A Day In The Life of an Auctioneer

Amy Smith from Tony Lester Auctions Ltd shares a day in her life of running an auction

It's 6am when my alarm goes off and all I want to do is go back to sleep. My auction day morning ritual begins with me complaining for 5 minutes that it’s a Sunday so I shouldn’t be up this early, I then crawl out of bed in the dark to find my phone somewhere on the floor. I crawl partly because I’m too tired to stand but also because I put my phone far away from my bed on the floor so that I HAVE to get out of bed to find it, otherwise I would probably just turn it off and go back to sleep. All of this is done in the dark to make it all the more exciting. Now it’s time to wake up my son Charlie, this is a 3 generations family business don’t you know! I then, feeling slightly more awake, proceed to get myself freshened up and ready for the day ahead. I wear something smart but also comfortable as it’s a long day. Time to wake Charlie up for the fifth time and tell him that he should have been up 20 minutes ago. It’s extremely unfair that he can get out of bed 10 minutes before we leave and still be ready before I am.
In between sales, which take place five times a year, I work full-time at the office. Here we meet new clients who bring us their much loved collections or maybe one of a loved one who has passed away, travel around the country viewing collections, assess and sort lots for the next auction and the general running of the business.


7am and time to leave for the office. One positive of having the auctions on Sundays is that there are no traffic jams. The drive to work is a peaceful one down the winding country roads, watching the sun rise through the trees. As I pull up to the office I see my dad Tony opening the door. My dad started Tony Lester Auctions 40 years ago and isn’t ready to stop anytime soon. He loves what he does and has built an extremely reputable business, on a daily basis new customers phone us saying that we come very highly recommended, which is always lovely to hear. Karen, Tony’s long serving secretary, is also at the office. Karen has been working at Tony Lester Auctions since they began, only stopping temporarily when she had her children. It’s great working with a team that are so experienced, and they have the running of the business down to a fine art. Once we have everything ready we head over to The Holiday Inn J2 in Coventry to meet our other colleagues, all eager to get the room ready for viewing.
After transporting over 800 lots from the van to the auction room we are ready to organize them for viewing. We have four teams working on the different aspects of the lot viewing. One team is organizing the boxes into numerical order, another sorting the self-view boxes, a third sorting the albums and envelopes and lastly Tony, Karen and I are in a separate quieter room with the special lots and stock cards. I have been working at the auctions since I was 12 so have been involved with all aspects of the auction day including sorting of the boxes, albums and envelopes and now moving onto the more specialized lots. In the afternoons I have been involved with despatching the lots, taking payments, recording the lot amounts on the computer for invoicing to now auctioneering. I remember the days when card payments were taken with a machine that would imprint the card details onto a piece of carbon paper for the payment to be taken at a later date, which shows how long I’ve been there for!

At 9:15am its time for the customers to arrive, we already have a steady queue outside the door eagerly waiting to start viewing the auction lots. The good news for our clients is that we have a wide variety of lots ranging from GB to world, single stamps to multiple boxes, and all at different price brackets, there really is something for everyone whether you are a dealer or a collector. The morning always starts slower but builds up to a peak as more and more excited philatelists arrive to look at their desired lots, hoping that no one else has spotted what they have so that they won’t get too much competition when bidding. It’s great to see so many more young collectors coming through our doors, we’ve definitely noticed an increase. The majority of my morning is spent handing out lots, taking bids, talking with customers and maybe getting a toilet break and a cup of tea if there’s time! 


At 12:45 viewing has ended and it’s time for lunch. I like to eat healthy natural foods before an auction as I find it keeps me more alert so I will usually have a salad and will drink plenty of water. Lunch is a great time to catch up with colleagues, with us having five auctions a year, with a couple of months in between each one there is always lots to catch up on. They’re a great group of people and most of them have worked there for many years, a few even longer than the 24 years I have. I think it’s nice for customers to see the same faces when they come to our auctions. Lunch time always passes very quickly and before you’ve finished your lunch there is a long queue of people waiting outside ready to come in and sit in their favourite spot.

1:45pm the auction starts… Tony starts the auction like he has done for every auction over the last 40 years, whilst I put the lots and prices onto the computer. I started doing the auctioneering about eight auctions ago, starting with around 50 lots and gradually building up to approximately 500 lots which is what I do now. Tony enjoys doing the auctioneering so he does the World and Commonwealth lots then I come in for the GB lots which is normally around half of the auction. Its 20 minutes before my auctioneering and the nerves kick in. Someone has come to relieve me from entering the auction lots and I prepare myself. It’s time for a coffee, the only time I drink coffee is just before an auction, I don’t particularly like the taste but I drink it to help me stay alert. I recite the bidding steps again, I have been doing this in my head throughout the day. I go into the auction room and maybe sit down for 5 minutes with the bidders to get a feel for the room. I then make my way up to sit beside my dad. I watch him with admiration and wish that one day I can be as calm and knowledgeable as him, even half as much would be nice! I’m on at lot 359 and Tony’s on lot 351, not long now. My nerves are getting worse as I’m trying to keep myself calm. Tony looks at me, it’s time to swap. 
I start with a shake in my voice, will this happen every time? Probably. “Lot 359 for £280” someone puts their hand up to indicate they want to bid “290. 300 postal” I have a bid of £320 on the books. “310. 320. 330 in the room. Sold to room number 45 for £330”. As the lots progress my voice becomes more stable as I begin to relax into it a bit more. The excitement mixed with tension that builds in the room when there’s a bidding war is great to experience. It could be a lot that doesn’t have a particularly high estimate but if two people want it for their collection they will keep bidding. Not everyone will get what they wanted but as long as you leave with one item that you were hoping to get then it’s a day well spent. Auctioneering is much more complicated than one may think. Not only are there the bidding steps to remember there are also the book bids that have come in through the post, email or telephone, taking into account if anyone has asked to bid on a specific lot if they didn’t get a previous one, ensuring that the information you write down is correct and making sure that you are not missing anyone’s bids. People bid in all kinds of different ways, some will hold their cards up clearly for you to see, others will just give a very slight nod of the head or twitch of the nose so as not to make it obvious to others that they are bidding and some will have multiple numbers with them as they are bidding for others. One time I got the giggles and once I start I can’t stop. Someone was on the phone with our in house bidder bidding for them and it was a bidding war between him and someone in the room. We could all hear what the phone bidder was saying so when we heard him say “yes just one more bid” we all assumed that the person in the room would get it. But when we went back to the phone bidder he thought about it and said again “yes just one more bid”. This continued to happen about 5 more times until he eventually gave in and the room bidder won the lot. The room bidder may not have wanted to bid that high but because he kept thinking the phone bidder would stop bidding it could have kept him on longer. With all this going on I could feel the giggles coming. I managed to hide them for a while but then they just came out and once they did they weren’t going back in. Luckily most people were thinking the same as me so once I started laughing I did hear a few titters coming from the room. So I spent the next 15 minutes trying to suppress my laughter. Let’s just say I was very happy to finish the auction that day!  
All of the nerves, complexity and pressure is worth it when the auction finishes. The auction itself is a culmination of many months' work so there is a real feeling of camaraderie once the sale is complete. I can’t put into words the buzz I feel once it has ended, there’s nothing like it. The auction usually finishes around 5:30pm so once everyone’s collected their items it’s time to pack everything into the van. Tired and excited from the day’s events we head home for an early night, we need to be up early tomorrow to get everything ready for the next auction!