TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #736: Bitcoin Treasury for Business with Scott Marmoll

Episode Date: April 18, 2026

Marty sits down with Scott from Capital B Advisory to discuss their new Bitcoin Treasury and Exit Playbook, exploring how private business owners can accumulate Bitcoin on corporate balance sheets, navigate exit strategies, and leverage AI to optimize operations. Scott on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/scott-m-1720012b7 The Playbook: https://www.tftc.io/download-the-playbook-here/ STACK SATS hat: https://tftcmerch.io/ Our newsletter: https://www.tftc.io/bitcoin-brief/ TFTC Elite (Ad-free & Discord): https://www.tftc.io/#/portal/signup/ Discord: https://discord.gg/VJ2dABShBz Opportunity Cost Extension: https://www.opportunitycost.app/ Shoutout to our sponsors: Bitkey https://bitkey.world/ Bitcoin 2026 - Las Vegas http://bit.ly/3NA9xQh CrowdHealth https://www.joincrowdhealth.com/tftc Unchained https://unchained.com/tftc/ Salt of the Earth: https://drinksote.com/tftc Join the TFTC Movement: Main YT Channel https://www.youtube.com/c/TFTC21/videos Clips YT Channel https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUQcW3jxfQfEUS8kqR5pJtQ Website https://tftc.io/ Newsletter tftc.io/bitcoin-brief/ Twitter https://twitter.com/tftc21 Instagram https://www.instagram.com/tftc.io/ Nostr https://primal.net/tftc Follow Marty Bent: Twitter https://twitter.com/martybent Nostr https://primal.net/martybent Newsletter https://tftc.io/martys-bent/ Podcast https://www.tftc.io/tag/podcasts/

You've had a dynamic where money's become freer than free. When you talk about a Fed just gone nuts, all the central banks going nuts. So it's all acting like safe haven. I believe that in a world where central bankers are tripping over themselves to devalue their currency, Bitcoin wins. In the world of fiat currencies, Bitcoin is the victor. i mean that's part of the bull case for bitcoin if you're not paying attention you probably should be probably should be scott marty we're here uh we've been working together on something for the last what two months now uh measured in ai years probably two years yes but yes at least a couple

months yeah so i think we just jump right into it because we're launching the pdf that we've been working on um the bitcoin treasury and exit playbook which we've been mulling around again for for the better part of two months and basically what you're doing at capital b advisory um what i'm doing at tftc and 1031 what the bitcoin price is doing right now going up i think it's important for business owners um to understand particularly private business owners to understand the opportunity that Bitcoin presents them as a balance sheet asset. So we banged our heads and our clankers together for the better part of two months. We came up with this playbook, which you can go get now. The link to the playbook is in the show notes here, so you can go find

those. But yeah, I think that's what we're going to do today, just walk through the playbook. But before we walk through it, maybe explain what the audience will get out of this if they listen to the end and why you're passionate about this particular part of the market. Yeah, I think um hopefully useful tool you know clanker aside the content is is ours uh with with a lot of thought and detail into it it's a playbook for you know the bitcoin space has a lot of advice on what to do as an individual um and some individuals are business owners and those bitcoiners need a guidebook for what that looks like for their business um because at the end of the goal on the individual side and the business side is to get as much bitcoin as possible

i have sort of a decade of experience helping private business owners raise capital whether that's selling the business raising debt or equity um and recently brought that skill set specifically to the bitcoiner business owner sector um which is not to say bitcoin focused businesses and services exclusively but rather just anyone with the mindset of a bitcoiner should probably get advice when it comes to raising capital or selling their business from someone with the mindset of a Bitcoiner.

So that's the idea. Playbook has lots of nuggets of wisdom from the dipping your toes to stacking a little bit of sats with the company cash flow to how do we augment that to should I own this thing at all? When Bitcoin is your opportunity cost,

that question gets a lot harder to answer. So that's the attempt and uh hopefully some good wisdom in there yeah i guess we start out it's broken up into four parts the four first part is the case for bitcoin treasury in the first place like why if you're a business owner whether you're a bitcoin or not uh should you be thinking about this obviously michael saylor strategy been a big meme in public markets over the last almost five years but this strategy applies to private businesses as well and probably is actually better for private businesses it it does and it is uh with the caveat that it's a little less financial engineering

right like sailors created a magical flywheel that i think people will study for ages um in the private markets it's a little simpler the opportunity is similar though which is you know So accumulating Bitcoin on the balance sheet for businesses is augmenting the performance in the balance sheet, whereas the historical sort of fiat landscape for valuing businesses is all based on the P&L. And so you start to accumulate this hard asset. It gives you optionality to do other things. First section is kind of Bitcoin curiosity around the Bitcoin or business owner. Okay, what do I do? What should I do to start to explore that?

same as when you're first exploring bitcoin as an individual you start to you know get the advice of hey i should dca i should be careful not to be in a for seller position and over the short term all these things apply but in the business owner perspective there's other factors a big one being that you know if you own control then the difference between doing this on your personal balance sheet and on your corporate balance sheet might be there might be no difference there might be major tax implications uh and if you have sort of shared equity with family members or early investors or scaled investors, then suddenly the unilateral control to distribute capital is limited. But if you own control, then you still have the control to

put Bitcoin on the balance sheet. So for some folks, it's like, hey, my father-in-law is a minority investor. And if I distribute cash to buy Bitcoin on a personal balance sheet, I've got to distribute cash to him too, and he's not gonna buy Bitcoin with it, and I'm tired of arguing arguing with him at Thanksgiving I'm just gonna buy Bitcoin and put it on the company balance sheets that he now owns some some Bitcoin through that Minority equity position so lots of little factors in there I think at the solo entrepreneur and small small business phase It's it's really hard to distinguish between the personal balance sheet and the professional sort of corporate balance sheet But as you get into that sort of two

$2, $5, $50 million of free cash flow, you're talking about businesses that have different trade-offs between the tax and the shareholder dynamics for stacking sats in the corporate entity versus distributing to shareholders. Well, not only that, too, as you get to those larger scales of cash flowing and then stacking cash on the balance sheet, the opportunity cost of keeping it in cash versus something like Bitcoin is extremely high. And that's something we describe in the first section as well, is trying to make the case, why should your business have Bitcoin on its balance sheet? Well, exactly.

