Before he left football to sell Pokémon cards, ex-NFL linebacker Blake Martinez made millions tackling people.
Over the course of his six-year professional career, Martinez amassed more than $28 million in earnings, even co-leading the league in tackles in 2017. Then, in 2021, he tore his ACL and was released from the New York Giants a year later.
While rehabbing, he found himself focusing more and more on the side hustle he picked up during the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic. And this past fall, when it came time to decide whether to fight for a spot on a new team — in his case, the Las Vegas Raiders — or double down on selling Pokémon cards, he made a surprising decision.
He chose the cards, launching his company Blake's Breaks in July 2022 and committing to it full-time in November. Over the past seven months, it's brought in more than $5 million in revenue on collectible reselling platform Whatnot, according to documents reviewed by CNBC Make It.
A quarter of that revenue gets reinvested back into Blake's Breaks, Martinez says. The rest is take-home pay for himself and his 15 contract employees.
And while he acknowledges that his name recognition helps a little in the card-trading world, it's not really how his company makes its money, he says.
"I think there's more to my success than [my name]," Martinez tells CNBC Make It. "I used to be like the quarterback of the defense, I was calling plays. When I started this business, it felt like running a team again."
Here's how he built his company on the back of his professional sports career: