Brad Weimert: Robert Miller, thank you for coming out, man.
Robert Miller: Yeah, sure thing. Thanks for having me, man.
Brad Weimert: Absolutely. We find ourselves in a wonderful studio, The Move in Miami.
Robert Miller: Yeah, shoutout to Move. It’s awesome.
Brad Weimert: It is. It’s a great setup. It’s awesome to find places like this in a city that can be totally accommodating and have a good setup. I’m not going to call it a ghetto rig that I bring with me on the road, like it works, and you’ll see stuff that we produce that way. But we don’t have the same quality lighting, the same environment setup. It’s awesome to have a place like this.
Robert Miller: Yeah, and the space too. So, I have a studio in my condo in Miami and we have three cameras, we have the lighting equipment, and that stuff takes up a lot of space. So, it did a really, really good job here. So, shoutout again to Move, really cool spot.
Brad Weimert: So, I want to dig into your background. But you’ve got heavy marketing background, marketing agency. You’ve also got a heavy crypto element, trading platform and a fund. So, there are all these different areas to hit on. I want to focus on some of the crypto stuff today because it’s 2024. And we went through functionally a crypto collapse. And I mean, like hard core collapse in a lot of fronts. So, I want to get back to that. But before we do, why don’t you give me the how you got into entrepreneurship basics?
Robert Miller: Yeah. So, my brother was very entrepreneurial. He’s about 12 to 15 years older than me. So, when I first was kind of getting started in entrepreneurship, he was giving me books like Rich Dad Poor Dad, basic kind of entrepreneur books while I was in elementary school.
Brad Weimert: Oh, wow.
Robert Miller: So, second grade, I read Rich Dad Poor Dad, played the CASHFLOW game, and started to really understand these concepts young, which I think kind of made that ingrained into me. So, I think it’s normal.
Brad Weimert: Damn.
Robert Miller: Then I really go through a crazy shift of trying to learn entrepreneurship after going a traditional route, just went straight into it. So, that’s how I got really started in entrepreneurship. So, in elementary school, I was flipping Yu-Gi-Oh cards and just doing little side hustle businesses and stuff. But long story short, from elementary school to then about 18, 19, I was going to different networking events and trying different multilevel marketing companies and just getting in the room because I didn’t know the businesses that could take me to the next level. I mean, you can’t just flip Yu-Gi-Oh cards to go do the big goals that you really want. And that wasn’t really my passion. So that’s how I got introduced into crypto was through some of those networking groups. I heard about Bitcoin, I heard about all this other stuff, and that’s where I made my first money. I flipped like 1,500 bucks into about a quarter million in three months trading and doing all that.
And then, from there, I was like, “What do I do now?” I had money, but I didn’t know how to generate cash flow. So, I took that money and I invested into a bunch of courses on e-commerce, marketing, social media marketing agencies, private label, wholesale. I just spent 50 grand on courses to figure out the next move. And so, that was kind of my launchpad.
Brad Weimert: I love it. So, I want to talk about that and kind of the trajectory there. But I have to hit on the 1,500 to 250 grand. How did that work?
Robert Miller: Dude, it was by luck and chance because I was 18, 19 years old at the time, and I knew that the project was going to take off because I was on Twitter forums and I was on different threads and stuff. But the time that I exited was luck, because you can easily go make a bunch of money in crypto and then just have it completely collapsed. And I just knew that there’s a little too much volatility in that specific coin. I mean, I was up, I don’t know, X amount of thousands percent, figured it was a good time to get out. But I’ll never forget that feeling of when I sold it. I was like, “Oh, sh*t, this is real.” It wasn’t just the video game of just seeing numbers changed, which I think a lot of the crypto traders and even people that invest in crypto kind of get caught up in is not realizing profits. So, it was a good lesson to actually take some profits and then reinvest into myself. But it was a very interesting, just unique set of events and timing.
Brad Weimert: Yeah, 100%.
Robert Miller: I didn’t know about it prior, wasn’t a big crypto guy prior, wasn’t into computers and tech. I wasn’t into it. I just heard about it, did some research, bought some stuff, and then ended up working out well.
Brad Weimert: Yeah. So, the mechanics of that are super important to me because there are a million ways that you could make money in crypto, and you’re talking about clearly the acceleration period of this. And from the sounds of it in altcoin that was getting launched, that had some maybe utility, maybe not. And I want to talk about that a little bit, but basically, you picked a winner, wrote it up, and then took the cash. Not to be confused with actively trading, like you would a stock or anything else, but invested in a project early, in altcoin early, wrote it up. What was it and what was the utility? What was it all about?