And I think, you know, do I expect the sort of non-Bitcoiner to crack this book and go, oh my gosh, this is it? Maybe not. But I think it's going to help. And that first section is just explaining like, look, if you have $10 million of working capital cash that you keep on hand to fund payroll and inventory and maintenance capex, that, you know, that's a painful necessity because over a year's time, if you're, you know, everyone's experience inflation is different. The CPI number is just one metric. But for most folks, especially in businesses, you know, you're probably closer to PPI. That metric is still totally manipulated. But the reality, I think, for most businesses, especially if they have to accumulate any hard assets on the balance sheet, is like 10% purchasing power loss every year.

So $10 million of working capital cash gets you $8 million worth of stuff in a year. That's a huge, that's an important piece of the business to have optimized. and you know there's a lot of different ways to skin that cat but certainly just sitting on a pile of cash is not the best way to do it no and then in terms of bringing this back to like board members family members i think the way in which we describe the frame is really highlighting that problem that you just described with the erosion of the purchasing power the cash sitting on your balance sheet and basically having them recognize that first so if you do have a board or a group of people you need to convince i think framing and backing into a bitcoin treasury strategy

is very important here start with the problem exactly yeah i think and this is true for orange pilling your friends and family your colleagues or in the boardroom start with the problem um you know who does a really good job of this jeff booth right he he was in nine chapters of the book price of tomorrow before he mentions the word bitcoin and he paints the problem pretty well. So I agree. It's the same approach there. Because the odds that even if you are sort of fully orange-pilled Bitcoiner, it's not likely that your $20 million EBITDA business has a perfectly aligned board on this topic or shareholder group. It's common. I see a lot of brothers-in-law that co-own businesses. That's a very common dynamic, right? Guys end up brothers-in-law

uh through marrying and then they start a business sometime in their 30s and by their 40s or 50s they've got like a really nice asset one of them's a bitcoin or one's not this is a super common i'm actually working with some clients right now that have this dynamic they're not brothers-in-law but they are you know dear friends one's totally down the rabbit hole the other one's tiptoeing so this would be a great tool for that conversation and then moving into uh the tactical playbook and sort of frameworks for thinking about how to approach an allocation depending on the scale of your business the buy-in from board or brothers-in-laws that you may need right yeah i mean i think the last thing you want to do is rock the boat so you want to be careful that you don't kind

of say all right team we're all in bitcoin on october 6th of 2025 right and then uh suddenly your working capital situation is is dire so you know the case is gonna be different for every single business and situation but thoughtful approach to what's our runway uh what's our burn what is our sort of cash conversion cycle and what can we do to safely move some of the value that's trapped in that situation into bitcoin um and i think boards think about this anyway because they certainly don't want you sitting on cash but usually it's hey reinvest in the business but if the reinvestment in the business is like a 10 15 return on invested capital you know you probably want to evaluate other options a la bitcoin it's a lot less work to

to sit in bitcoin and clip that success um it's also very hard to sell a board on that when we're at you know 70 some k and down 40 plus percent but it's also the best time to do it it is no And we touch on it in the playbook as well, but I think building on what you were just saying there with our experience at 1031, and we've seen this within our portfolio, Grant Gillum, co-founder and a partner of mine at 1031, he wrote this piece I think two or three years ago, maybe even longer than that at this point. Bitcoin is the fourth lever of equity value growth, and it's something we've highly encourage portfolio companies to do particularly if bitcoin is significantly below uh the price

uh of the previous all-time high and they've raised around let's put a chunk of that into bitcoin um make sure you have enough runway to reinvest in the business and make payroll and all that but put a chunk of bitcoin build out your your company your product suite as quickly and as efficiently as possible run as lean as possible get to revenue profitability and you'll find at the end of the day bitcoin is this forcing function to make you efficient to make sure that you're not adding a ton of bloat to your organization and then on top of that once you get to profitability uh and uh you're looking pretty like when you go back to market and bitcoin has appreciated that takes two or three years uh the value of the business is looking

good and then you have incredible optionality right as a founder so a bit different scale you're talking like mid-market established companies spitting out cash but it's true either way grant grant i don't know where it was grant gave a presentation i watched on youtube uh riga yes and he's got uh great memes in there um grant grant does a wonderful job of balancing wall street jargon and memes i think there's a michael jackson thriller zombie image in there that uh gets to the heart of the problem which is a lot of businesses you know if their sort of hurdle rate was bitcoin then they shouldn't exist and um yes that you guys at 1031 have lived it the, the scale is different in venture, but honestly, you know, I think a lot of the way

1031 thinks about investment is more like a private equity fund. I mean, you know, Bitcoin land doesn't have, you know, super copious numbers of, uh, 10, $20 million EBITDA businesses, but you know, I think you guys are working hard to change that with the investments you make and whether a business is negative cashflow, like a venture opportunity or mid-market and, you know cash flowing quite nicely that the math is the same which is you know holding a bunch of cash for the long term is for sure not the best idea then the question is just well what is the right mix um and and i definitely think that from the investor perspective from the 1031 perspective you guys have probably seen it where having bitcoin on balance sheet augments the equity

value math in a way that's been helpful in otherwise you know down times in in business cycles um and you're right i think it it sounds too simple but really just as long as you're not like right at all-time highs it's probably an okay time to stack aggressively into a bitcoin treasury for the long term and i think we talk about it in the book in the in the pdf here but you guys have seen that firsthand right i mean some of the 1031 portcos have kind of weathered longer than they otherwise would have because they raised and and allocated meaningfully that race to bitcoin and now it gives them more runway because it's more than it was if they would have kept it in dollars yeah and i think this gets into a good point of the playbook as well which is running

