How Township Ventures is Creating a "Bitcoin-Based Berkshire Hathaway" - Lucas Bazemore

Lucas Bazemore: 00:00:00

We look at all of the areas that we believe fiat broke and these are areas that require hard work and real long term investment.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:00:07

This is food, this is education, this is health and wellness.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:00:11

This is city infrastructure.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:00:13

These are areas where you make large investments and you have to do the hard work.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:00:18

But you might not see the results for years, if not decades.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:00:21

The game theory suggests that the longer the business lasts, the more bitcoin you'll have.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:00:26

And so if we do think of this as a bitcoin maximization function, right, you want to last as long as possible and you'll be able to accumulate as much bitcoin as you can that you can then reallocate into growing the team.

Josh Friedemann: 00:00:43

Welcome to the Business Bitcoinization show.

Josh Friedemann: 00:00:46

The show dedicated to helping you enrich your life and grow your business with bitcoin, the hardest money on planet Earth.

Josh Friedemann: 00:00:54

I'm your host Josh Friedemann and our guest today is Lucas Bazemore of Township Ventures.

Josh Friedemann: 00:00:59

Township Ventures purchases companies, increases their operational capacity and puts them on a bitcoin standard.

Josh Friedemann: 00:01:08

We're going to get to our interview with Lucas right after this.

Josh Friedemann: 00:01:28

Lucas, welcome to the show.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:01:30

Pleasure to be here, Josh.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:01:32

Thanks for having me.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:01:33

Excited to chat.

Josh Friedemann: 00:01:34

Absolutely.

Josh Friedemann: 00:01:35

So I like to start off every single interview with a few questions that help us to get to know you a little bit better and give us some insight for our own lives.

Josh Friedemann: 00:01:40

Are you ready for these?

Lucas Bazemore: 00:01:41

Absolutely.

Josh Friedemann: 00:01:43

Question number one is this.

Josh Friedemann: 00:01:44

When and how did you first learn about bitcoin?

Lucas Bazemore: 00:01:46

learned about it actually in: 2014

Lucas Bazemore: 00:01:52

Was just doing the gambling thing and didn't realize what I was doing.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:01:56

Trying to do the get rich quick.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:01:57

But then really, one of my partners at my company, Darien, I have to give all the shout out to him because he beat us over the head about this bitcoin thing.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:02:07

It wasn't about: 2019

Lucas Bazemore: 00:02:12

I'll say this for the audience to know.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:02:15

I'm 150% allocated to Bitcoin right now.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:02:18

Short, fiat, long bitcoin.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:02:22

I'll leave it there.

Josh Friedemann: 00:02:24

Any recommendations or would you recommend people don't go extra long bitcoin or are there ways to do it in a way that actually makes sense and is not just potentially throwing your life down the drain?

Lucas Bazemore: 00:02:37

Absolutely.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:02:38

No, I'll clarify that one.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:02:40

I am not a financial advisor by any sort.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:02:44

You have to make the decision that's best for you and your family based upon your current financial situation.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:02:51

So the only reason why I can do that is because I have the.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:02:54

I'm blessed to be in that position, to take on that type of position, whereas, you know, two or three years ago wasn't even close.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:03:02

I wouldn't have even considered it.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:03:03

So it's only as I've learned more and had more levers and opportunity to do something like that.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:03:08

So obviously we need to make the best decision for you based upon your risk tolerance and your understanding of bitcoin and money, etc.

Josh Friedemann: 00:03:17

Question number two.

Josh Friedemann: 00:03:18

What's an insight or fact about Bitcoin that you wish everyone understood?

Lucas Bazemore: 00:03:22

Yeah.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:03:22

I'll say two things if it's okay.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:03:25

The first one is, as some of your other guests have mentioned this, and I think it really is important, is that bitcoin is not the ends.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:03:33

Bitcoin is a means to an end.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:03:34

Bitcoin is now best money that exists.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:03:38

And so we need to be stewards of that money as we allocate it in our lives and where we put that for our friends, our family, our communities.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:03:47

And so that, I think, is something to remember now that transition happens as you've accumulated more and you learn more.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:03:53

Which leads me to the second point that I think I wish people kind of already understood now, which is Bitcoin has unequivocally won.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:04:00

Bitcoin will be the world reserve currency, and we will have hyper bitcoinization in the next 15 years.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:04:07

The writing is on the wall.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:04:08

I.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:04:08

I think you might have recently seen the European Central bank just came out and said, bitcoin's going to go hit a million dollars a coin.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:04:15

It undermines government's ability to control people.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:04:18

It gives people sovereignty.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:04:19

That's why we need to ban it.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:04:21

We're living in a parody of reason at this point.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:04:25

So the writing's on the wall, and I think that bitcoin will have an impact on society in magnitude that will be as big, if not bigger, than the Internet itself, in terms of what it will affect.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:04:40

There is this seriousness of what's to come that I wish people just knew, but it's okay.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:04:49

It happens with time.

