Bitcoin Treasury for Business: A Private Owner's Guide
Transcript — TFTC
Article: https://www.tftc.io/bitcoin-treasury-for-business-scott-marmoll
Transcript page: https://www.tftc.io/bitcoin-treasury-for-business-scott-marmoll-transcript
Published: 2026-08-05
Machine transcription, lightly cleaned; may contain errors.
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[0:07] Marty Bent: You've had a dynamic where money's become freer than free.

[0:09] Scott Marmoll: Let me talk about a Fed just gone nuts, all, all the central banks going nuts. So it's all acting like safe haven.

[0:18] Marty Bent: 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.

[0:34] Scott Marmoll: Probably should be. Probably should be.

[0:36] Marty Bent: Scott.

[0:38] Scott Marmoll: Marty. We're here.

[0:39] Marty Bent: We've been working together on something for the last, what, 2 months now?

[0:43] Scott Marmoll: Measured in AI years, probably 2 years.

[0:46] Marty Bent: Yes.

[0:47] Scott Marmoll: But yes, at least a couple of months. Yeah.

[0:48] Marty Bent: And so I think we just jump right into it because we're launching the PDF that we've been working on. The Bitcoin Treasury and Exit Playbook, which we've been mulling around again for the better part of 2 months. And obviously what you're doing at Capital B Advisory, 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 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 2 months. We came up with this playbook, which you can go get now.

[1:46] Scott Marmoll: Yeah, I think, Hopefully useful tool. Clanker aside, the content is ours with a lot of thought and detail into it. It's a playbook for— the Bitcoin space has a lot of advice on what to do as an individual, and some individuals are business owners, and those Bitcoiners need a guidebook for what that looks like for their business. Because at the end of the day, 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, and recently brought that skill set specifically to the Bitcoiner business owner sector, which is not to say Bitcoin-focused businesses and services exclusively, but rather just anyone with the mindset of a Bitcoiner.

[3:13] Marty Bent: Yeah, I guess we start out, it's broken up into 4 parts. The first part is the case for a Bitcoin treasury in the first place. Like why, if you're a business owner, whether you're a Bitcoiner or not, should you be thinking about this? Obviously, Michael Saylor strategy been a big meme in public markets over the last almost 5 years, but this strategy applies to private businesses as well and probably is actually better for private businesses.

[3:41] Scott Marmoll: It does, and it is, with the caveat that it's a little less financial engineering, right? Like, Saylor's created a magical flywheel that I think people will study for ages. In the private markets, it's a little simpler. The opportunity is similar though, which is accumulating Bitcoin on the balance sheet for businesses is augmenting the performance in the balance sheet, whereas the historical 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 Bitcoin curiosity around the Bitcoiner business owner. Okay, what do I do? What should I do to start to explore that?

[6:02] Marty Bent: Well, not only that too, as once 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 That's what you describe in the first section as well, is trying to make the case why should your business have Bitcoin on its balance sheet?

[6:22] Scott Marmoll: Well, exactly. And I think, 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, look, if you have $10 million of working capital cash that you keep on hand to fund payroll and inventory and maintenance CapEx, That's a painful necessity because over a year's time, if you're— everyone's experience inflation is different. The CPI number is just one metric, but for most folks, especially in businesses, 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.

[7:24] Marty Bent: No. And then in terms of bringing this back to 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.

[7:53] Scott Marmoll: 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. Who does a really good job of this is Jeff Booth, right? He was in 9 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.

[8:59] Marty Bent: And then moving into the tactical playbook and 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.

[9:15] Scott Marmoll: 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, 2025, right? And then suddenly your working capital situation is dire. So the case is going to be different for every single business and situation, but thoughtful approach to what's our runway, what's our burn, what is our cash conversion cycle, and what can we do to safely move some of the value that's trapped in that situation into Bitcoin. 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.

[10:23] Marty Bent: 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 2 or 3 years ago, maybe even longer than that at this point, Bitcoin is the 4th lever of equity value growth. And it's something we've highly encouraged portfolio companies to do, particularly if Bitcoin is significantly below the price of the previous all-time high.

[10:58] Scott Marmoll: Mm-hmm.

[10:59] Marty Bent: And they've raised a round, is put a chunk of that into Bitcoin. Make sure you have enough runway to reinvest in the business and make payroll and all that, but put a chunk in Bitcoin. Build out 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 and you're looking pretty like when you go back to market and Bitcoin has appreciated, if that takes 2 or 3 years, the value of the business is looking good. And then you have incredible optionality as a founder. So a bit different scale. You're talking like mid-market established companies spitting out cash flow.

