Business Opportunities Weblog

Tiny Family Biz Sells Billions in Gold

By on February 11, 2013 in Featured / Profiles

Gold

In 1973, Coins ’N Things opened as a small storefront between a Dairy Queen and a hair salon in Brockton, Mass. Today they do $6.5 billion in annual sales with about fifty employees.

How do they do it?

Easy, they’re the single largest seller of raw gold the United States government.

Every weekday, Coins ’N Things faxes the Mint with the amount of gold it can furnish and the price it wants. The Oliaris compete against four other government-approved sellers, and the Mint orders from the one with enough stock on hand at the lowest price. The family says its extensive network of suppliers often means they win the day. Coins ’N Things gets roughly 40 percent of its gold from a refinery owned by the Canadian government. “You have to know everybody, everywhere,” Mark says.

Annual revenue is now about $6.5 billion, 65 percent of which comes from gold. Mark won’t reveal profits but says the company pockets about a quarter of a percent of its precious metal sales—less for the gold it sells to the government.

Photo by Gina Sanders/ShutterStock.

family gold

Business Opportunities Weblog editor and publisher Dane Carlson lives in the Sierra Nevada mountains of California, just 15 miles from Yosemite National Park. He accidentally became a professional blogger in 2001. He has added 12,208 posts to the site.

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