Josh Friedemann: 00:04:51

Was that the same ECB report where they were saying that people who don't hold Bitcoin or are latecomers will be impoverished if Bitcoin is successful.

Josh Friedemann: 00:04:59

Was that the same?

Lucas Bazemore: 00:05:00

Exactly.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:05:01

It was the exact same report.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:05:03

It's hilarious.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:05:04

They are literally the best advocates for why you should buy bitcoin.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:05:09

I wish more people read the report.

Josh Friedemann: 00:05:11

It's crazy because at that point they're basically saying, if you don't have this thing, then you're done for, which is them saying that it's going to be the thing that wins.

Josh Friedemann: 00:05:20

Once again, if everyone could read the report, and you hardly need to read between the lines, but just see what they're saying all of a sudden, it should become so much clearer to people.

Josh Friedemann: 00:05:29

And yet some people, for whatever reason, are still dragging their feet.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:05:33

It's okay.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:05:36

Again, I'll shout out one of my partners, Daran, he just says there is this kind of weird paradigm where as Price appreciates and you get it, to break people's expectations of reality.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:05:47

It forces people to question what it is that they know.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:05:51

So, you know, things take time.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:05:54

We try to try to educate as much as we can for those that aren't there.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:05:58

But you're right, you can read the report and it's literally the government saying it.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:06:02

So I don't know.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:06:03

I don't know what to tell you anymore at this point.

Josh Friedemann: 00:06:05

Sure, sure.

Josh Friedemann: 00:06:06

So question number three is what is a bitcoin resource that you recommend to other.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:06:11

I really like video content.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:06:12

I will say I've listened to a lot of Matthew Cratter with Bitcoin University.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:06:17

I think he's got basically a video on every single topic when it comes to the fundamentals of bitcoin.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:06:24

So I would personally recommend really getting an understanding of the fundamentals because it is something that has never existed before and really does break the paradigms of things that you've known.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:06:36

So you have to study it from first principles.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:06:38

And I think he does a really good job.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:06:39

So I tend to send people there.

Josh Friedemann: 00:06:41

I recommend him all the time, especially to people who are skeptical and think that maybe on a YouTube comment they'll throw in some jab and try to undermine bitcoin.

Josh Friedemann: 00:06:50

It's just like, hey, go take a look at this guy.

Josh Friedemann: 00:06:52

I could send them to specific videos because he addresses almost every question that people have connected to fud, but at the end of the day, go check it out for yourself, see what's out there.

Josh Friedemann: 00:07:02

All the questions that people think they have that in their minds are like checkmates against bitcoin are all easily answered.

Josh Friedemann: 00:07:08

And his is probably one of the best places to go for that.

Josh Friedemann: 00:07:11

So I appreciate that.

Josh Friedemann: 00:07:13

Resource Question number four, beyond bitcoin, what is a resource, tool or idea that's been helpful to you or your work recently?

Lucas Bazemore: 00:07:20

Absolutely.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:07:21

I'm a big book reader.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:07:23

I love trying to find what I call cornerstone books, books that have distilled ideas in an area that I think are of course, pertinent to me.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:07:32

But I can go back to over and over and over again.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:07:37

Right now, what I'm reading or what I would, what I'm reading that I recommend is I love $100 million offers by Alex Hormozi.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:07:45

When it comes to thinking about sales and value perception and niching down.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:07:50

I'm also reading Actionable Gamification by Yukai Chu.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:07:55

The ideas of how do you design systems around motivating factors for people?

Lucas Bazemore: 00:08:01

And how can you build not just games, but businesses that drive towards win states like games do that also deliver business outcomes?

Lucas Bazemore: 00:08:10

And then the last one is Pitch Anything by Oren Klaff.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:08:16

When you're a business owner, right, you're constantly selling, whether you know it or not, you're selling to your customers, you're selling to your team, you're selling to investors, you're selling to everybody.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:08:26

And so understanding the nature of what pitches are and how, he does a great job of breaking down the.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:08:34

The psych, the biological components of how we actually process information and how to get past a lot of these like fear signals that we have when we're learning something new.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:08:44

So he really does a great job of that one.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:08:46

So those would be the three that the books that I would recommend as, as kind of resources or tools that I'm using in my business.

Josh Friedemann: 00:08:54

Excellent.

Josh Friedemann: 00:08:54

Well, I appreciate you sharing those resources.

Josh Friedemann: 00:08:56

Now we have our final what we call our arbitrary but insightful question and it's this as a general life principle, is it better to ask why or why not?