Robert Miller: Yeah, basically, like a little VC play, if you will. I didn’t even know what VC was, but that’s kind of what you do with playing the alt game strategy is look at the team, look at the developments that they’re making. And I was just learning. I was just a sponge. So, I accepted almost everything that they were saying is truth. And that’s also what gave you the conviction to stay in when there’s volatile moments. But it was basically a platform that was going to integrate with a bunch of e-commerce businesses and ecommerce marketplaces. And so, you could essentially use the coin as a reward back system by, if you purchase through their app, they’ll give you coin back, which is one part of it.
And then the second part was being able to use those on their marketplaces and just because I was into e-comm, I was into marketing and crypto, this kind of like married all of them. I saw the fit. But back in 2017, 2018, any cryptocurrency that was creating their own marketplace around actual currency transactions for products was shut down. Any platform that was competing with the Swift banking system, lawsuit, lawsuit, lawsuit. So, there was a big cleaning of a bunch of great crypto projects in 2017, 2018 because of the rules and regulations from the SEC and just trying to put a blanket stop on all the developments that were occurring. So, that one actually isn’t even around anymore, but it just kind of went out with that wave.
Brad Weimert: Yeah, ’16, ’17, super early on the crypto front, even for the altcoin stuff. I mean, we had the significant acceleration happened later where there were hundreds or thousands of projects happening. Okay, so you made a chunk of cash. You wisely invested it in education to build skills, marketing, operations, tech stuff. Then what? You learned some sh*t and then you didn’t go off on your own, right? From then, you learned and you got a job?
Robert Miller: So, I was in college at the time. Even though I just made that money, I was doing Postmates and part-time jobs and just all this stuff around the local college, trying to figure out what the next move was. And I knew that if I kept doing jobs and doing corporate jobs, I was never going to experience the same kind of jump that I just did with crypto. So, I always wanted to figure out a vehicle that could give me enough cash flow to move out and then continue to play the crypto game. That’s like what my whole plan was.
And so, through all of that, that’s when I learned about Amazon dropshipping, then I learned about Shopify dropshipping, then I learned about Clickfunnels and marketing. And it was just kind of a rabbit hole of learning this online stuff. So, I quickly became a guy that had a personal brand with PDF e-books on crypto, courses on crypto, and I was kind of using the stuff to fit the case study that I just had. And then the cash flow side was all e-commerce.
But what I then learned was, hey, you need credit. I was like 19 years old at the time. So, you can’t just do cash for your e-commerce business. You have to recycle cash flows and build up the profit over time. And so, I learned that whole game of credit and had that work. So, I learned things in a sequential way. And even if they weren’t high cash businesses, I still kind of learned the fundamental blocks that I needed. So, as soon as I could actually make that jump, the jump for me was social media marketing. I was doing it for local businesses. I was able to go reach people digitally through Facebook groups and through different forums and stuff like that, just like what I did with crypto. And that’s how I first started building my brand, was through marketing and doing case studies for my buddies and stuff.
Brad Weimert: So, you mentioned a whole bunch of stuff through college, trying to apply what you were learning and figure things out. One was e-comm, and you said that was the cash flow thing. What was the ecomm store? And why did you do it?
Robert Miller: Yeah. So, Amazon dropshipping was the method back then where essentially, you could do an arbitrage between Walmart and Amazon to the customer. So, if you sell a dresser for 100 bucks and you can find it on Walmart for 50 bucks, just dropship, make the spread. So, you don’t actually buy any physical inventory. Client purchased it from your Amazon portal or your storefront, and then you would actually just send it out. Easy. Doesn’t require me to fork up a bunch of capital in the beginning.
And back then, Amazon didn’t really care too much about dropshipping. It was still kind of a gray area thing. Now, if you do that method, your store will get shut down. And so, I remember, within my first couple months, I was like 30, 40 grand per month in top-line revenue. And on Amazon Business, you can make in there between 10% to 20% margins on that. So, three to six grand per month is pretty healthy for starter business. But again, like I said, it was heavy cash because the margin is 10% to 20% after all the fees and all that stuff.
Brad Weimert: Because you had to buy product.
Robert Miller: Yeah, you had to buy the product and you’re basically waiting for Amazon to pay out, takes anywhere between 30 to 45 days, depending on the cycle. So, that’s where the credit thing kind of stunted my growth a little bit.
