Empathy, Emotional Intelligence and Connection in Business with Mike Weinberger

**SPEAKER_1** (0:04)
The Bliss Business Podcast, the show about empathy, connection, and consciousness in business. Today's episode is brought to you by Zero Company, your paid search, social media, and programmatic ad experts.

**Stephen Sakach** (0:17)
Well, welcome back to the show everyone. I'm Stephen Sakach once again with my co-host Tullio Siragusa and we have a special guest today. It's going to be a fun conversation.
We're going to introduce him in a moment. Whether you're leading teams, serving customers, or building franchise systems, business leaders are discovering that people want more than transactions. They want authentic connection, meaningful relationships, and great environments to work in. Today, we're exploring how empathy, emotional intelligence, and human connection shape business success and leadership. We're looking through the lens of the local sports card shop, which to me just brings back memories of opening those baseball card packs and all that. Probably there's some chemical reaction going on in my brain with that, but it's just like one of the highlights of when you're a little kid. Just having that experience. And now, I'm older and I still kind of have that experience a little bit.
Literally going through my attic because we just moved, and I've got just piles and piles of stuff that I'm reliving right now. But enough about that. Tullio, introduce our special guest today.

**Tullio Siragusa** (1:31)
My pleasure. Our guest today is Mike Weinberger. He's the co-founder and head of franchising at Replay Sports Cards, and founder of Community Franchise Group. Mike is a multi-brand franchise executive who has spent more than 20 years leading, scaling and successfully exiting franchise brands across food and beverage, fitness, cannabis and collectibles. A former attorney turned servant leader, Mike has built systems designed to empower entrepreneurs while staying deeply committed to preserving community-driven business experiences.
Through Replay Sports Cards, he's focused on protecting the local card shop experience nationwide and creating businesses rooted in connection, mentorship and people-first leadership. Looking forward to our conversation today. Welcome to The Bliss Business Podcast, Mike.

**Mike Weinberger** (2:28)
Hey, thanks for having me. I appreciate it. Thanks for the intro that I didn't realize I did all that and you make it sound so good. So thank you. Thanks for having me again.

**Stephen Sakach** (2:38)
I love this topic. Mike, just throw me back to my mom. What was my best card experience growing up? I remember I saw this, I was at a convention and there was like this, the Magic Johnson Larry Bird rookie card there. There was a couple of them for a dollar each back then. So this is pre when basketball wasn't even a thing.
This card also got Dr. J in the middle or something like that. This is just too cool of a card to not pass up. I'll buy both of them.
So I've still got those, right? I don't know how much they're worth now, but a lot. But those kind of experiences, I think, as a young kid just geeking out over like, this is like a couple of legends and I love this sport, why isn't it more popular? Then finally, it blew up at some point. But I'm sure you've got experiences like that that led you into this direction of wanting to do this at this stage of your career.

**Mike Weinberger** (3:35)
Yeah, absolutely. Make sure you keep those at that card. It's valuable. We'll talk offline that you can get graded through a group called PSA and sell one, put it in the college fund for the kids or fun, fun, fun, fun for the family and save the other one. For me, I grew up in Ohio, Northeast Ohio, so Buffalo wings for breakfast and sports all day. There wasn't a lot going on. I really was just passionate about all things calves. At the time, Indians and Ohio State and at the same time, collecting things, especially sports cards. I had a giant collection and was really into it, let's say from age 8 to 15 Then like anyone else, I found other interests and found other things and remarkably came back to it. A lot of stories resonate during COVID.
COVID hit and a lot of people got locked in their house. I got locked in my basement with my son. My wife fed us and watered us and everything, but she told us, clean up. At the time, my son was six and he was really inquisitive and asking, what are these? These are cards. We just really bonded over it and it became a thing. I decided to open a sports card shop in Denver.
I have been enfranchising for 20 years like Tullio said.
I like scale, I like big business. I started looking and I'm like, there's no national brick and mortar brand in sports cards. It's a lot of mom and pops, it's disparate, it's spread. Instead of opening one, I was fortunate to meet my current partners, Mike Martin and Brent Shepple and they had already opened shops on the East Coast. We rebranded under Replay with the goal of bringing local card shops under a unified brand around the country. It's my son's part of the business and to me, it's something very special. It's awesome.