Handling more material
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Nothing about finding or buying more material is hard. Everything about processing it is.
The constraint is processing
Fifteen to thirty minutes per specimen to clean, identify, catalog, number, label, photograph and house.
Which means a show that produces two hundred specimens has produced fifty hours of work, and that is the number that decides how much you can actually handle.
Batch the steps
Do one operation across many specimens rather than all operations on one specimen.
Clean a session's worth. Then identify. Then catalog and number in one sitting with everything set up. Then photograph in one lighting setup. Then house.
The setup cost is what kills piecemeal processing, and batching removes it.
Photography in particular: one background, one light, one scale, fifty specimens in an hour, against five minutes each done separately.
Grade on arrival
Three destinations decided before anything is processed: collection, individual sale, bulk lot.
Only the first two get full processing. Bulk lots get one catalog row and a count, which is what makes volume possible at all.
Deciding this on arrival rather than later is the difference between a system and a pile.
The backlog is the real limit
Material accumulates faster than it processes, always, and the gap compounds.
The only rules that work are unpopular: process before acquiring more, and schedule the backlog rather than intending it.
One flat a week, sulfides first because those are actively deteriorating.
And be honest about the ceiling. A one-person operation has a real throughput, and buying past it does not increase output, it increases the garage.