Brad Weimert: Got it. And for clarity for people that aren’t heavily involved in dropshipping, so from a credit card processing perspective, we have tons of clients that do dropshipping. And so, I’m incredibly, incredibly familiar with all of the different variants of the model, right? And I want to highlight it because, in the credit card processing space, the term dropshipping has a sh*t reputation, but it usually has a sh*t reputation because people are dropshipping from China. And the problem with dropshipping from China is delays and quality control and all sorts of other stuff. But there are a million ways that you can dropship legitimately. And so, you’re talking about arbitrage and directly dropshipping from a Walmart interface to fulfill to Amazon clients?
Robert Miller: Yeah, exactly. So, dropshipping has two kind of arms that you can go down. The first arm, like you said, is depending on a supplier, a manufacturer, and the actual product quality to be done without your control. It’s from some overseas kind of person or just from some company that you have no affiliation and connection with. That could be done with, again, Amazon to Walmart. That can be done in any platform from Wayfair to eBay, whatever, wherever you can find the arb.
The second method is typically when people buy products or buy inventory and they just put them in a warehouse. They don’t touch the inventory, but orders are coming in, the product’s moving. That’s another form of dropshipping. But the first one is really the beginner method is to figure out what products are actually selling. And then people typically go to that second model where they buy some more inventory, so that way they have some quality control, goes into a warehouse or even a garage, and they just ship stuff out.
Brad Weimert: Yeah. And there’s an intermediate step there too which now, depending on the vertical that you’re in, like in the supplement space, for example, there are companies that will do sort of done-for-you supplements and dropshipping for you. So, you don’t have to do the arbitrage from a Walmart or overseas and do the Alibaba thing and actually house the product and pay for it. You can just go to that company that says, “Hey, I’ve got 50 supplements on the shelf. We will label it for you, and you just send us an order when you get it and we’ll dropship it.” And it’s local, right?
So, for clarity, from a business model perspective, the likelihood of you having happy clients is on that spectrum. If there’s a product in a warehouse ready to ship when somebody wants to buy and you have some control over it, that’s where you have happy clients, right? So, the reputation of dropshipping is poor with beginners because of the likelihood of the disconnects, quality control of products, shipping time, service, control over it, etc.
Robert Miller: Especially if you’re the marketer that’s actually selling these products as well, it maybe doesn’t require your brand face. But even if it’s your Shopify store, your Facebook page, those bad reviews, or the bad reputation, it goes back to those distribution channels of Facebook, of your page, of your ad accounts, so then you can actually get shut down there because the product quality was bad. So, there’s a whole loop with it that can actually mess up your distribution. And that’s the value add that you have in dropshipping. How can you actually sell the product because a lot of people are not good at marketing and sales? So, if you have that skill set, it’s a great skill set to learn, but you got to grow up out of the dropshipping model at some point.
Brad Weimert: Yeah, I love it. Okay. So, you started there and you mentioned getting into the agency side of things. Why was that ultimately? And you actually said social media agency, right?
Robert Miller: Correct, yeah.
Brad Weimert: And ultimately, you did other agency stuff. Why did social media pop out as the early one? And how did it evolve into full-blown agency?
Robert Miller: Well, it’s something that I can control service-wise because at the time, it was just my intellect. It was the stuff that I was doing personally, how I knew these softwares worked together. But my market is blue collar. It’s traditional, like you’re either a nurse, a cop, or you work in construction. So, when I was talking to them about Facebook Ads, they had no idea what it was, let alone crypto, man. So, they were so new. So, it was just a brand-new concept to really think about.
And so, I was doing these door-to-door sales for marketing contracts, are like 250 bucks for local restaurants for monthly advertising, because that’s really all that that market could absorb and I was just door knocking. And I got to the point where I was so bad at sales, so bad at closing these deals. I went and worked at a solar gig for a while to try and learn how to be out of my introverted self and go sell. Now, that didn’t last long either. I was really bad at that, but at least I tried. And that’s when I was listening to Grant Cardone and really about how to improve sales.
Brad Weimert: Love it. Yeah, Cardone’s a trip, we did a good episode of Beyond a Million with him. And you have another interaction with him later in life. So, where’d you go from there? So, by the way, I want to applaud you for taking time to go learn the sales skill or make an effort to do so. Most people and this is, obviously, a telltale sign of a good entrepreneur, are the people that see a deficiency and aim to fix it. Whether they hire it or they repair it internally in themselves, most of humanity doesn’t bother doing it.
