“When I first started CrystalVista Gems, it was a passion project. I loved traveling to small mining sites across the U.S., discovering unique crystals and minerals, and seeing the sparkle in collectors’ eyes when they saw a perfect stone. At first, it was simple. I would dig up gems with a couple of helpers, hand-carry them back to my workshop, polish a few by hand, and sell them at local gem shows. I could remember every stone, every cost, and every customer.

But as word spread, things grew quickly. Soon, we were sourcing raw gems from multiple locations—remote mines, independent collectors, and even small-scale international suppliers. We had to transport materials across states, sometimes hundreds of miles, to processing facilities where specialists cut, polished, and graded each gem. Then we had to get them to gem and mineral shows across the country. Each gem had a journey, and suddenly, I could no longer remember every detail. My spreadsheets were bursting, our costs were all over the place, and coordinating multiple teams scattered across the U.S. became a nightmare.

I remember one particular weekend before a major gem show. We had a batch of rare quartz crystals coming from three different states. I had no clear view of which batch was arriving first, which had already been polished, or what our total cost would be once we added transportation, labor, and packaging. I spent hours on the phone with drivers, processing teams, and dealers. By the time the show started, I still didn’t know which items were truly profitable. That was the moment I realized that passion alone wasn’t enough to scale CrystalVista Gems. We needed a system that could track everything from excavation to resale and make sense of the chaos.”