through the sort of tactical decision tree of do i lump sum do i dca in what situation should i do either or and i think that's very important too because i think a lot of what we see in the 1031 one is raise and most companies will do a dca over a set period of time yep yep and that set period of time is is less than a four-year you know if cycles exist it's less than a four-year cycle i there's not a right answer on this that one i mean even i'll tell you on the personal side whatever if anybody could just look through all my trades they should just do the exact opposite um i'm i'm michael saylor is competing for for top tick king but i'm i'm pretty darn good at it uh so but but the good news is if you just wait it out that trade ends up being a good trade

anyway um but that said you know i like what adam back says about this it's like if you take out what is it the 10 best days of a year in bitcoin you're just like down hilariously um which means time in the market is more important than timing the market i think the dca strategy just feels responsible when you're doing it with like large quantities right when you get into seven eight or nine figures, it's kind of nervy to be the guy that hit the button to do the spot buy. Because again, you know, even if you're the control shareholder, like whether that's at Thanksgiving or at board meetings, someone's going to be yelling at you if the timing was wrong. And so I think there's a balance there. And at the end of the day, you know, the advice is just

advice and the business owner has to decide. But I think that's right. It's like some version of we're going to like size into this over six months or 12 months. Um, but also case dependent, right? How intense is your seasonality on cash conversion, right? It's like, Oh, we buy a ton of equipment in the fall. Well, let's not run out of cash in the fall then. Um, so, you know, that's always going to be a case by case situation, but, um, the sooner you're off zero, the better. And I think for some businesses that that'll be the case, but many, it'll be, we want to move what is already a personal Bitcoin strategy into the corporate here. well i think it's important to elaborate on this too because we say it in the piece

that if you pick a certain strategy like let's say you want to dca a certain amount either in perpetuity over a fixed period of time and let's say the bitcoin price dumps by 30 you you stop doing it because you're scared out of the market like that is right you have to go into this with the mental framework that there is going to be volatility whatever plan you you said you have to stick to it um the easy part is buying the bitcoin and ask any long-term bitcoin holder the hard part is stomaching the volatility um so absolutely set a plan uh work with an advisor to set that plan be deliberate about um establishing that plan outwardly with the key stakeholders whether that's the management team or shareholders or brothers-in-law so that

you um have something other than your own uh emotions to point to when decisions are being made on that strategy because for sure if you're new to bitcoin and you started sizing into it in october of this year you probably have a little heartburn right now um but if you've set a playbook and you're sticking to it then you can kind of rest easy that we need to see this all the way through before we get heartburn and uh change our strategy all right now let's um let's walk to the spectrum of sort of different Bitcoin strategies, depending on where the particular business owner is in their personal journey with their business. Some Bitcoiners that run businesses are like, hey, I'm going to keep running this for 10 years. So I'm just going

to do a set and forget a DCA strategy over the next decade. Others are later in their careers and looking to make an exit and sort of framing what options exist to acquire Bitcoin using your business across that spectrum and for those who are closer to selling their businesses what what does the landscape look like why is now opportunistic the the bitcoiner business owner hero's journey i call it uh was similar to the individual bitcoiner hero's journey you start stacking some sats you get excited you sit in the red for two or three years then you're kind of permanently in the green you continue to stack sats you start looking around what else can i sell you start liquidating iras and other positions a decade in you sell your chairs uh the hero's

journey on the business owner side looks similar uh the scale is different but the game is similar uh stacking bitcoin to the balance sheet some conservative portion of cash flow okay get more aggressive okay 100 of cash flow okay can we borrow money against the business to accelerate that can we pull forward accumulation and then bitcoin uh bitcoin or business owners thinking about the end game for their business uh have a different hurdle because bitcoin you know historical kegger pick your number 30 40 50 percent makes you really want to own more of that thing and if you're looking at your business saying okay next year if we want to grow 10% we need to put in uh you know we need to reinvest into the business

meaningfully and we run the math on that and the return on invested capital there is 15% for example in fiat land that's great right private equity will underwrite that all the time because they'll use leverage and they'll augment that and they'll make nice returns for their lps in bitcoin land you're like okay i can spend whatever uh make 15% return on it with a bunch risk execution and otherwise or i could have taken that same cash and just bought bitcoin um then it gets harder so so then you start thinking through okay the hurdle rate for a business owner is that bitcoiner is that bitcoin kager and the hurdle rate for the potential acquirers of your business is the fiat treasuries kager or or yield and so what we're seeing and

this is in the materials is that the fiat markets are overvaluing your business because they don't understand bitcoin uh i have a theory that the reason private equity hasn't yet come to understand bitcoin is because if you take their playbook which is five to seven years of illiquidity and you apply it to just buying and holding bitcoin for five to seven years it kind of begs the question of like why does this industry exist at all why are we allocating capital paying two and 20 to these private equity professionals for them to underperform spot Bitcoin, which is liquid 24 seven tradable 365 around the globe. And if I just don't touch it for five to seven years, I probably outperformed 99% of private equity funds. That is your advantage

as a business owner, because they're going to keep valuing businesses that way. It's their job to deploy that capital. That's, you know, private equity fund, LP capital, limited partners, think teachers pension funds and the firefighters union and university endowments chasing yield to pay their pension liabilities and other sort of long-term liabilities like from insurance funds and they have to make a return so there is this artificial bid for nice cash flowing businesses and you can take those proceeds if you're at that stage in your business uh and sell all of it part of it, raise some debt, or just stack a little bit of Bitcoin, but all across that menu of options, depending on where you are as a business owner, you can use it, you can use sort