Robert Miller: Yeah, it’s uncomfortable, man, especially a lot of people my generation too, they still use a laptop or iPad, phone, whatever to do business that way. But that’s not how a lot of business is done, at least with older generations and just people that have established businesses. And I was so zoned into the computer, man. That was my thing. I could do so much. That’s how I learned the crypto thing, the e-comm thing. It was just how can I do things to this laptop lifestyle. It wasn’t until I got out into the real world to develop and see where those deficiencies were. That’s when I started to invest into courses and stuff.
So, I’ve been a huge proponent of just investing and double downing into books, courses, mentorships, and programs. And so, I kind of had this momentum going with social media marketing, had some good clients, was learning how to promote myself, doing video content just like this, just wasn’t as high production. It was an iPhone attached with a GorillaPod to a lamp because we didn’t buy tripods. I don’t know why. But it was just, hey, take action, right?
Brad Weimert: Yeah, I love it.
Robert Miller: So, I had a whiteboard. I was drawing stuff out, drawing out different concepts, and I was just throwing all the spaghetti on the wall, dude, like, going over content, funnels, email. I had no structure other than these high-level concepts. And so, they got some attention and just my local market. But what really had some lift is after the crypto run, after me doing it for some local businesses, and I did it for a lot of entrepreneurs that were digital as well, I had a full portfolio of clients that I did stuff for free, that I did well with clients that I paid or that paid me to do stuff for them that I did well with, and then even local market people that were just helping me out, still got to use them as testimonials, case studies, because they’re just helping out a young kid.
So, I always tell entrepreneurs, especially if they’re getting started, don’t be afraid to not charge and don’t be afraid to charge, like you got to do both, so that way you’re not having this weird imbalance in validating your skill set because for me, when you figure out something digitally and your whole entire market has no idea what you’re talking about, they’re trusting in you and believing in you. So, sometimes, you just got to work with them and have a little bit of a stepping stone there. But anyways, went from that to investing into a bunch of courses. I mean, I watched every single Grant Cardone YouTube video that came out. I bought every single one of his books, bought all of his webinars, registered for the free webinars, bought courses that were all within like the 7 to 97, maybe 197 range and didn’t know about funnels in the ascension into the other stuff that he had but bought all that stuff, got all of his books.
And so, around 2020 when the 10X Growth Con kind of happened, I went to a couple of different masterminds and events, and when I came back, everything shut down. And that’s when I said, “Hey, I’m going to go full scale at the marketing agency thing because this is the moment where the pendulum is swinging, where the things that I’m saying are actually going to grab attention,” then prior to COVID. And so, literally, the agency went from like 0 to 30k a month within its first 40 days, and then, from there to 80k a month within like two or three months after that and just through that growth, just reinvested in myself. And then I kept going to Cardone’s events, which I’m sure, we’ll talk about.
Brad Weimert: Yeah. Okay. Was that still social media or did you go…
Robert Miller: All social media, so paid ads, funnels, email and SMS marketing but integrating it specifically for entrepreneurs and for e-comm. So, I had both skill sets of understanding the e-commerce business model, how the financials worked, and how retainers can work in that model. And then the creator personal brand entrepreneur, literally, the Grant Cardones of the world and the me toos of that, those are the two people that I was serving.
Brad Weimert: Awesome. And so, you’re still going to Grant Cardone stuff. Clearly, you’ve got the Grant Cardone bug.
Robert Miller: Yeah. They infected me, bro. I had all of his books. I had his hat. I had pictures with me and all the books, rockin’ 10x. Yeah, I think a lot of people don’t go deep on one mentor as they should. Like, I went super deep with Grant and maybe one or two other entrepreneurs, but most people, they’ll go like the Gary Vee, Tony Robbins, and they’ll do Grant Cardone, and then they’ll do Ed Mylett, and they’ll do Elliot and his whole crew.. They’ve all different philosophies. Just stick to one until your environment changes. Because if your environment isn’t changing, then that’s when you should switch the mentor. When you’re deep with that person in training, put this stuff into action. So, I just said, “Hey, screw it. Just take action. Be brash like him.” And it kind of worked out.
Brad Weimert: So, it worked out to build that initial social media agency. When did you stop doing that?