Lucas Bazemore: 00:09:05

I've thought a lot about this one.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:09:06

It really, it really was almost a stumper.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:09:09

But I'll say this, as an entrepreneur at heart, my DNA has always been in the why not category.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:09:16

The idea of spending time, money, energy to build something that may fail was always still worth it if the size of the opportunity was big enough.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:09:25

Now I've really been shifting into more of the why camp, especially as I'm taking and transitioning more into the role of my personal life, husband, potentially fatherhood, or as I've adopted, bitcoin mentality.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:09:42

And now again, as I mentioned, being a steward of money, you kind of have to ask yourself, okay, if the default is do nothing, right, and I can hold on to that and save, I really have to ask myself, why would I do something and output that that expenditure and capital?

Lucas Bazemore: 00:10:00

And for me, that comes down to really asking myself, what's my purpose?

Lucas Bazemore: 00:10:05

Like, why am I doing what it is that I'm doing?

Lucas Bazemore: 00:10:07

Why am I spending time with these people or you know, going to these activities, et cetera.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:10:13

And so I look at it definitely more as a questioning of what's important to me moving forward, looking at a long term time horizon.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:10:23

Whereas before it was always just like, how do I make the next buck?

Lucas Bazemore: 00:10:27

You know, and it's like that's no longer the case anymore.

Josh Friedemann: 00:12:36

Well, Lucas, we're here today to talk about Township Ventures.

Josh Friedemann: 00:12:39

I happen to run across you guys.

Josh Friedemann: 00:12:41

I love what you're doing, but instead of me spilling the beans, could you just share about Township Ventures and maybe what led you to getting this set up in the first place?

Lucas Bazemore: 00:12:48

At the core of our team, we believe that fulfillment is the most important thing in life.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:12:55

And we create that fulfillment by putting people first and designing for people in everything that we do.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:13:02

Township Ventures itself is a long term holding company to buy and build businesses to last generations and ideally fix what Fiat broke.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:13:12

And so we take this idea of creating fulfillment through human centric design, applying Bitcoin as the lens with which we look at everything, which I'll touch on a little bit more later, but ultimately to build not just wealth or generational wealth, but what we're, what we believe is internally is true generational wealth, where you're actually building fulfillment for yourself, for your family, for your community, for your team, and you are taking the ultra long term mindset.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:13:44

So as a how we came to that is that our team is a collection of engineers and entrepreneurs and even physicists.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:13:53

And we looked at.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:13:56

So in our lives we've had experience with healthcare, manufacturing services, lots of different industries, and we were all in kind of leadership roles in those organizations that we participated in.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:14:09

And what we found out was, is there's really kind of three trends that are going on at the moment that steered us into this direction where there's an opportunity window to create this new generational wealth that, that we're, we're trying to lay the framework and the blueprint for with Township Ventures.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:14:27

And those three were, first, you have the aging demographic of older individuals that have businesses that are for sale, so that silver tsunami, as people like to say.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:14:39

And so there's an opportunity of businesses that are coming onto the market that are trying to be offloaded, that don't have succession planning.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:14:45

The second is of course, Bitcoin itself, right.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:14:49

Hyperinflation around the corner in many different domains.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:14:53

And bitcoin being that opportunity to bring it into the local communities that are there.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:15:01

And then the third is actually AI technology, which I know it's kind of a.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:15:06

Oh, AI again.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:15:07

But there's a very real.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:15:09

What we believe here is, is that more is no longer what's being requested, There is now going to be an infinite amount of more.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:15:18

What matters is getting back to quality.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:15:21

And so at the heart of what we really are thinking about is quality in what we do, quality in the decision making, quality in the people, quality in the business, quality of, you know, how we allocate bitcoin, right?

Lucas Bazemore: 00:15:35

Those three kind of trends give us this window of opportunity to really leverage the traditional financial world that is still using Fiat, put bitcoin on the company's balance sheets.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:15:46

And actually I had a great conversation with somebody where he said it's not just about putting bitcoin on the balance sheet, it's actually about turning the balance sheet into bitcoin.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:15:55

And what are all the implications that that comes with, which I can touch on a little bit more, a little bit more later, but then going full circle once you're there, you've acquired the business, put bitcoin on the balance sheet.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:16:10

How do you build that business?

Lucas Bazemore: 00:16:11

How do you do the hard work of just doing really good business and making high quality decisions?

Lucas Bazemore: 00:16:18

And what we try to do is look at everything through that bitcoin lens, through that quality lens of what are those implications?

Lucas Bazemore: 00:16:25

How do you think about your customers, how do you think about your team, how do you think about capital allocation, how do you think about the whole nine yards?

Lucas Bazemore: 00:16:32

It sounds like a lot, but when you slow down and you start thinking on at least four year cycles with bitcoin, right, not just next quarter, but even at that timeframe, you really start to shift your priority to long term sustainability.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:16:49

And so that's one of our core metrics is we're constantly measuring, is what we're doing right now sustainable for the long term.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:16:57

And if we're having trouble answering that question, we need to kind of slow down and try to find that answer.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:17:03

And now that might mean go out, try things, run against the walls, test and validate, still using that agile entrepreneurship mentality, but in low risk, low cost ways that get you more information to make a better decision.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:17:20

So that's a really long winded answer, but I hope that kind of shares with you how we think and what we're doing here at Township.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:17:28

And I can go into further.

Josh Friedemann: 00:17:29

So, Lucas, one of the things you've just mentioned is the idea of a generational perspective and also the focus on quality.

Josh Friedemann: 00:17:38

Before we get into the idea of turning your balance sheet into bitcoin, which is very interesting to me and probably sounds outlandish to the average business owner, what is the connection between thinking generationally, thinking about quality and bitcoin.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:17:53

Great question.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:17:55

The entry point that you have to think of is if bitcoin is the best money.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:18:00

And right now we're in this transitionary period where the bitcoin hurdle rate is basically 149% compounded annually.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:18:08

So over the last 10 years Bitcoin has done just that.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:18:13

It's compounded 149% every year.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:18:15

And so you have to ask yourself, okay, if that's the case, then am I going to allocate my money towards something that generates me less than 149%?

Lucas Bazemore: 00:18:28

That's one way to think about the direct linear correlation.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:18:33

But this also drives us to think about where that long term side of things is, where when you're allocating capital now, you think about it not just strictly from a dollar perspective or, sorry, from a SATS perspective or a return on capital in nominal money units.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:18:51

We actually get back towards a world where you're thinking about aesthetics, about the longevity of your team, about the quality of your customers.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:19:02

How long can this last?

Lucas Bazemore: 00:19:03

So, so I'll start with saying you have the, you have the hurdle rate that forces you to reconsider your decision making.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:19:10

Then with that hurdle rate you then have to requestion everything else, which is am I going to hire this person or am I going to reinvest in my team?

Lucas Bazemore: 00:19:18

Am I going to try to get the next customer or am I going to make my customers that I have last longer?

Lucas Bazemore: 00:19:23

And so that immediately forces you to think about, well actually it is more valuable.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:19:30

And this is even a traditional business metric, we all know customers that you have generate you more cash than trying to go get a new customer.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:19:40

The customer acquisition cost is so much higher.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:19:42

And when you account for the inflation of the customer acquisition costs, it's a no brainer to invest more in the customers that you have, provide them more value, provide them more services over time.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:19:55

When you really think about it there, and we were touching on this earlier, under a bitcoin standard, you actually want, if you want your business to last as long as possible, which I think is maybe implicit what most people want.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:20:10

Most people are not the type of individual that's building their business to grow it, sell it for two coins and then go live, go sleep on the beach.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:20:19

They do it because they love their business, whatever that may be, and they love their team.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:20:24

They enjoy those emotions and when it makes them money, fantastic.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:20:28

But they get to do what they're enjoying on a daily basis.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:20:31

And so if you can build that Succession planning into the organization through the bitcoin lens.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:20:38

You start to think about the customers that are receiving your customers, putting them on a bitcoin standard, putting your vendors on a bitcoin standard.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:20:46

Because then as the rising tide lifts all boats, your entire supply chain becomes much more reliable over time.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:20:53

And so when you are thinking about the generational mindset, you do have to think about every component with this hurdle rate of 149%.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:21:05

And I think it's actually going to increase as we accelerate into the transition.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:21:10

But I'll pause.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:21:10

Does that answer your question?

Lucas Bazemore: 00:21:11

Does that shed some light?

Lucas Bazemore: 00:21:13

I'm curious.

Josh Friedemann: 00:21:13

It does.

Josh Friedemann: 00:21:14

And I guess the follow up question then is, is that why you want to turn your entire balance sheet into Bitcoin as opposed to holding bitcoin on your balance sheet, or is there an additional perspective there as well?

Lucas Bazemore: 00:21:27

Yeah, it's more of a semantic play, but it is the lens of not just trading fiat for bitcoin, which we all have to go through, everybody has to go through that transition of okay, I understand it, I'm learning about it, I want to put bitcoin in my company.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:21:47

But there is also the lens to look through exactly that.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:21:54

For example, one of them that I think is really important for most business owners to understand is the implications of a deflationary asset.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:22:02

Under a deflationary asset, let's actually look at it from the converse to start with, in an inflationary world, you don't control your costs.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:22:11

Your costs are basically increasing.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:22:14

You are playing a game constantly of raising prices and trying to grow inflation.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:22:19

Inflation forces growth into the system without necessarily caring about if it's sustainable or not.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:22:26

It just simply says, hey, just FYI, costs are going to go up, so hope you're making more money, otherwise you're going to get squeezed.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:22:33

If you flip that around under a deflationary world, what now happens is your top line revenue might actually go down.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:22:42

And so you're now actually chasing a world where you have to become more operationally efficient and so investments should not.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:22:51

You change your mind from putting your time and attention into how do I grow?

Lucas Bazemore: 00:22:58

And you put it actually more into the camp of how do I become more operationally efficient?

Lucas Bazemore: 00:23:03

Is the business reducing costs over time?

Lucas Bazemore: 00:23:06

Are revenues declining slower than the deflationary pricing pressure?

Lucas Bazemore: 00:23:11

Because we will get to there where your top line revenue might actually decrease in nominal terms, but your purchasing power would have gone up.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:23:18

And so you're going to have to make sure that your revenues are declining slower than the rest.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:23:24

You're also wanting to think about is the product or service increasing in quality or value to maintain purchasing power or pricing power that you have?

Lucas Bazemore: 00:23:32

So if the product costs right now 100,000 sats, it's like, well, is it still 100,000 sats in five years?

Lucas Bazemore: 00:23:40

If it is, then you have to have provided whatever the delta is in terms of service value or product value to the end customer, because the customers themselves are also going to be asking the same question.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:23:54

Well, If I'm paying 100,000 sats now, this product really better last me a long time because my alternative is I can just hold onto it and not buy the product.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:24:02

So even things like product ossification will become more and more prevalent, which is, I think, one of the other things that I'll kind of touch on when it comes to your product or service, which is, how do you make your product or service as absolutely great as it can be, niche down who you're serving and make that product or service phenomenal?

Lucas Bazemore: 00:24:24

Because your customers are going to ask themselves eventually, hey, wait, this is, you know, 100,000 sats.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:24:30

Why am I continuously spending 100,000 sats?

Lucas Bazemore: 00:24:33

Either the product stays the same and I should be paying you less, or the product is getting better to maintain that pricing power.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:24:41

So I'll pause there.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:24:42

I can ramble, but no, I think that's great.

Josh Friedemann: 00:24:45

One of the things that I have this free Bitcoin for business quick start guide that we talk about on the show.

Josh Friedemann: 00:24:52

One of the terms I use there, instead of accepting Bitcoin, I talk about earning bitcoin because of that very thing where you're going to have to, at some point convince people that whatever you're offering, whether it's a service, product, anything else, it is worth a finite piece of the pie, a finite piece of the money.

Josh Friedemann: 00:25:10

It changes how you begin to think about what money is and why people are giving it or why you might be giving it to someone else.

Josh Friedemann: 00:25:18

I think that's a very interesting point.

Josh Friedemann: 00:25:19

And I think the more business owners start to think about that, the quicker quality will go up and it's a new thing because business owners have to think about, am I willing to accept less for this product or continually increase the quality so that I can be maintaining my revenue?

Josh Friedemann: 00:25:36

It's a totally different game than what we're used to, but I think it will be a valuable place when we get to that point.

Josh Friedemann: 00:25:44

One of the things I wanted to ask you about as well is there are a few key areas you guys have decided to focus on at Township Ventures.

Josh Friedemann: 00:25:52

And I Wanted you to talk a little bit about what those areas are and why you've chosen those Perfect segue.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:25:57

Because I wanted to touch on what the last piece you said which was the cost that customer has to pay.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:26:07

And one of the things is the investments that we make in those cost efficiencies.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:26:14

So we look at in particular at township, we look at all of the areas that we believe fiat broke.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:26:21

And these are areas that require hard work and real long term investment.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:26:25

This is food, this is education, this is health and wellness, this is city infrastructure.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:26:30

These are areas where you make large investments and you have to do the hard work.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:26:36

But you might not see the results for years, if not decades.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:26:39

If you think about your health, right?

Lucas Bazemore: 00:26:40

Like I have to go to the gym and eat, right.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:26:43

And I'm not going to see the results tomorrow, right.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:26:45

It could be years before I realize it's like, oh, actually I increased my lifespan by five years, right?

Lucas Bazemore: 00:26:51

Or education.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:26:52

You're investing in yourself or your children or your community and that takes years.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:26:58

Even if you go into a technical skill trade, it can sometimes be a year, two year long process which in a business environment where everything is measured in quarters, two years is eight quarters.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:27:10

That's an infinite amount of time for the corporate world.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:27:13

So we focus on those particular industries because we believe that those are what fiat broke the most as the incentive for long term investment.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:27:23

Completely disintegrated.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:27:26

And that's how you can understand also the importance of investing for that long term.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:27:34

Right now, for example, in the United States, I think our infrastructure report card was like a D and now I think then it was a C, maybe it's a B minus now.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:27:46

But there are estimated trillions of dollars in water infrastructure, in levees, in dams, in bridges, in all sorts of areas that cities have just ignored completely because their budgets are going towards other things that deliver them short term benefits.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:28:05

And so you really have to ask yourself your litmus test.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:28:11

So, so I'll give you, I'll give you some of the metrics that we look at.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:28:16

So the first one being the business needs to be financially resilient.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:28:19

That's first and foremost.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:28:21

You're not going to be able to do anything else if you're not actually, you know, financially resilient.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:28:26

And that means maintaining good balance sheets.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:28:28

It means generating dollars.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:28:30

That's about 50% of the equation.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:28:32

And I'm using loose relative terms, but the financial resilience is one.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:28:35

The second part is what we call lifelong service.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:28:39

So this is that 30% and so that's where you're investing into the service, the lifelong component of your customers and of your vendors and of your team.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:28:50

That's about kind of 30%.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:28:52

And then the last 20% is on the community impact.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:28:55

And that for us is the crux of it, which is are you actually making where you are geographically located better?

Lucas Bazemore: 00:29:06

And so those areas of food infrastructure, education, health and wellness, these are things that have a tangible impact on the localities that they are.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:29:16

If you have children that are learning things that are applicable to their geography, somebody in Texas, a kid in Texas might be much more akin to wanting to learn agriculture and oil and gas and cattle farm than somebody out in California that might want to grow up and have a winery.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:29:33

Right.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:29:34

So if you can embed the locality into those investments that you're making and think about it from that long term perspective, you can.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:29:43

What we're attempting to do is how do we create this horizontal playbook of principles to put into these areas of long term investment where other people can then also go and replicate it?

Lucas Bazemore: 00:29:55

Because we're not going to be, we're not going to do everything right.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:29:57

Those are areas that we want to have an impact in.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:30:00

But that needs to happen globally.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:30:02

The entire world has been under a fiat standard that all of these things need to improve.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:30:07

So pause there.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:30:11

I can get wordy with it and yeah, I'll pause there.

Josh Friedemann: 00:30:15

So I want to ask in just a moment about maybe how things might change in order to.

Josh Friedemann: 00:30:24

Once you purchase a business or become the majority owner of a business, how you kind of maybe would redirect some things so that it aligns more with that long term quality approach that you've just described.

Josh Friedemann: 00:30:38

But maybe even before that, the precursor is what does it look like for a business owner who might be listening to this right now, or someone listening to this, they have a friend who owns a business who might look to sell it.

Josh Friedemann: 00:30:49

What would it look like, I guess theoretically for Township to partner with that business and to purchase the majority share of that business.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:30:59

Perfect.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:31:00

So the two questions being one, what does it look like to actually do the acquisition from a Township perspective?

Lucas Bazemore: 00:31:06

And then two, what are you actually doing in the business?

Lucas Bazemore: 00:31:10

Yeah.

Josh Friedemann: 00:31:10

And I think what would you change?

Josh Friedemann: 00:31:13

Or do you want to buy businesses such that you don't need to change all that much along the way because you don't want to just totally change something that's maybe a foundational part of the community.

Josh Friedemann: 00:31:24

I'm just interested to know how you would navigate that to make sure that that long term quality perspective is Really a foundational element of the business, assuming that it's not already.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:31:34

The way that Township works right now is in the, as a long term holding company right now we are what's called in the private equity world, what's called an independent sponsor.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:31:45

So we have not, we are not raising a fund at the moment that could change in the future, but at the present moment we're not raising a fund to raise a bunch of money and then deploy to go buy businesses.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:31:57

There's a lot of SEC regulation and you know, compliance headache.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:32:01

And in a lot of ways these funds actually have an incentive misalignment where the fund is making money off of the capital that they've actually raised.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:32:14

Whereas what we're doing is as an independent sponsor, we are using our own Capital Capital from LPs, other Bitcoiners and also the traditional tradfi world in order to acquire these businesses.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:32:27

So there are hundreds of billions of dollars of infrastructure set up for the traditional M and A activity that takes place to leverage into buying businesses, whether that's through the SBA or senior banks or mezzanine debt that all exists.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:32:40

So the lion's share of our acquisition can come from a traditional institution that can allow us to acquire the business along with the equity that we're going to be putting in to do the acquisition.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:32:53

Now from a legal structure, what that means is that we are creating an entity to basically own that we're buying the assets or shares of the company.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:33:05

And we are now owners of this new entity that's been formed.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:33:09

And as operating partners or as operators, we are not acting as money managers.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:33:16

And so we are acting as business owners.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:33:19

So we're allowed to sell shares in this new business to the, to the LPs for example.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:33:26

And that gives us that actually for us aligns the incentives because we don't actually make money unless the business is making money.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:33:34

Whereas in a traditional private equity world a lot of the times they can make money off of, grow the business and then sell it for a multiple.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:33:42

And so they'll take a, they'll take a fat fee off of the, take a fat fee off of the assets that they have as their management fee that they've raised money from.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:33:52

And then they'll make money when they, after they've sold the business in five years.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:33:58

And so the entire structure is this short term mindset now, it's longer than most, five to seven years.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:34:05

But it's by no means generational in principle.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:34:10

And so that for us aligns the incentives a lot Better where we actually don't make any money unless we are growing the equity of that business.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:34:17

And growing the equity of the business in a bitcoin world means bitcoin on that balance sheet, what it looks like when we actually get into it.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:34:26

Before I jump into that, any questions that came to mind on your end?

Josh Friedemann: 00:34:30

I don't think so.

Josh Friedemann: 00:34:31

I think it makes sense.

Josh Friedemann: 00:34:32

Maybe the one thing is this sounds a lot like, and I don't know the background of Berkshire Hathaway, but is Berkshire Hathaway a long term holding company as well or is their structure a little bit different?

Lucas Bazemore: 00:34:42

That's a great question.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:34:43

I would want to define, refer to my other partner, Roberto.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:34:46

He has studied Berkshire Hathaway for years.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:34:49

But in principle, yes, Berkshire Hathaway is their sole game is buy businesses that are going to last forever and grow the equity of that.

Josh Friedemann: 00:35:00

So this is Berkshire Hathaway on a bitcoin standard, essentially, In a way, yes.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:35:05

And we think that there is an opportunity for a lot of people to replicate this if they follow certain principles.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:35:15

This is what we'll actually do when we get in with these businesses.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:35:18

The first is understanding that the business has been up and running for a while.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:35:25

It has its own operations, it has its customers, it has its team.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:35:28

We're not trying to go in there and disrupt everything.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:35:30

If anything, we want to have as minimal invasion as possible.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:35:35

But it's starting with the executive team, starting with the seller, starting with the leadership to create a longer term vision to understand who are the best customers.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:35:47

So at a high level, we're going to start by doing an evaluation, right?

Lucas Bazemore: 00:35:52

Let's understand your customers, your vendors, your team there.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:35:57

Then we want to start to create plans to what we call as the main, as the entry point principle, do less, better.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:36:06

So again, back to that whole hurdle rate for bitcoin, right?

Lucas Bazemore: 00:36:10

It's not about doing more, it's actually about doing less, but doing that less better.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:36:16

And so maybe this translates into, you know, serving less customers but focusing only on the high quality, high quality customers and creating maybe turnkey solutions for them.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:36:27

It could be maybe building less products, but streamlining operations and therefore being able to serve more customers with a tighter kind of product set.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:36:37

Maybe it's just executing on fewer ideas, but instead rallying the troops to work on one singular opportunity that requires the entire team Instead of having 10, 15 small teams doing things.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:36:50

So we're trying to see where in the business that might not be happening.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:36:58

Is the company serving too many low value customers?

Lucas Bazemore: 00:37:02

Does the company have too many products that they're servicing is the team misaligned and doesn't understand what that vision is.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:37:09

And we're going to work with the executive team to actually put a plan in place to resolve those issues and understand that the new objective of the business is not growth.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:37:21

Growth.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:37:21

If it happens as a byproduct of the improvements, fantastic.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:37:25

But the principal requirement now is make this business last as long as possible.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:37:31

Because the game theory suggests that the longer the business lasts, the more Bitcoin you'll have.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:37:36

And so if we do think of this as a bitcoin maximization function, you want to last as long as possible, and you'll be able to accumulate as much bitcoin as you can that you can then reallocate into growing the team.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:37:48

Or if you don't even think about the business from the growth side and you're just like, hey, I have an opportunity to where I've got bitcoin in the balance sheet.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:37:55

This is now, I can now create maybe an employment stock option plan or an esop, or I can now create a retirement account.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:38:03

And we actually go back to where we were before the 70s, where you had companies like GE or Ford that had these pension plans where people worked at the company for decades.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:38:14

And the reason why is because in a lot of ways, those businesses were providing the talent, opportunity for growth, fulfillment in the work that they do, and a steady, stable source of wealth that they had.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:38:26

And they knew that they were going to be taken care of because the money wasn't broken yet.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:38:30

And so I think we're going to see a reversion back to that, at least from, like, the employment perspective.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:38:35

But that's, you know, I can.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:38:37

I can keep going, but I'll pause there.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:38:40

And we are really trying to create plans around that at the highest levels of abstraction.

Josh Friedemann: 00:38:46

I think one of the things, especially if someone's listening right now who's thinking about selling their business in the future, one of their thoughts might be, where do I play into this?

Josh Friedemann: 00:38:56

Do I sell and go away?

Josh Friedemann: 00:38:58

I say that knowing that from your website, you say we don't want business owners that just sell and are totally out, but what does it look like for the original owner after they enter into a contract or into a relationship with you guys?

