Community Highlights: Meet Michael Aust of Finch and Sparrow Games

Today we’d like to introduce you to Michael Aust.

Hi Michael, so excited to have you with us today. What can you tell us about your story?
We are a retailer, and up until the Covid times, we held tournaments. We specialize in the trading card game Magic: the Gathering, but we carry the other related items and games. Myself (Michael) I was a player for a couple of years casually, then around 2014-2015, I started to travel around the country to larger events. I found myself working with a local store.

Met my now business partner (Chris) there through mutual contacts. We worked with that store for about a year but had some differences in opinion, operationally speaking. Chris and I took some time and decided to start operating our own small scale business online. We started with about $500 and a couple of thousand cards (which sounds like a lot to a layperson, but it isn’t). We worked full time, then would meet back in his kitchen at night and grind doing our online sales. When the opportunity presented itself to move into the Brick and Mortar space, we did. And now, we’ve continued to specialize and focus, doing things like traveling to trade shows that other local stores don’t attempt.

Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
Smooth in some ways. We are focused and work really hard, so approaching new challenges is something that isn’t worrisome. We’ve made mistakes, but our successes have always helped us push past the mistakes. Traversing unknown territory is always hard, but we got through it. Plus, going to the trade shows, we were always the small fish in the big pond, so we’ve had to be scrappy the entire way. We were fortunate to focus on our brand and social media presence to help organically grow. Traveling all over the US and having people come up to us and want to work with us because they “know” us helped us work through being the small fish at those events.

Thanks – so what else should our readers know about your work and what you’re currently focused on?
We like to call ourselves your “(Not so local) LGS”. LGS stands for Local Game Store. We are one of the few, if not only, leveraging social media to the extent that we are to interact with our customers. Magic the gathering stores are plentiful, but our approach is different. We transact with people all over the world, and each interaction feels like they are actually visiting our location and interacting with us. What sets us apart from other Hobby or Card stores is that we are hyper-focused on our inventory of individual cards. We don’t sell board games or tons of other “nerd” stuff. This enables all of us to be incredibly knowledgeable and helpful. Plus, because our inventory is specific, we can turn it over quickly. We can buy cards for more and sell cards for less because it is what we do.

Can you talk to us a bit about the role of luck?
The biggest stroke of luck was being in the right place, at the right time when it comes to the brick and mortar store. The owner of the store that we essentially took over was looking for an exit. We had worked with him for some time, both buying and selling cards. He approached us, and we had both the inventory and the capital to jump in. It was significantly earlier than we thought we’d be comfortable with, but we did it.

Contact Info:

• Email: mike@finchandsparrowgames.com
• Website: www.finchandsparrowgames.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/finch_and_sparrow_games/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/FinchandSparrowGames
• Yelp: yelp.com/biz/finch-and-sparrow-games-signal-hill