of future performance, either equity value or cash flow to accumulate Bitcoin at what I think everyone agrees is lower prices than it will be in the future. That's the exciting trade. And so you can see in the materials, you know, the overall equity valuations across public and private markets for these businesses, the enterprise values rather, is just going up into the right. There are interruptions around COVID and whatever else. And I'm sure what's going on right now in macro isn't great for valuations. But overall, the trend is just up into the right. So we see inflation everywhere, including in asset prices. That is coming to Bitcoin. But while it's still overstated in equities, you own equity as a business owner. So there's a monetization

opportunity but it is not near as simple as logging into fidelity and selling shares of apple computer the private markets are very illiquid clunky it takes months to negotiate it's a lot of heartbreak um but deal making is a ton of fun and so that's that's cba's pitch so freaks guess what just booked my tickets to vegas headed for bitcoin 2026 it's that time of the year april 27th to 29th in las vegas i'm gonna be there a ton of people are gonna be there you better get your ass there you know what it's people are calling a bear market you know these are the best conferences i've been going since 2019 when it was in a parking garage in san francisco if you want to get the best possible ticket prices make sure you use our link and the

code tftc you go to 2026.b.tc use the code tftc you'll get 10 off you can bundle with a hotel room to stay big and make the most of your experience staying on site at the venetian that is where i will be ticket prices are increasing so make sure you get yours today Join Bitcoiners from all around the world. It's a global endeavor. It's a pilgrimage, if you will, for the ultimate networking experience. There's going to be a ton of people there that you can hear from the biggest names in the industry. Saylor's going to be there. Matt and I and the PubKey boys and the Bugle boys, we're going to have live hot style takeover. That's going to be there too. All in the Venetian. Everybody's meeting up. It's going to be fun.

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who haven't moved it off, tell them to pick up a BitKey. Go to bitkey.world, use the key TFTC20 at checkout for 20% off your order. That's bitkey.world, code TFTC20. Well, let's go into the three different scenarios you listed.

Sell the whole company, maybe sell part of it yep roll it back in alongside the pe sponsor and yeah so and then the other one is keep it right so the the first one is hey return on invested capital in this business is now like objectively unexciting to me as the owner i want to take all of my chips and go home and my chips are going into bitcoin that is the full sale strategy i think the biggest thing for that plan is exit planning which needs to happen way before you decide to go to market I tell business owners you should work hard for years in advance to make yourself useless to the business that way when the time comes to sell the buyer isn't saying okay you need to be I need you

shackled to the desk here right I like to joke that private equity funds they buy your company they don't want you to go to the beach they want you to drive a really nice car to the office every day and so you've got to work really hard as an owner entrepreneur to do the one thing that you've always most most times struggle to do which is take your hands off and start empowering your team to run the business without you so that when you do go to exit you really are a passive shareholder because passive shareholders get paid cash active shareholders get paid in earnouts and other you know contingencies that tie you to the business the next category is like hey i really like my business it's got a great return on invested capital the opportunity to grow here is

huge but i'm tired of betting the farm and i'm overweight my company and underweight bitcoin And so I don't want to miss the boat on Bitcoin, but I also am not ready to sell my job away. I like running this business. You are, in that case, private equity's favorite because you're saying, I want somebody to give me some money to take risk off the table, and then I want to go pursue the half a dozen aggressive growth strategies that I've always thought about but always been scared to go after because I don't want to personally guarantee, I can't get the bank to give me that much money, whatever the risk.

Private equity is going to eat that alive. They love that because they're saying, hey, there's a bunch of low hanging fruit. The only reason this hasn't already happened in this business is because the owner is tired of doubling down with basically and sometimes literally signing the deed to his house to the downside case. So in that case, you know, sell a portion of your business to a private equity fund or other acquirer, roll some of your ownership into a minority position, stay in an operator seat and go execute on that next phase of growth and know that you're partnered with

people on the balance sheet in in the investment that their job is to make three five x on their money and so you're riding along in your minority position with that but you've also just taken some cash off the table you've likely eliminated personal guarantees in the business and you're in a position to really chase the next phase of growth with the institutional sophistication that didn't exist before right they're going to help you set up a board they're going to give you strategic planning but you also are going to have you know in a in a worst case description you have bosses. So there's a balance there. And then the far end of the spectrum would be, you know, don't partner with these folks at all. I think it would be like, this is definitely the case in a

lot of Bitcoin companies is if we have, if a Bitcoiner has started a business, they have looked at the risk reward and said, I think I can outperform Bitcoin here. TFTC and CBA are both great examples. And like, can you picture a scenario where you would sell equity for anything beyond like an insane valuation? Probably not, because you want to grow and be the beneficiary of all of that cash flow. And so I think in that scenario, if you've got lighting in a bottle, then your goal should be to never give away any equity unless you're at that stage. So I think that's the early stage, right? Stack Bitcoin, grow the business on your own. That mid-stage is really interesting because there's a lot of that happening. And then that final stage,

you've really got to make sure that your transaction preparedness puts you in a position to not be a key man or mission critical to that transaction yeah let's go back to two parts one being the second option you sell part of the business roll alongside the pe firm i think another thing that we highlight uh in the playbook as well is that you take the proceeds by bitcoin your long bitcoin pe fund at the end of your relationship uh they get their nuts and then you have the potential if bitcoin has a a good run during your engagement with the pe firm to to buy your company back yeah so this would be so fun i think we'll find this uh you know we're looking for this client at cba but i i love the idea of using the private equity funds money to

buy bitcoin on the personal side watching them you know make some smart decisions but maybe some dumb ones too and at the end of their sort of five seven year process they're you know hiring an investment banker to go sell that business you're a minority owner and you're like actually i'll buy it and you use your bitcoin stack which has probably grown much faster than their investment in your business uh to reclaim the ownership of your business i think that would be really interesting i've i've heard i've had clients uh who've lived this experience where you know they sold to a big private equity fund it didn't go great uh whether growth slowed down or leverage was poorly managed or whatever it was and they end up you know partnering with other groups to

buy back the business and and sort of write the course and grow it again i think you know entrepreneurs are kind of serial uh they're very competitive and they like to win and i think it'd be a pretty cool win to unlock some liquidity from your business use it to accumulate bitcoin at at what we all agree are lower prices today than they will be in the future. And then fast forward to that future date and say, hey, private equity guys, nice trade you did there. I'll actually take it back. And oh, by the way, it's going to take me half of the cash you gave me

five, seven years ago because I stored it in Bitcoin. Yeah. And then second thing to bring it up on, you're a Bitcoiner ourselves, own a business. I alluded to it earlier with how 1031 portfolio company founders typically view their businesses. but bitcoiners are good business operators or they should be at least that's that is the thesis for cba so uh i'm counting on the bitcoin community to be to make me look uh to prove me right which

is i think bitcoiners are by nature contrarians they have figured out something that requires a lot of humility now i'm not saying we're all humble but we had to start humble right because you had to say okay what am i wrong about oh literally everything when it comes to money um and then you sort of re-educated yourself on the bitcoin standard so if if that is an archetype and i think somebody just did some research on like the emotional intelligence strategy yeah myers-briggs yeah i think brandon brandon quittem did that years ago but he brings it up okay it must have just hit like it just it bubbled up to me recently and and it's like you know bitcoiners are one of two types i think my thesis is that bitcoiners are good business owners because

they have figured out something that takes a lot of research and humility to understand and if that you apply that mentality to businesses my thesis is that like being bitcoin first as an advisor to business owners i'm going to get to work with all the best business owners because all the best businesses will be run by bitcoiners um and and it's also a fun top of funnel because there's no such thing as someone who's like oh yeah i used to be into bitcoin and so my tam for people that want to work with cba because they want to work with the advice of an advisor that understands bitcoin is just however many bitcoiners there are their own businesses and i'm betting on that number going up forever yeah i think it will and the um the thing i wanted to bring up after

this is like highlighting that this is real and not only is it real it's more real than it's ever been because of the emergence of ai tools right i think talking about running lean um operations i think that's one thing we've really bonded over over the last two months is is banging our heads together talking about our ai setups and what it's done for our individual businesses yeah i owe you a big thank you so all anecdotes about ai and deflation that are useful for this um are is primary to my business and it's thanks to you so i was playing around with open claw like everyone in late February, and was trying to hook it up to Maple. Ambitious, you know, privacy preserving, the right ethos. And you and I were chatting, and I'm like, I just, this thing is a net negative to

my productivity right now. What am I doing wrong? And you encouraged me, you know, the trade-off is obviously privacy, but you're running a business, so it's not like you have super good privacy on that side anyway. Lean into the frontier models, and also lean into the spend. Find a way to justify it right so if that's if you're pinching pennies on your ai subscription that's not the right approach find a way to make it pay for itself and that advice from you was probably in late february and you know the anecdote for cba is that prior to late february the goal so i launched this firm in october of last year i was previously a vice president kenner fitzgerald not on their crypto stuff uh but just a middle market investment banker and so i launched this in october the goal

from october to sort of i'll call it you know d-day for it for open claw and ai was to grow the business to a scale where i could justify a million dollars of gna a team of five maybe three associates and two analysts or two associates three analysts in investment banking to support deal execution for my top of funnel deal flow uh enter open claw and frontier models uh agentic ai in general and now i'm not sure that cba ever needs a junior team member um and so like people say, well, where is the actual deflation in AI? Well, I mean, it's a million dollars of savings a year for CBA. And I know that you're seeing this on your side too, but it's just, that's happening really quick. Business owners, especially in the middle market that aren't going to get

disrupted by like, oh, we're a SaaS and we just don't exist anymore, that live in the physical world molecules wise, their opportunity to layer AI into their stack is like, they can probably shave multiple million dollars out of gna um and so you know let's go after that as a bitcoin community and and make even greater businesses and and then use those to accumulate bitcoin yeah and the anecdote from our side i think this playbook is a perfect example of it like i said we banged our clankers together it's not really for the content itself but it's structuring it in a way like this pdf that we have i think it's very beautiful and the bigliest this has been an idea like partnering with somebody like you to do uh sort of like a collaboration on something

specific in the space in this case the bitcoin treasury and exit playbook for private businesses but i wanted to do this for years but in my mind it's like i really i've got myself the team has grown we've added two team members so including myself there's six of us um a couple of them are part-time over the last year we've added two and i've never had the confidence or the resources to be like okay if i wanted to do something like this i probably have to go hire a designer or somebody who can just run and lead this stuff and now that's not the case like we could sit there we went back and forth over multiple calls over the course of six weeks about how this is going to be structured and then we got our final sort of text and the graphics we wanted to put in and

boom the clanker was able to actually format and design it's incredible pdf uh in minutes yeah i i think um i think that this it turns you i think i'm stealing this from you somebody i listen to a lot of podcasts uh you know it turns the ideas guy into a results guy um and and you've got great ideas and and those can now basically come into existence with a voice message um i know the bitcoin community is very like pro-privacy and that there's massive trade-offs running these things on frontier models where they're for sure hoovering up your data but look if you're a business owner who are you kidding yourself like you like all of your data is getting eaten alive and i know that's not a good answer like that's a that's a quitter's answer but also i think if

we look at where open source models are today six to twelve months from now i think it's not unrealistic to say we can self-host some of these things now that won't be cheap but if you're a business owner getting a million dollars worth of gna value out of running open you know agents through OpenClaw, Hermes, whatever other agentic harness. And you need to spend 30 grand on GPUs. Okay, it's pretty easy to do the math on that ROI. And so you can either sit around and wait for open source models to be ready for that

so you don't ever have to violate the privacy, but you'll also be, you know, I mentioned at the beginning, it's like AI is like dog years. Like you'll be years behind if you don't play with these things now so that when you can, you know, take an open source model and your own hardware and run it, you're ready because you've already built the systems

and processes around the business to be ready for that yeah and i i feel like we're very fortunate at tftc because we run a media business a lot of our output is public anyway and so the input on the back end is just like a lot of source material if our chats were to get leaked it's just us right like hey literally read everything we've ever written create our voice and here's the topics we're interested in here's the source material we want to report on help us format it the right way And people get, people, it is funny, there are a lot of Luddites out there who are, this is all AI slop. I don't think they understand, like, yes, AI is helping with the output, the end output, but there's a lot of curation and context provided before that. And I showed you the sort of hockey stick growth we've seen in terms of engagement and what's happening.