Lucas Bazemore: 00:39:10

Great question.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:39:11

With us, we are looking for particularly owners or leadership team that want to continue to operate, because at the very least.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:39:22

Well, from.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:39:23

From our perspective, at the very least, it actually creates an operational risk if the owner wants to leave.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:39:28

That makes it actually difficult for us to acquire the business, right.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:39:32

You're introducing new operational risks.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:39:35

But as a seller, the way I.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:39:36

The way I would position it is our team has experience in sales and marketing, in operations, in strategy, in industry research, in technology.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:39:46

I mean, one of our partners, Cameron, he owns an AI development company right now, and he's at the forefront of building products in that space.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:39:56

So we have skill sets that we utilize to bring in an outside perspective of the business that you have.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:40:05

And with the bitcoin lens, how can we make this last as long as possible?

Lucas Bazemore: 00:40:09

And so with the seller themselves, the business owner, the leadership team, it's about giving them more time to do the most important things.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:40:18

And as a leader, the most important things that you can do are working on your business, not in your business.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:40:24

This is something that a lot of people hear all the time, like, oh, work on your business, work on your business, don't work in your business.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:40:31

And it's so true, but it's so easy to get caught in that trap.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:40:35

And so the way we look at it is how can we enable, by bringing more resources or different ways of thinking to give the leadership team that has the expertise in their business, they have the expertise, expertise on the customers and the product lines and their industry as a whole, and give them the right incentives, give them the right space, and give them the right kind of structure and alignment together to create something that lasts as long as possible.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:41:01

And so if you're an individual that doesn't care about your team, just wants to make money and then, you know, go sit on the beach, it's like, at a core value perspective, we're not going to.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:41:09

We're not going to be in alignment because that's probably going to bleed down into other things that exist.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:41:14

Your product or your customers or your team, they're going to feel that same feeling.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:41:18

But if you do love your business, you love your customers, you love your product, but you're not quite sure what you want to do next, or, you know, there's this growth that could be there, or you want to make it last and pass it down to the next generation or to your employees.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:41:32

That's exactly how we're thinking about this.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:41:34

Does that answer your question?

Josh Friedemann: 00:41:35

It does indeed.

Josh Friedemann: 00:41:37

So I feel like we have probably another interview in our future once you guys are even further down the line, what you've learned, what's working well, et cetera, et cetera.

Josh Friedemann: 00:41:48

Maybe for today we can just go ahead and finish up here, though.

Josh Friedemann: 00:41:51

Are there any final thoughts you have, anything you want to make sure the listeners leave with either that you want to reiterate or that we haven't addressed yet in our conversation.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:41:59

I'll say first, just thank you again for having me on here, Josh, I think that what you are doing is meaningful and impactful and I hope that you continue to do it.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:42:12

I think that the information that's being disseminated needs to continue to be disseminated.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:42:17

And the last final thought is as a business owner, it is much too easy to get caught up in the more the more the more.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:42:26

And it really is taking a step back and re looking at things from the expectation, the expectation that if you've got bitcoin you will be phenomenally set and then asking yourself if I know for a fact that I'm going to be taken care of and I have that security of being financially stable where if I don't change anything in my life, if I'm okay with it and I'll be good for the next 20, 30 years, where do I want to spend my time?

Lucas Bazemore: 00:42:58

Where do I want to put that time and energy?

Lucas Bazemore: 00:43:00

And really ask yourself that question, what is important and valuable to you?

Lucas Bazemore: 00:43:05

And go spend your time doing that.

Josh Friedemann: 00:43:07

Where can people go to find out more about Township Ventures?

Josh Friedemann: 00:43:10

If what you shared today has piqued.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:43:12

People'S interest, you can go to Township ventures.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:43:16

It's not townshipventures.com, it is township Ventures.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:43:20

That's where you can find our website and from there you can get to the social media.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:43:25

I don't know them off the top of my head, but you can find me on LinkedIn as well at Just my name, Lucas Bazemore.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:43:31

I'd love to connect with anybody that is curious and wants to learn more.

Josh Friedemann: 00:43:36

Great.

Josh Friedemann: 00:43:36

Lucas, thank you so much for your time today.

Josh Friedemann: 00:43:37

It's been a pleasure.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:43:39

Absolutely.

Lucas Bazemore: 00:43:40

Thanks Josh.

Josh Friedemann: 00:43:40

Well friends, it's a wrap.

Josh Friedemann: 00:43:41

Thanks so much for listening to this episode of the Business Bitcoinization Show.

Josh Friedemann: 00:43:46

If you want to reach out to either me or Lucas, you can find those links down in the show notes.

Josh Friedemann: 00:43:50

If you know of someone thinking about selling their business, let them know about Township Ventures.

Josh Friedemann: 00:43:54

As always, keep building, keep growing and until next time, keep living and leading.

Josh Friedemann: 00:43:59

Well, thanks to pleb to Polymath and user 809-510-98 for streaming sats to the show on Fountain in the last week.

Josh Friedemann: 00:44:14

If you would like to support the show, be sure to listen on Fountain and stream sats as you listen.

Josh Friedemann: 00:44:21

Or if you like to, you could send a boost and if you include a note with that boost, I'LL be sure to read it on the show.