes extraordinary specimens that they could add to their collections while staying within those budgets. My business was very atypical of the industry, and very popular with collectors.

My strategy was to buy the very bottom end of material from high-end mineral dealers. For them, the specimens were not worth bothering with. Those high end dealers often purchased entire collections for 7-figure amounts. In every great collection is always a set of mineral specimens that were purchased for one reason or another, often early in the collector's hobby. They remained in the collection until it was sold, often after their deaths.

The high end dealers who competed for these collections had no interest whatever in those specimens, and often passed them along to me at bulk prices that made it possible for me to offer rare minerals, unusual specimens, and even some historic specimens with labels dating back to the 1700s for prices a modest collector could afford.

In the meantime, they were available to me for study, and to display in my little mineral museum until they were sold. School classrooms came to visit my showroom and museum, where I taught them a little about minerals and sent every student home with a specimen of his or her own. The goal wasn't to make a pile of money, ever, and I didn't. The business made a small profit, which repaid my time doing the scut work of photographing and listing specimens on my site and packing and shipping them. I had other sources of income doing other work at the same time.

I don't work within the standard business model, and never have. I started that mineral business with $100 and a website on CompuServe's early web hosting venture. I soon developed my own website, where there were never less than 3000 specimens in stock. A dozen years later, after passing many, many thousands of specimens through the business, the model the business was based on no longer worked. So, I moved on to my other interests, and passed the entire stock on to one of my regular customers for about my original cost. He continued the tradition, offering interesting specimens to collectors at very reasonable prices. I didn't sell him the business name or the website...just the remaining stock.

It was a business, but also my hobby at the time. I operated it primarily so I could pass all of those specimens through my hands to learn more about mineralogy. Now, I do something else as a hobby. I rarely spend more than ten years pursuing any interest. That's how I've lived my life. I am on the edge of financial insecurity and always have been there. It's the price a guy pays for doing whatever he pleases. It's all been very much worth it, and a great pleasure.