Robert Miller: Yeah. So, the initial social media agency, I stopped doing that after I realized that the skill set of marketing, when you work with an agency that doesn’t have the aligned incentives, you’re just building the other person’s distribution method and you’re not getting any of the upside. But what’s great about the agency models, you get to see every business model through and through. So, I was building operational systems, dashboards, all this stuff for other businesses. And that’s when you get to see the cash flow. Like, how does this actually hit? How does the person’s lifestyle look? Is he just overspending and this business is going to collapse? Or does he actually know what he’s doing and he’s spending properly and has a cool lifestyle too?
So, you kind of see these different models and these different ascension programs. And so, once I found ones that I liked, that’s when I said, “Hey, I’m going to use my secret sauce.” And what we do for ourselves because of the amount of time and effort that’s required with content, amount of time and effort that’s required with building out the business units is just needed to keep the long-term growth of a business because sometimes, these guys will be short sighted. So, if you’re dependent on their cash flows for your business to operate on their distribution, you are basically the bottom of the cap table. You are looked as a commodity across every other agency because they all make the same promises. And until you can have the leverage and be higher up on the cap stack, then you’ll always be in that rat race. I didn’t want a rat race business.
Brad Weimert: So, where did that take you? What decisions did you make once you realized that?
Robert Miller: Once I realized that, I mean, it took me a couple of years to actually realize that because first, it was working with these entrepreneurs, I used to call them divas because they’re all caught up in their personal brand and not sticking to the business kind of protocols that are being built. I then switched to e-comm because I was like, “Dude, I don’t want to even be dependent on you, on your sales team. I don’t want to be dependent on any human interaction, Let’s go full e-comm.” So, I did that for about a year and a half, full e-comm, sold the business model.
And back in 2021, D2C had this huge capital influx from massive hedge funds, massive companies where they’re doing e-commerce aggregation. They were doing e-commerce VC models where they would just do a Series B or Series C and just spend about 50% of budget on advertising. So, there was a big market forward at the time. And my initial goal was to actually go purchase brands, have my agency run them, and then exit. I spoke to a mentor prior to be doing that model because in the agency space, everyone’s looking for that next jump, like, “Hey, how do I actually go make more?”
There was a company that did it like a couple of months prior to me, and he told me about them. And within six months, a $10 million per year agency business went bankrupt because they didn’t forecast how much was needed for logistics, how much was actually needed in the financial operations, the dashboards, and the systems, as well as quality control. They looked at it just from a marketing perspective. So, he told me that, I researched it, and I was like, “I don’t have the team for it.” I had the pitch deck for it. I was going to go raise money for it. I had everything laid out, except for that one part of it, which was the operations and FinOps around e-comm specifically.
So, I stayed in the e-commerce space for another year, year and a half, or so. And then instead of doing direct-to-consumer for e-comm, we actually have a company now where we have a wholesale distribution model. So, we have big contracts with PepsiCo, Celsius. We actually just finalized some stuff with Sysco and some really big distributors for the volume, so that way we have our supply chain kind of guaranteed. And now, we can control where that gets distributed rather than trying to just convince a market distribution.
Brad Weimert: Okay, I want to dig into that. But you keep saying e-comm and I think that, correct me if I’m wrong, so the name of the agency was ARC?
Robert Miller: So, the first agency that I had was named Captify. We got shut down for some trademark stuff. I didn’t know anything when I was 18, 19. So, that was the first one. We changed it to ScaleBold and that was the e-comm agency.
Brad Weimert: Got it.
Robert Miller: Those models and those agencies were great, great people, great clients. It was awesome. But I had to make that pivot, partly because some of the business partners and some of those models didn’t quite have the same vision, so we kind of just disintegrated anyways. But the distribution model where I learned, hey, I can go further up in securing product and I can go further up in securing the margin, and then I can just worry about distribution on myself, that’s how ARC was created. So, that’s Automated Retail Commerce where we help people with their Amazon distributions. Basically, we set up these marketplace stores for them. And then we have these big wholesale contracts. We buy in bulk and we distribute it on these big brands through the different client stores.
Brad Weimert: Got it. So, that’s exactly what I want to hit on. So, before ARC, when you say e-comm, it was not Amazon?
Robert Miller: No, it wasn’t Amazon. It was mostly direct-to-consumer on Shopify. That was the big business model that everyone was getting into, VCs were throwing money at. And there was people throwing money into Amazon, but they were doing a model where they would buy private label brands and try and just flip it into a rollup. The problem with only depending on Amazon for branded products is that really an Amazon distribution channel if you are making your own product, and then you have Amazon alongside it, Amazon is actually your loss leader. A lot of people don’t think of it like that. And so…
Brad Weimert: The billboard.
Robert Miller: Yeah. The private equity guys, they bought up all these companies, were valued at like $10 billion and then got cut by 90% about a year later because they didn’t understand the forecasting of e-comm and how the product cycles work. So, it was an expensive blow-up, but when I understood that, hey, I can go to war every single day, new content, new angles, new landing pages, new everything to just push the product, or I can just go further up in the food chain where the products are actually coming from straight from manufacturer, that quality brands, stuff like that that I can control, that’s how ARC actually came to be.
Brad Weimert: Got it. So, I think what I’m hearing is that you were doing the e-comm thing and when you went up chain, so you create ARC, and the idea with ARC is that you are creating Amazon storefronts for people and running them for people. But part of that, I think what I heard was that you’re dictating what products are being sold to some extent because you’re looking at wholesale contracts that you have, so you have better terms on the contracts. So, when you sell products, when you create a store for them with those products, you have higher margins than they could get anywhere else.
Robert Miller: Yeah. So, a lot of these brands, they want to work with distributors that have volume and they want their product to move. If you’re just a one-man shop, you got set up out of the move here, you’re not going to be able to move as much product, pun intended, not going to be able to move as much product just because you can’t buy in the volumes and the quantities that you have to. So, we’ll buy millions of dollars of product every single month, and we’re building a relationship with them over time. So, as we spend more and more with them on the brands that are already going to sell, you’re going to need to buy trash bags, you’re going to need to buy Celsius. I’ve seen a couple in the studio here. We got one right here.
Brad Weimert: So, Celsius Ad.
Robert Miller: Yeah, there we go. We sell that kind of stuff and we sell a bunch of other products as well. So, when we go to build with these relationships, they want to see the warehouse infrastructures, they want to see great processing, they want to see great financial reporting, they want to see portfolio report, they want to see that stuff because that’s what makes you a legitimate business. So, we can talk about FinOps and all that stuff later, but that’s what I was really doing for all those agency clients. And if you’re going a couple of steps deeper with 50 clients, it’s not going to compare to you going really, really deep on one business model because you’re going to have more time to build all the infrastructure that’s really required. And so, that’s why we ship it to that model, and then we’re just leveraging our distribution connections with these big companies.
Brad Weimert: Interesting. Okay, so we’ve hit on Cardone a couple of times. And I have done that because you had a run where you were working inside the Cardone Enterprise. Was that in the midst of this? Where did that fit into the puzzle? And why did you do it? And how did you get out of it? And where was it in the timeline?
Robert Miller: Yeah, so 2019. So, prior to me starting my first agency that took off during COVID, it was right before then.
Brad Weimert: Got it. So, at that point, you did the social media marketing agency and you were following Cardone. And then you got a job with him before you launched the agency?
Robert Miller: Yeah, I had a starter freelancer agency first.
Brad Weimert: Got it, yep.
Robert Miller: Try to do the sales. It didn’t work. And I was in college at the time too, but I worked with him remotely for seven or eight months doing marketing. So, I remember I was in my social media marketing class. And I’m literally managing seven figures, like $2 to $3 million per month in ad campaigns. I have Facebook Ads and Google Ads pulled up, and the social media marketing is like going over blogs. I’m like, “Oh my gosh, you guys are so far behind it. No funnels, no social media ads, no content marketing blogs and SEO and just old school tactics.” And so, for me, that’s when I also knew that there was an opportunity, like all the kids there, my peers weren’t being taught social media at the depth that the market rate for social media marketing. And so, we were able to charge $5,000, $6,000 a month contracts for the cutting-edge tech, cutting-edge strategies, and just stuff that really, really worked.
And the distribution on Facebook and Instagram was super hot. It’s still hot today. But it was just cranking at that time. And so, that’s where that window of opportunity came for me. But I worked with them for about seven or eight months, was working mostly with Frank Kern and I had a partnership for a little while. But from there, I actually got burnt out. I was like too high stress, got full-time college, had a girlfriend at the time too, and I was full time with him. So, I was working like 4 a.m. or 5 a.m. to midnight every single day. It was just insane. I had too much on my plate. So, I took a sabbatical for a month to two months, and I was like, “I never want to do marketing again. I am done. Peace out.”
So, I took my finals, kind of took a break for winter break, whatever. And then, come around like January, a buddy of mine saw an ad for social media marketing for Tai Lopez’s course, and he’s like, “Hey, I want to do social media marketing.” I was like, “Bro, you don’t know the half of it. I just went through it. I’ve been through that route. I’ve been through the door to door, went and worked at one of the biggest agencies at the time. You want to start social media marketing agency? Okay.” And he was like, just telling me about kind of the early stages of his development. And I just remember, I was like, “Dude, just don’t go down this route, please. Let me save you.”
So, we started the agency together, and that’s when COVID hit and we just took off. So, it was a very interesting set of events. But I really learned a lot, not only from the marketing side because it actually just validated what I knew, but it gave me a budget to test with.
Brad Weimert: Yeah, sure.
Robert Miller: And I didn’t have a lot of clients prior, but all these concepts, I got to see them in action. I got to go deeper on these business models. And that’s where, for me, it was like, you’re not crazy. You just needed the opportunity. Doesn’t matter who it came from. Drop the ego and go for the opportunity.
Brad Weimert: Yeah. I think that one of the biggest oversights that new entrepreneurs have is that you can learn from other people that have already gone to battle and tried it 15 different ways. And where they landed was a result of all the mistakes they made. And you can avoid making them if you go work for them for some period of time and learn, right? But if you don’t learn with a budget, bro, it’s going to take you years to figure that stuff out. So, you can press your time frame by taking on millions of dollars in budget to iterate with ads, with the ad platforms to get good at. And that launched you into ARC, to the next agency.
Robert Miller: Yeah, yeah, it launched me from that to a couple of agencies that I’ve had. I still have an agency now. It’s called Creator Ads and it’s very, very boutique. So, we do a lot of growth partnerships, we build this stuff out deep with a few of our clients, but it also runs all of my marketing as well. So, it’s now, I’m using the leverage that I’ve built over the years.
Brad Weimert: Awesome. So, tell me now, so ARC happens. You’ve gone through a bunch of iterations. Today, what’s the mix of businesses that you own and operate? And we’ll get into crypto here, but what’s the current structure for you?
Robert Miller: Yeah. So, ARC is one of the main businesses that has some downstream companies beneath it. Like, we’ve done VA staffing for about 700 or 800 different VAs, but that’s all kind of internal. We’ve done it for a couple buddies of mine that ask us about that, but that one’s called On It Outsource. Then through there, we also have some processing stuff that we do. So, we actually, similar to EPD, but mostly for the recurring subscription kind of side. So, a little bit of a different model compared to just direct processing and straight sales. It’s mostly built for recurring, which is really, really cool.
Brad Weimert: We should talk about that.
Robert Miller: We should. We definitely should. It’s a whole game. It’s a whole world I had no idea about. My partner has been really diving deep into it. It’s kind of more his thing than mine, but I’m just fascinated about how this whole thing works when it comes to subscriptions and recurring.
Brad Weimert: Huge. Well, see how we can support you there. We’re very, very deep in that stuff.
Robert Miller: Okay, great. Awesome, yeah. Well, let’s have the chat about it.
Brad Weimert: Yeah, I love it. So, you’ve got an element of that. The agency’s still running.
Robert Miller: Correct.
Brad Weimert: The VA thing.
Robert Miller: Yeah. So, we have VAs, the processing. We have the e-comm side as well. We have our own warehousing out in California. So, that’s kind of all under that hub there. Then we have the agency. And then that’s led into my software development projects and the fund because that’s all go-to market strategy for software product that we built. And then I’m a big believer in digital cash flow and then digital wealth. So, all the money that I’m working on making there, throwing it back into the fund.
Brad Weimert: So, pie chart of those things, there were five things there. In the pie chart, where does your time go, and then what produces the most money?
Robert Miller: Three areas that produce the best ROI are ARC, the software for crypto, and then the fund because those are the highest leverage vehicles because of the moats around those businesses. ARC, we have some of the best distribution partnerships really in the world, but specifically for this model, I mean, there’s no one that competes with us here in the States, here in the US. The second is the software. No one else has this algo, this software, it’s custom built. No one else has it. So, it’s its own individual product. It can’t just be ripped off.
And then third, the fund, it takes a long time to build a fund. It takes a long time to go through the legal paperwork. And that’s typically what is the big moat beneath or between someone actually starting one and actually launching one is that big time duration and the expenses to actually get it launched. It’s taking us about a year and a half, two years. So, those are the three highest leverage. But the best ways to get connected with people ROI on relationships, I mean, that’s the podcast and that’s the agency because I get to see the business models and see where I can help and provide value.