And I think despite what the Luddites are saying, like the proof is in the pudding, like it's helping us be better at disseminating information. Absolutely. If you're already a master of your craft, which I'd like to think that you are, I'd like to think that I am, adding AI to your stack augments you in the same way that Tony Stark's Iron Man suit augments him. If you are not, then you become a slop cannon and there is no in between. And so I think what I've found, actually, great example, I actually launched a side business focused on this. I'm helping folks in the Bitcoin community and now sort of just broader community get these harness setups running on their own machines. And I recommend the frontier models, even though there's a privacy tradeoff. Every single one of my 30 plus customers now has started their own business. I think there might be one exception to that.

And in every case, they're not saying, hey, AI, how do I make money? they're taking what they're already good at and working with their agent to build something that that generates revenue or generates value for the world and bringing that to market and so it's such a fun project to see folks kind of bear that out what you what you see online that is you know causing the luddite behavior is people will just get a new agent and say make me money you know i think you and matt probably went through this experience trying to have them having the the agents trade um trade whatever marketplace you know there are high frequency funds that have been working on that strategy for a long time and so there's not a lot of alpha there but if you're

if you have literally anything that you think you're halfway decent at you can basically build a business around it with like a few voice messages um so there's there's never been a better time to start a business um there's never been a better time to be in bitcoin i'm very bullish on on all the all the above and the intersection of ai and bitcoin is pretty exciting i didn't have in my base case for bitcoin uh 50 plus percent deflationary event in ai sort of bringing value to the world and my thesis is that the only strategy to solve for that like we can't have deflation in the economy like central planners could be laser-eyed bitcoiners they don't have a choice they can't have the value of the money go up so they're gonna have to print

the difference and so like when i first got into bitcoin as a gold bug and i was like wow they're gonna they have they have to print so much money they have to print so much money um i i have um friends in the bay area bitcoiner san francisco area that we keep in touch even though i've moved away they are my original sort of bitcoin meetup uh folks and i whenever we're texting about macro i usually end our conversations with they are going to print so much money and um you know for better or worse ai accelerates that i think so freaks when you take bitcoin seriously you start with custody you want to control your keys avoid single points of failure and make sure your savings cannot disappear because you or someone else screwed up that is what unchained has been

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all right we got a bit of an ai tangent we gloss over it in the piece but maybe we can do a whole another one on that uh like how how bitcoin optimizes business or ai optimizes business and then you can use the efficiencies and the productivity and hopefully the revenue and cash flow gains the funneled into bitcoin but bringing it back to the playbook and just tying a knot in the exit decision or the the three decisions that we talked about um why moving now as opposed to waiting yeah so um set aside bitcoin for a second the conversation i have with business owners for for all of my career in fiat land, in private equity, in fiat land M&A, in private equity as a buyer, in fiat land M&A, because I sort of went both sides of the deal table. It's always,

you know, now's an okay time to sell, but I don't want to take the tax hit because I've got, you know, X value in the business. And when I sell it, you know, 80% of it's going to be ordinary income or no, sorry, 20% of it's going to be ordinary income. And the other 80% is going be goodwill which will be taxed at cap gains rates nobody wants to give away like say you sell a business for 100 million dollars and you give 30 of it to uncle sam like that's really painful and i don't like i don't think it's a an ethically good thing to do even so like there i understand people's a lot of business owners like well i want to delay that i want to deal with that later i want to get my house in order figure out a way to avoid more of that tax and i

agree like there are legal and and trust and uh tax efficiency stuff that we kind of allude to we are neither of us professionals in those categories i think you should get good advice in those categories um but if you're like waiting to sell or raise capital or take chips off the table because you think that you'll somehow save money on taxes later if bitcoin is your opportunity cost good luck because the american huddle says this thing's a runaway freight train like every day you wait the risk that you never see that price again is real and so take the tax hit see see what that looks like and stack bitcoin today at today's prices versus waiting five years assume any reasonable kegger for bitcoin and then run the math later even at

a more efficient tax rate you're gonna see that you'd be better you'd have more bitcoin by making that trade today and this is all this is a fun plug like there's a calculator on the cba website that helps you look at this which is just okay do i raise capital now do i sell equity now whether it's control or or the whole thing or most of it or a minority and use that to buy bitcoin at today's prices or do i wait okay well what do i wait for how long okay what's the bitcoin kager over that timeline how much bitcoin would i get if i waited and it's you know that calculator you know i built it with my clanker it's pretty hard to get that calculator to show you that the better trade is to wait and now obviously as an advisor who makes transactions happen that is self uh self-promoting

but it is also just mostly true which is if you look back on when you should have bought bitcoin yesterday was the best day today is the next best day any form of waiting usually ends up being a mistake yeah and then getting into the technical details i think that's important we can uh wrap up the four sections there but then we'll get into some examples which uh you provide at the end some case studies but in terms of what this looks like not what this looks like in practice but uh that's i think one of the underappreciated aspects of businesses getting into bitcoin you can convince them like all right i'm in i'm gonna dca i'm gonna lump sum i'm gonna do this that but what do you actually do who do you work with who are your counterparties so i i want to be careful

not to like pick favorites there's a lot of good services out there a rule i would suggest folks adopt is is look for businesses services uh and advisors that are focused on bitcoin only um in in optimizing for more than just bitcoin in the crypto world usually corners are cut and shortcuts are taken that are dangerous and if someone doesn't understand that bitcoin is the signal and it's the crypto noise then you have to sort of doubt the rest of their advice and so start with that as a filter and then I think there's several categories so there's there's tax right you definitely want well you have to pay your taxes you should do that every year you probably have advice for that already but I think

tax efficiency for a transaction whether that's raising capital to invest in the business acquire a competitor take chips off the table sell outright there are things you can do ahead of time with tax attorneys to be more efficient with that tax implication um legal from a structuring perspective you know when you transact regardless of the type there you'll be making representations and warranties that create scenarios where if what you said or disclosed during the transaction was untrue uh that can have real recourse and so you want to make sure that the attorneys helping you document your transaction are top notch. Attorneys are painfully expensive, but, um, sometimes it's money well

spent. I'm curious to see how AI drives that cost down because a lot of what they do is just pattern recognition. So I'm excited for, for discounts in that category and I'll help, I'll help businesses find them. Um, so yeah, legal tax, uh, if it's Bitcoin accumulation, then you got to think about custody for sure. Um, and there's a, there's no one size fits all. I think on one end of the spectrum, like a cold card in a desk at the CEO's office is a way to do it. But like, who are your shareholders? What is the risk profile?

When do you need to move the Bitcoin? You could look at multi-sig setups where your board has a distributed set of keys, but then you run into this problem of like, okay, well, when we cycle out an employee, a C-level employee or a board member, we have to like do a key rollover ceremony that can get messy. there are businesses and service providers that that cover that space um what else am i missing uh trading so obviously like if you're gonna deploy a bitcoin accumulation strategy you you need to have an exchange acquire the bitcoin for you take your cash and give you sats for it um i'm trying to think of what else did we cover in there there is a whole checklist that folks can

go through and i think it it'll depend where you are um i mean being m&a prepared like you just on i think we touched on this earlier but it's like it's just not going to happen tomorrow that's right yeah you can't log into fidelity and sell shares in your in tftc and uh and and i can't in cba and so i think there's a lot of work to do there it doesn't start when you decide you're ready it starts well in advance um and so getting good advice on what that looks like building a playbook and working towards it whether that's a 12 month 18 month three-year plan you know uh just a regular way m&a process could take you six plus months so and then and then what you need in that checklist will depend on where you're at and so this this will dovetail nicely into case studies

so cba's client base spans anyone that's a bitcoiner and so in some cases i'm helping you know seed round businesses make introductions to potential investors in other cases i'm i'm working with scaled entrepreneurs selling the whole business because they have looked at the return on invested capital in that business and said, I'd rather own Bitcoin and everything in between. And so in the sort of Bitcoiner seed round sort of stage, you're thinking about what portion of this raise do we allocate to Bitcoin? How do we manage against our burn? And you have these two trends of like well i want to raise as much cash as i can to buy bitcoin today but i don't want to sell any equity because the only reason i'm building this thing is i think it's going to

outperform bitcoin that's a very different mindset than fiat vc where you're saying just raise as much cash as possible because that's all that matters um and the other end of the spectrum before you come to the conclusion i'm going to sell the whole thing look at with a advisor what does a partial sale look like? What does taking some chips off the table look like? Work with tax folks to look at what actually net proceeds is going to be and then have a real sense of humor about it's not going to happen overnight because it's a lot of work. Yeah. Well, I think to give tangible examples of companies that you've worked with, I mean, not to name them by name, but you have a few in here that I think would be helpful for people listening. Maybe their business is

similar and so the franchisee i think is a really good one the franchisee is my favorite and uh i called him before this to see if he would mind what level of uh of commentary i gave and so uh i'll keep it high level but um a multi-site franchisee so i've done a lot of multi-site franchisee m&a in my in my fiat days um this is a business in food in restaurant uh in a really nice scaled franchise brand and the owner is a bitcoiner and so you're thinking okay well that business has nothing to do with bitcoin the reason cba is involved is because the owner is a bitcoiner and he wants advice from another bitcoiner they are exploring the outright sale of that business because the return on invested capital of opening another store another of the

multi-site brand is like 15% ish with leverage. That's like not worth it when you think about the opportunity costs of just holding Bitcoin. And so for that situation, we got involved early and started talking about, hey, maybe you should raise some debt to put Bitcoin on the balance sheet. So they started accumulating Bitcoin on their balance sheet a year ago. And the start of our conversation was, I think you should raise some debt. I think I, at the time, assumed he was pretty bullish on his business. I was like, I'm not telling you to sell equity. I think you should use debt to accumulate faster at lower Bitcoin prices last summer. And through that exercise and learning what the options were in the debt markets, he was like, man, I don't have

that much conviction in the next five years of this trade to be long the equity with leverage just to get a little bit more Bitcoin exposure. And so through that exploration, we came to this conclusion of, I think there's a number where I'd like to sell this business. And so that's what we're working through right now. But that is a great example of one where he literally lived through the journey of just started stacking sats. We worked through that with him. Then we explored, well, could you use leverage to speed that up? There feels like a runaway freight train in Bitcoin right now. Last summer, we sort of all thought we weren't going to be where we are right now. But it still would have been a great trade if he ended up doing it. But through that exercise

and looking at, okay, I have to do what? I'm gonna have to personal guarantee potentially. I'm gonna take on how much leverage? That's how much interest expense? Whoa, that's a lot of heartburn. I'm not that bullish on the brand here or the underlying investment opportunity. And so then I think the conclusion is gonna be,

let's sell this business. Now, part of the heartbreak in my business is the business owner retains up until the day of closing the right to change his mind and say, nevermind. So I like to joke, you know, m&a advisory is like 364 days a year of heartbreak and then one day a year you're like crying tears of joy because you get a deal closed um so i think i might be a little bit masochist for enjoying it so much but those closing days are very fun yeah all right next one uh multi-unit

