[travrosty]

Here's how I would start an autograph authentication company.

1. Calling my business BSE (Best Signature Evaluation. here at BSE I would hire main authenticators who have 'autograph running' experience and who are hooked into store and sales modules to gain submissions, but the requirement that they have longtime actual authentication experience is secondary and an afterthought.

2. I would then contract with consultant authenticators who claim to be specialists, but not pay them, (who wants to share the loot anyway?) I wouldn't even care if these consultants worked as consultants for the competition, or even owned their own auction houses outright. I would ask them to help me authenticate not by having them look at the item in person, but by sending them scans only over the internet. (Shipping costs too much and takes too long. This is faster. What could go wrong?) There is no such thing as conflict of interest, just compounding of interest.

3. Now that I have my team in place, I will advertise them as the the world's best. Yes, we scoured the WORLD and couldn't find anyone better in Japan or Norway or the Seychelles, so we are all set. They have to be the world's best, because they are working for us, duh and we just said so, so that's settled.

4. We have the team and we advertised the heck out of them, now it's time to dilute their expertise and split them up in 2 and even 3 teams and send them all over the country to authenticate at shows. They all have computers with exemplars so they can figure any autograph presented to them at these shows, even outside of their specialty. The subscription customers who have 2 hour turnaround privileges at these shows are in for a particularly special treat as we are now under the gun to authenticate them come hell or high water in a short period of time. But we will 'get-r-done'

5. Now that we have had our entertainment or sports authenticators take a stab at it, and they have given their positive 'thumbs up' opinion to your favorite Abraham Lincoln autograph, it's time to print our COA. I have made sure to produce a generic type COA constructed in such a way that it does not list who exactly looked at and approved of your autograph. We don't necessarily list all the celebrities who have signed your item on the COA if there were too many to make it worth our while. We will say on our COA that it went through our authentication process which includes side by side exemplar comparison, but we won't show any of the exemplars, even if asked by the customer and we have no phone number for you to talk to the authenticator who looked at your autograph. Don't call us, we'll call you. If your autograph doesn't pass our inspection, we will make sure to give you a generic letter of rejection, full of vague terms we like to call 'weasel words', like flow, slant, size, shape, that don't really mean anything, and we again won't show exemplars on how we came to the conclusion that your autograph is a steaming pile of cow dung. If we can't figure it out one way or the other, we will issue you a no opinion, but we won't give you a refund, you get a voucher that locks you into another authentication. We wouldn't want to give you your money back if we can't figure it out. You understand.

6. Now that our customer has our COA in their hands, signed off by the company's brand only, it is time to take our unsightly, gaudy, shiny sticker and place it directly on your decades old, desirable and collectible item and paste it on there to let everyone know our company's name and that WE decided it was real. Joe Louis or Charles Lindbergh is second fiddle to our hologram. We might place it cockeyed, or extremely close to the signature, or even over part of the celebrity's body on the picture.

7. Next, it's time to log your submission in our database. We took a picture of your item, and assigned it a code number. When this number is entered into our online database on our website, it may or may not come up. It might come up with another picture or description, or the name of the athlete might be wrong. Our choice. If no picture comes up, sorry about that, we meant to do it. We are out autograph running, be back shortly to finish the upload.

8. In the unfortunately, (some say inevitable - haters!) scenario that our authentication was in error, we will not acknowledge nor admit we were in error, we will not cancel the cert nor remove the image from our database. The mistake simply didn't happen. Our sweep-under-the-rug policy is best for all anyway as who wants to send something in to a company that makes mistakes? Any request to see the exemplars we used to make such a mistake will go rebuffed and the tables turned on such rabble-rousers. Who are they to see what exemplars we used? Us = world experts, you = nobody!

9. Next, we give pre-certification to auction houses, which used to be called auction LOA's, but please forget that fiasco, as we weren't getting paid double for them, so we fixed that problem. Pay us again and you can get our "Now we really mean it is real" cert for the item you bought at auction that only included our "It's real but you didn't pay us so you really need the 'really real' cert."

10. Now that we got our money from the pre-certs, let's offer an online "fast assessment" option that let's people get our thumbs up or thumbs down assessment for auction items residing hundreds if not thousands of miles away from our computer. But through the amazing technology of 'scans' we can tell if it's the real deal, of course if it is a pre-print, stamp or laser copy, well, we tried, didn't we? All this from an unnamed guy with concealed credentials and hidden experience making beer money sitting in an undisclosed bunker somewhere at 2 a.m. playing 'call of duty' on their xbox and munching on a deep dish pizza pie with extra jalapenos, and slamming energy shots. We don't put his name and credentials on our website under "fast assessment" specialist because we don't want you to know who is doing the opining. Makes sense on our part, plus you don't care, do you?


Our day here at BSE is almost over, we gave 'em hell, Harry and came out unscathed for yet another day. You all come back again now, you hear? Bring your money too.
Actually, I think I would start a service doing absolutely 180 degrees opposite of what is listed above on all points but let's not rile things up and challenge the status quo because we might tick someone off or start a revolution where the customer might actually demand such customer service from their authenticators.

This can be reproduced anywhere on the web, my permission granted.