Editor's Note: As part of a paid partnership with Certified Collectibles Group, cllct is publishing a series of stories highlighting the company's growth and future initiatives.
SARASOTA, Fla. — The rules for entry are simple: No spare change, no cell phones and don’t feed the alligators.
Tucked behind a security gate and partially obscured by dozens of trees sits Certified Collectibles Group’s Sarasota headquarters.
On the outside, the building’s beige and brown brick exterior is as generic as possible. Inside, however, are seemingly endless boxes of collectibles submitted by collectors from all around the world.
At its core, CCG isn’t unlike the mom-and-pop company that graded its first coin under the NGC brand in 1987. But nearly 40 years later, CCG has graded more than 100 million items, expanded into a number of new categories and delivered the holder for some of the most important collectibles ever created.
Compared to the company that now-CEO Steve Eichenbaum first joined in 1999, CCG is nearly unrecognizable.
“When you think about where we've come from to where we are today, I don't think in our wildest dreams, those of us that were here in the beginning, ever envisioned this company being this big and this global,” Eichenbaum told cllct.
According to Eichenbaum, NGC was grading roughly 40,000 coins per month when he joined the company more than 25 years ago.
In 2025, CCG is closer to 40,000 items per day when every card, coin, banknote, comic, poster, magazine, video game and VHS tape is taken into account.
That expansion across new grading categories has been the biggest driver of CCG’s growth over the years. Following NGC’s success with coins — the company has graded more than 65 million total — CCG founded Certified Guaranty Company to grade comic books in 2000.
Today, CGC grades everything from comics, cards and magazines to posters, video games and home video, while PMG grades banknotes, and ASG grades stamps.
Though CCG appears to have expanded into new categories rapidly at times, it has always attempted to do so while wielding a scalpel rather than a hammer.
Plucked from the coin grading room shortly after joining the company in 2010, CCG president Max Spiegel, alongside Eichenbaum and CGC VP of sales Harshen Patel, has helped move the company into the right categories at the right time.
Categories most aided by authentication often have, at the most basic level, disagreements between buyers and sellers over condition and value that can, ideally, be solved by a neutral third party.
“You can really tell when a category is ripe for certification,” Spiegel said. “It has the trading velocity. It has the catalog information, the taxonomy. It’s got price guides. You can tell when people would benefit from a service that gives them confidence.”
There are dozens of questions, but CCG has gotten good at finding answers.
Among the most important is whether or not CCG can hire the right people. Launching any new category requires convincing leading experts to leave the marketplace to become graders, and that can be a difficult sell.
Most categories are resistant to grading at first regardless of a grader’s pedigree — right place at the right time with the right people doesn’t matter if the marketplace isn’t ready.
And that’s exactly what happened with CGC’s arrival into comics in 2000.
More than 25 years later, it can be hard to imagine CGC struggled to resonate with comic collectors when it entered the market.
At CCG’s headquarters, past a number of security guards and a metal detector, the halls inside CGC’s wing of the building are lined with freshly-graded books stacked on top of each other.
There are far too many to count, but there are surely thousands, destined to be displayed in a collection somewhere.
Inside the grading room itself sits CGC president Matt Nelson, his desk positioned right as you enter the left side of the room. Directly in front of Nelson are the graders, working side-by-side on incoming orders.
The far walls are covered in floor-to-ceiling recreations of famous comic book covers, some of which have crossed the room in the correct dimensions many times. Further into the room is a station where graded books are placed into their holders with labels and inner sleeves. They’ll be sonically encapsulated and ready for final quality checks.
It’s in this room some of the most important and expensive comics level-up from prized possession to record-breaker, and no grader has been better at delivering secondary-market prices in the category than CGC.
To date, all 10 of the most expensive comic books to sell at public auction, including an Action Comics No. 1 that fetched $6 million in 2024, have been graded by CGC, and ultra high-end auctions are often packed with the best books almost exclusively holdered by CGC.
In 2000, the market was less enthusiastic.
“People are picturing certification as entombing the collectible,” Nelson recalled of the attitudes 25 years ago. “You can't get to it. You can't hold it. In the case of comics, you can't read it. You can't smell it. You can't get that full experience.”
“Whenever we get into a new market, there’s always pushback from the dealer community — they don’t think an independent third party knows more than they do,” Eichenbaum added. “They have the control. They’ve had control for a really long time within that vertical, and then when we come in, there’s a lot of pushback.”
Collectible dealers of any kind are reasonable people, though, and CGC was playing the long game. The concept of comic grading wasn’t adopted immediately, but CGC believed the community would come around.
And eventually it did.
A grading scale helped standardize condition, which helped both buyers and sellers properly gauge value. The authentication process also provided transparency for books that had been restored in some way.
Though slow, collector sentiment for graded comics shifted throughout the early 2000s, and today, hobbyists often question when important or valuable books aren’t graded.
Spiegel estimates the company’s comic book grading business wasn’t a major revenue driver for likely the first decade, but CGC was always playing the long game.
Years later, not only was the company’s move into the comic book market arguably its most impactful to date, it provided the playbook CCG now uses when it enters any category.
While many competitors focus either on a single category or a limited number, CCG has often looked to expand across a wide range of verticals whenever it makes sense — even when competition could be significant.
Just as the market was preparing to crescendo, CGC took a calculated risk in 2020 when it entered the trading card category. For card collectors, PSA, SGC and BGS had been the trusted names. Though CGC had brand recognition in comics, it would have to play from behind in a new market.
And its earliest steps were more of a stumble than anything.
CGC Trading Cards, which launched in 2020, would handle categories such as Pokémon, Marvel, Star Wars and Magic: The Gathering while Certified Sports Guaranty, which launched in 2021, would handle all sports cards.
Deploying two brands ended up being a self-described misstep for CGC. The two holders featured different labels, and the trust and brand recognition CGC had built over decades was lost on collectors holding cards graded under CSG.
Collector feedback showed there was simply too much confusion between the two brands. It was clear CGC, no matter how costly and difficult it would be, needed to pivot. So that’s exactly what it did.
“It’s our philosophy that we listen to the community — we may do something one way, but we listen, and if we’re wrong, we do pivot,” Patel said. “We held some extensive focus groups, and it was an eye-opener for us, but it helped us.”
The branding was wrong, but CGC felt everything else was right, and the market for card grading was ripe for disruption. Of CGC’s three major competitors, two have become heavily reliant on a single category for the bulk of their business. All three have at times suffered backlogs that created delays.
To CGC, backlogs meant graders weren’t meeting demand, and the category, while competitive, has been far from oversaturated.
In 2023, the company consolidated CGC Trading Cards and Certified Sports Guaranty into a single CGC Cards brand with a unified holder. It has rapidly grown since.
By the end of 2024, CGC Cards had positioned itself as the clear No. 2 grader in the trading card category based on volume. According to third-party grading tracker GemRate, the 2.32 million items graded by CGC Cards was a 27% year-over-year rise from 2023.
CGC Cards, which is quickly approaching 10 millions graded cards since arriving in the category five years ago, graded a company-record 341,000 cards in April.
“That’s where the upside was, and it still is,” Eichenbaum said. “We really feel like the card market internationally is just a monster, and you can tell from the success we’ve had just from inception to date — the number of cards we’re doing today is pretty astounding for us.”
Of course, there's still work to be done.
Of those 341,000 cards graded in April, more than 311,000 were TCG or non-sports. The delta between brands such as Pokémon and sports cards is high, but that’s not entirely unexpected.
CGC believed its reputation among pop-culture collectors would convert those customers when it was time to grade their Pokémon or Magic: The Gathering collection. That theory has mostly held true — CGC Cards graded more than 1.95 million TCG and non-sports cards in 2024, the second-most of the four major graders. Beckett graded the third-most with roughly 330,000.
The next step for CCG and CGC Cards will be expanding its market share across the sports card market, which could be its most difficult test yet. But like the company’s launch into comics, CGC is willing to play the long game.
CCG continues to have the trust and backing of investment firm Blackstone, which acquired a majority stake in the company in 2021. That acquisition helped modernize CCG so it can better compete in a category that is rapidly evolving.
“It’s incredibly expensive to get into one of these categories like sports cards … but we see the opportunity there, and we’re getting incredible feedback,” Spiegel said. “We’re starting to get traction in sports cards, so everything we do is looking at 10 years from now, 20 years from now. We’re not so worried about having to immediately be profitable, we want to be the best.”
In the short-term, CCG still has its playbook. It knows how to play ahead from its success in coins and comics, and it’s rapidly learning how to succeed as an underdog in trading cards.
CGC Cards has been able to gain traction with lower fees and faster turnaround times compared to key competitors. Quality-of-life improvements such as superior holders are things CGC believes it can continue to build with and will attract customers entering the market for the first time.
Now, nearly 40 years after grading its first coin and more than 25 years after grading its first comic, CCG is happy with where it stands, even if there’s more to be done.
The company has holdered coins for the Smithsonian, many of the most important comics and video games ever created, and now many of the best modern Pokémon cards in the market.
“When I first started, especially with comics, it was a slow grind,” Patel said. “But you see where we are now, you look at an auction and it’s filled with nothing but CGC-certified comics, you know all that effort went to something, and I’m happy about that.”
Ben Burrows is a reporter and editor for cllct, the premier company for collectible culture. He was previously the Collectibles Editor at Sports Illustrated. You can follow him on X and Instagram @benmburrows.