[11:48] Scott Marmoll: But it's true either way. Grant— I don't know where it was. Grant gave a presentation I watched on YouTube.

[11:54] Marty Bent: Riga.

[13:50] Marty Bent: Yeah. And I think this gets into a good Point of the playbook as well, which is running through the 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 is a raise and most companies will do a DCA over a set period of time.

[14:13] Scott Marmoll: Yep. Yep. And that set period of time is less than a 4-year— if cycles exist, it's less than a 4-year cycle. There's not a right answer on this. That one, I mean, even— well, 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. Michael Saylor is competing for top tick king, but I'm pretty darn good at it. But the good news is, if you just wait it out, that trade ends up being a good trade anyway. But that said, 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 down hilariously.

[14:49] Marty Bent: Yeah.

[14:51] Scott Marmoll: 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 large quantities. When you get into 7, 8, or 9 figures, it's nervy to be the guy that hit the button to do the spot buy. Because again, even if you're the control shareholder, whether that's at Thanksgiving or at board meetings, someone's going to be yelling at you if the timing was wrong. I think there's a balance there, and at the end of the day, 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 gonna size into this over 6 months or 12 months, but also case dependent, right? How intense is your seasonality on cash conversion? 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. So that's always gonna be a case-by-case situation, but—

[15:46] Marty Bent: Yeah.

[15:49] Scott Marmoll: The sooner you're off zero, the better. And I think for some businesses 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.

[15:57] Marty Bent: 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 into perpetuity over a fixed period of time, and let's say the Bitcoin price dumps by 30%, you stop. doing it because you're scared out of the market. Like, that is—

[16:17] Scott Marmoll: Right.

[16:17] Marty Bent: You have to go into this with the mental framework that there is going to be volatility.

[16:20] Scott Marmoll: Whatever plan you set, you have to stick to it. The easy part is buying the Bitcoin. And ask any long-term Bitcoin holder, the hard part is stomaching the volatility. So absolutely, set a plan, work with an advisor to set that plan, be deliberate about establishing that plan outwardly with the key stakeholders, whether that's the management team or shareholders or brothers-in-law, so that you have something other than your own 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. 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 change our strategy.

[17:14] Marty Bent: All right, now let's walk into 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 gonna keep running this for 10 years, so I'm just gonna do a set and forget it DCA strategy over the next decade. Others are later in their careers and looking to make an exit and just 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 does the landscape look like? Why is now opportunistic?

[17:55] Scott Marmoll: The Bitcoiner business owner hero's journey, I call it, was similar to the individual Bitcoiner hero's journey. You start stacking some sats, you get excited, You sit in the red for 2 or 3 years, then you're permanently in the green. You continue to stack sats. You start looking around at what else can I sell? You start liquidating IRAs and other positions. A decade in, you sell your chairs. The hero's journey on the business owner side looks similar. The scale is different, but the game is similar. Stacking Bitcoin to the balance sheet, some conservative portion of cash flow, Okay, get more aggressive. Okay, 100% of cash flow.

[19:23] Marty Bent: Yeah.

[19:24] Scott Marmoll: In Bitcoin land, you're like, okay, I can spend whatever, make 15% return on it with a bunch of risk execution and otherwise, or I could have taken that same cash and just bought Bitcoin. Then it gets harder. So then you start thinking through, okay, the hurdle rate for a Bitcoiner business owner is that Bitcoiner— is that Bitcoin CAGR. And the hurdle rate for the potential acquirers of your business is the fiat treasuries CAGR 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. 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 5 to 7 years of illiquidity, and you apply it to just buying and holding Bitcoin for 5 to 7 years, It kind of begs the question of like, why does this industry exist at all?

[22:29] Marty Bent: SubFreaks, 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 going to be there. A ton of people are going to be there. You better get your ass there. You know what? It's a bit— people are calling it 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. tc, use the code TFTC, you'll get 10% off.

[24:35] Scott Marmoll: And yeah, so, and then the other one is keep it, right?

[24:37] Marty Bent: Yeah.

[24:38] Scott Marmoll: So the first one is, hey, return on invested capital in this business is now 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, I need you shackled to the desk here. 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.

[27:41] Marty Bent: Yeah.

[27:42] Scott Marmoll: 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 lightning 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.

[28:22] Marty Bent: Yeah. Let's go back to 2 parts, one being the second option. You're still part of the business, roll alongside the PE firm. I think another thing that we highlight in the playbook as well is that you take the proceeds, Buy Bitcoin, you're long Bitcoin, PE fund at the end of your relationship, they get their nuts, and then you have the potential if Bitcoin has a good run during your engagement with the PE firm to buy your company back.

[28:51] Scott Marmoll: Yeah. So this would be so fun. I think we'll find this, you know, we're looking for this client at CBA, but I love the idea of using the private equity fund's money to buy Bitcoin on the personal side. watching them make some smart decisions, but maybe some dumb ones too. And at the end of their 5, 7-year process, they're 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, to reclaim ownership of your business. I think that would be really interesting.

[30:20] Marty Bent: 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.

[30:38] Scott Marmoll: That is the thesis for CBA. So I'm counting on the Bitcoin community 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. And then you sort of reeducated yourself on the Bitcoin standard. So if that is an archetype, and I think somebody just did some research on the emotional intelligence strategy or whatever.

[31:13] Marty Bent: Myers-Briggs. Yeah, Myers-Briggs. Brandon Quiddam did that years ago, but he brings it up periodically.

[31:17] Scott Marmoll: Okay. It must have just hit Like, it just bubbled up to me recently, 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 you apply that mentality to businesses, my thesis is that, like, being Bitcoin first as an advisor to business owners, I'm gonna get to work with all the best business owners because all the best businesses will be run by Bitcoiners.

[31:44] Marty Bent: Yeah.

[31:46] Scott Marmoll: 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 wanna work with the advice of an advisor that understands Bitcoin is just however many Bitcoiners there are that own businesses, and I'm betting on that number going up forever.

[32:06] Marty Bent: Yeah, and I think it will. The thing I wanted to bring up after this is just 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? Like talking about running lean operations. I think that's one thing we've really bonded over over the last 2 months is banging our heads together, talking about our AI setups and what it's done for our individual businesses.

[32:36] Scott Marmoll: Yeah, I owe you a big thank you. So anecdotes about AI and deflation that are useful for this. is primary to my business and it's thanks to you. So I was playing around with OpenClaw like everyone in late February and was trying to hook it up to Maple. Ambitious, 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, 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.

[34:52] Marty Bent: 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.

[35:03] Scott Marmoll: And the bigliest.

[35:04] Marty Bent: This has been an idea, like partnering with somebody like you to do 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've wanted to do this for years, but in my mind it's like, ah, I've really, I've got myself, the team has grown. We've added 2 team members. So including myself, there's 6 of us. A couple of them are part-time. Over the last year, we've added 2. And I've never had the confidence or the resources to be like, okay, if I wanted to do something like this, I'd probably have to go hire a designer or somebody who can just run and lead this stuff.

[36:00] Scott Marmoll: Yeah, I think that this, it turns you, I think I'm stealing this from you, somebody, I listen to a lot of podcasts. It turns the ideas guy into a results guy, and you've got great ideas, and those can now basically come into existence with a voice message. 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, all of your data is getting eaten alive. And I know that's not a good answer. Like, that's a quitter's answer.

[37:27] Marty Bent: Yeah. And 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 being 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 basically, oh, 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.

[38:23] Scott Marmoll: Absolutely. If, if you're already a master of your craft, which I'd like to think that you are, I like to think that I am, adding AI to your stack augments it, uh, 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 trade-off.

[39:35] Marty Bent: Yeah.

[39:36] Scott Marmoll: I think you and Matt probably went through this experience trying to have them, having the agents trade whatever marketplace. 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 have literally anything that you think you're halfway decent at, you can basically build a business around it with a few voice messages.

[39:59] Marty Bent: Yeah.

[40:01] Scott Marmoll: There's never been a better time to start a business. There's never been a better time to be in Bitcoin. I'm very bullish on all the above, and the intersection of AI and Bitcoin is pretty exciting. I didn't have in my base case for Bitcoin a 50+% 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. 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 going to have to print the difference. And so, when I first got into Bitcoin as a gold bug, and I was like, wow, they have to print so much money.

[41:06] Marty Bent: 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 focused on since 2016. Unchained is the leader in collaborative multisig custody and Bitcoin financial services that keep you in control. They secure over $12 billion in Bitcoin for more than 12,000 clients. That means about 1 out of every 200 Bitcoin sits inside an Unchained vault. Their model is simple. You hold 2 keys, they hold 1 key. It always takes 2 keys to move Bitcoin, meaning their single key can't access your Bitcoin on its own.

[43:36] Scott Marmoll: Yeah. So set aside Bitcoin for a second. The conversation I have with business owners 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, now is an okay time to sell, but I don't want to take the tax hit because I've got X value in the business, and when I sell it, 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 to be goodwill, which will be taxed at cap gains rates.

[46:19] Marty Bent: Yeah. And then getting into the technical details, I think that's important. We can wrap up the 4 sections there, but then we'll get into some examples which you provide at the end, some case studies. But in terms of what this looks like, not what this looks like in practice, but 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?

[46:50] Scott Marmoll: So I wanna be careful not to like pick favorites. There's a lot of good services out there. A rule I would suggest folks adopt is look for businesses, services, and advisors that are focused on Bitcoin only. 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 amidst the crypto noise, then you have to 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 tax, right? You definitely want— well, you have to pay your taxes.

[49:21] Marty Bent: Yeah.

[49:23] Scott Marmoll: 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'll depend where you are.

[49:31] Marty Bent: I mean, being M&A prepared, like you just don't— I think we touched on this earlier, but it's like, it's just not going to happen tomorrow if you don't have it ready.

[49:37] Scott Marmoll: That's right, yeah. You can't log into Fidelity and sell shares in TFTC, 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. 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, 3-year plan. Just a regular way M&A process could take you 6+ months. And then what you need in that checklist will depend on where you're at. And so this will dovetail nicely into case studies. CBA's client base spans anyone that's a Bitcoiner. And so, in some cases, I'm helping seed round businesses, make introductions to potential investors.

[51:32] Marty Bent: 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.

[51:50] Scott Marmoll: The franchisee is my favorite. And I called him before this to see if he would mind what level of— of commentary I gave. And so I'll keep it high level, but a multi-site franchisee. So I've done a lot of multi-site franchisee M&A in my fiat days. This is a business in food, in restaurant, 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's 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.

[53:06] Marty Bent: I think you—

[53:07] Scott Marmoll: 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.

[53:17] Marty Bent: Yeah.

[53:18] Scott Marmoll: 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 5 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?

[54:48] Marty Bent: All right, next one, multi-unit operator.

[54:50] Scott Marmoll: That was the multi-unit operator.

[54:52] Marty Bent: Okay.

[54:52] Scott Marmoll: So I jumped out of order. The first one is really transaction preparation is more of 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. 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 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.

[55:34] Marty Bent: Yeah.

[55:34] Scott Marmoll: So the work begins well in advance of a transaction to make yourself not needed.

[55:40] Marty Bent: 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 for.

[55:53] Scott Marmoll: Yeah. So 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 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 $2 trillion 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 3 or 4 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.

[57:44] Marty Bent: We've seen the software credit deals aren't panning out as many thought they would 5 years ago.

[57:50] Scott Marmoll: I mean, I think you and I could both rattle through half a dozen software B2B SaaS, SMB SaaS products that we've replaced in our own businesses that otherwise I'd pay $50 to $100 a month that now I just clank them together.

[58:03] Marty Bent: Yeah. What would you say to people who say, this is insane, we're not going to have businesses? What's the incentive for anybody to go start a business?

[58:12] Scott Marmoll: 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 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? 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. Because if I can make 30%, 40%, 50% CAGR holding Bitcoin, I'm not going to open another Taco Bell as an example. 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.

[59:05] Marty Bent: 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.

[59:12] Scott Marmoll: I think it was good. I would just say, I think so. I want to give a shout out to the Bay Area Bitcoiners. They— so my Bitcoin origin story is mostly private. I didn't really sort of visit or talk with folks about Bitcoin in meatspace 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 do a good job of explaining it.

[1:00:36] Marty Bent: Yeah.

[1:00:37] Scott Marmoll: 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. 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.

[1:00:51] Marty Bent: We're going to win. Go check out the playbook. Let us know what you think. And 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, CVA as well. And as somebody who's been doing it, I've had Bitcoin on the balance sheet since before Saylor, 2019. It has, I mean, it has helped us reinvest in the business. It has helped us, me as a business owner, grow the stack. And it is a very pivotal tool to our capital stack that, that has benefited us massively over the last 7 years.

[1:01:36] Scott Marmoll: Absolutely. And a huge thank you to you, Marty. Uh, your openness to exploring this has been very well received, and, uh, I'm grateful for the partnership.

[1:01:47] Marty Bent: So, well, like I said, real recognize real, Scott. So that's all. Go read the playbook. Peace and 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 A day early and ad-free. Make sure you download the Fountain podcasting app. You can go to fountain.fm to find that. $5 a month gets you every episode a day early, ad-free. Helps the show, gives you incredible value. So please consider subscribing via Fountain as well. Thank you for your time, and until next time.