operator that that was the multi-unit operator so i jumped out of order the first one uh is is really transaction reparation is more of a an abstract of if you are in a sort of nice fiat business and you're thinking through what does that look like in 18 months don't wait 18 months to call right we there's a lot you can do ahead of time the main thing we talked about earlier which is make yourself replaceable make yourself irrelevant to the business as the owner as the control owner and entrepreneur if everyone is paralyzed when you're on vacation the the investor the buyer whether it's a strategic or a private equity fund or a family office is going to have a lot of trouble letting you go to the beach and so then you get back to that analogy of they're

going to want you to drive a really nice car to the office every day so the the the work begins well in advance of a transaction to make yourself not needed and so you explored this option with the multi-unit franchise owner but he decided not to wants to sell the business but diving into who the leverage equity play or leverage treasury play may make sense yeah so that was the that's what we explored in the mid stages with the multi-site operator which was i said look i think you're bullish your business but you want to get more bitcoin you started stacking a year ago and you're kind of feeling behind as the price runs you have access to the private capital markets private credit for all of its being in the news lately is still two trillion dollars of dry powder

begging for anything good to lend to and the anything good to lend to is cash flowing businesses And so the idea there is, okay, let's go raise three or four times EBITDA, depending on the business and the situation, of debt capital, put that debt on the balance sheet, put the cash on the balance sheet on the other side, use that to acquire Bitcoin. Now, that's never really been done. Typically, these private credit funds, what they're underwriting is they give the owner a mountain of cash the owner distributes that cash to himself he buys a boat or an airplane or you know another vacation home and in that case the private credit funds recourse what they're lending against is the business it's not the boat the airplane the house that actually sits outside of

the business and so my argument to private credit even though this sort of deal has never happened before it's a better underwriting for them because now there's the equity and cash flow that you're used to underwriting but there's also this bitcoin on the balance sheet so your private credit fund guys aren't going to suddenly become Bitcoiners. But even if they valued the cash Bitcoin on balance sheet at 50%, it should give more recourse to the loan than a typical what it's called when you distribute the cash for the airplane situation is a dividend recap. So this should be net better than a dividend recap from the private credit side. And safe to say those folks are dying for a new form of deal with better collateral because we've seen what's happened to the public ones with

uh redemptions you've seen the software uh credit deals aren't panning out as many thought they would five years ago i mean i think you and i could both rattle through a half a dozen software you know b2b sass like smb sass products that we've replaced in our own businesses that otherwise i'd pay 50 to 100 bucks a month that now i just i clank them together yeah what what would you say to people who say this is this is insane we're not going to have businesses what's the incentive for anybody to go start a business i think that the bitcoin hurdle rate does make it really hard to justify starting a business but i mean you and i are living proof that there's still businesses worth starting but yeah maybe maybe that person is right when they

say if this continues no one will ever open another taco bell and i'd ask that person well does that sound like such a bad thing um so i do think that as the hurdle rate for investment capital rises, some businesses that currently look like good businesses will actually be exposed to be malinvestment. Um, because if I can make 30, 40, 50% Kager holding Bitcoin, I, I'm not going to open another Taco Bell, um, as an example. Uh, so yeah, I think there is this period of austerity where folks would rather save and saving is investing in the future. So that's not a bad thing. No. All right. Any final thoughts, anything we didn't cover that we should get in here? I think this is very concise i think we ran through the whole playbook i think it was good i um i

would just say i think so i want to give a shout out to to the bay area bitcoiners they so my bitcoin origin story is is mostly private uh i didn't really sort of visit or talk with folks about bitcoin and meet space for a few years and when i finally did it was during covid in san francisco and so i was just like dying to talk to another human being those guys were the start of like kind of giving me the encouragement to hey like you should talk to people in person about bitcoin because you you do a good job of explaining it um and then i'm now in charlotte north carolina that's where we'll we'll hope to stay for the long term i'm very involved in that group so i also want to give a shout out to them i think i would encourage everyone and i the reason i thought

of bitcoin meetup groups is because i'm hearing exhaustion from like five-year bitcoiners who are like man like if we get to september of this year and we're not higher then i'm really in it for the tech at that point and you know i'm in it for the tech too but the tech is number go up and i think one of two things is going to happen in september or by september because so september of this year the five-year rolling comp is a 65k high of september 2021 so either bitcoin's return is going to look really mediocre or we're going to laugh about how worried about the price of bitcoin we were with the straight over news stuff going on. When you fast forward to September of this year, put me in that second camp, but otherwise I'll come back on and I'll help craft a new

narrative that you just have to zoom out further. Um, but I would just say, well, I would say what you say, we're going to win and I'm excited for the future for Bitcoin. We're going to win. Go check out the playbook. Let us know what you think. And, uh, yeah, if you're a business owner out there, I mean, I think what made me feel confident about writing this with you and now publishing it is that we're living it like tftc runs on a bitcoin standard 1031 runs on a bitcoin standard cba as well and uh it as somebody's been doing it i've had bitcoin on the balance sheet since before sailor uh 2019 it has i mean it has helped us reinvest in the business it has helped me as a business owner grow grow the stack and it is a very pivotal tool to our capital stack that

that has benefited us massively over the last seven years absolutely and a huge thank you to you marty uh your openness to exploring this has been very well received and i'm grateful for the partnership so like i said real recognize real scott so that's all go read the playbook peace love thank you for listening to this episode of tftc if you've made it this far i imagine you got some value out of the episode if so please share it far and wide with your friends and family we're looking to get the word out there also wherever you're listening whether that's youtube apple spotify make sure you like and subscribe to the show and if you can leave a rating on the podcasting platforms that goes a long way last but not least if you want to get these episodes

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