Brad Weimert: And it might be, it might not be, but the pie chart of your time, is that directly aligned with the ROI or is it in a different place?
Robert Miller: Yeah. So, I would say about 40% to 45% of my time goes to ARC, but another 25% to 20% goes to the software, 15% goes to the fund. And that’s going to shift over time. It just depends on the season, but the latter part goes either towards personal branding or just gets allocated to the proper business that may need help.
Brad Weimert: Got it. I love it. So, let’s talk about crypto. So, you got in early, and it sounds like– were you involved during the agency period also? Or did you kind of make the money and then come back to it later?
Robert Miller: So, I made money in crypto first. Before I learned the traditional finance, before I learned any business model, I was a crypto guy. And so, when I learned the marketing stuff, I just attached it to what I did in crypto, case studies, VSLs, da, da, da. And then I was like, “Oh, there’s actually a way to generate cash flow here because crypto doesn’t cash flow.” So, then that’s when I really went deeper into the agency side.
Brad Weimert: But did you do anything with crypto during that time? Because from ’16, ‘17 is when you made a quarter million in crypto on an initial bet, then you’re an agency land from then until now, really. And at some point, did you pick crypto up again? Or were you kind of playing with it throughout that period of time?
Robert Miller: Yeah. So, I’ve always thrown money over to crypto. It wasn’t necessarily a public thing, like there was no offering that I could make other than say, “Hey, buy it. It’s going up. I know where Bitcoin is going. I’ve been studying this thing for years.” But I think there’s also seasons of figuring out where you can actually supply value in a market. So, I follow a lot of great people in the crypto space, like Mark Moss, good dude. You got Layah Heilpern. You have some of the main people that have just been in crypto for a very, very long time. I had Gary Cardone on my podcast. And now, he’s entering crypto. So, we have all these people that have their own personalities in crypto, right? And you don’t want just to be a me too to them because if they’re more established, they have 10 years of track record with it, who are you? At the end of day, no matter how much you’re marketing, you still got to build trust.
So, first, I had to figure out, okay, where do I want to enter this market? What’s the persona of like, what can people relate to me on in that market? That’s number one. And then number two is, what value can I provide? Crypto got a lot of adoption in 2020 and 2021. Everyone’s now using QR code. So, the education isn’t really the value add anymore. Everyone’s talking about crypto. So, okay, that’s one element you can go down. The next element would have been launching some sort of education model that also had a moneymaking element to it. And that’s okay. But crypto’s so volatile that it’s not a tried-and-true formula. And you’re on a rat race of the crypto market and that thing is super volatile. They don’t want to do that.
So, I was always investing into crypto. But when I found out how to actually start the fund, which was in about 2021, that’s when we started investing into the resources for it. That’s when I was like, “Ah, got it.” I could do the business model of actually bringing in capital, and because I went bigger with the goal, then I actually created the downstream businesses I could attach to it to make the entire ascension make sense. So, sometimes, people go with that low product or low-ticket product first, and there’s a lot of commoditization there. But if you go upstream, typically, your vision gets bigger, then you can kind of see how everything works together.
So, for me, I didn’t really enter the crypto space marketing heavily again until about 2022, early 2022, because that’s when we were going to go raise capital. But crypto market had a whole of sh*t show. So, we pulled back the reins on raising capital and those just value, value, value, video, video, video education to then go launch our fund here into 2024.
Brad Weimert: Got it. Awesome. So, you prepared to do the fund and, I mean, things, I can’t remember the exact timeline, you probably can, but the things unraveled in the crypto space. There was so much heat growing so quickly. All these NFT projects were happening. Everything was accelerating, and then things imploded, I mean, really catastrophic level, right? The major platforms that allowed you to trade had every problem from being poorly run to full-blown fraud, which obviously rattled confidence in crypto at large, specifically all the altcoins, etc., but everywhere. Why were you still bullish on it.
And when you say education, were you monetizing at that point or did you still think fund at that point? So, those are, I mean, two distinct things. First, why were you still bullish on it when all this happened in the face of regulation, fraud, collapse, mismanagement, government intervention, etc.? Then what exactly does education mean?
Robert Miller: Yeah, so the underlying value of any crypto is just, number one, there’s the actual thesis behind the project, which in Bitcoin’s example, no CEO, no board to talk to, no one’s promoting it from a company perspective, so you don’t have the risk of company operations that are not registering things properly or going through a legal battle or whatever. It’s a decentralized protocol and it birthed the whole industry, number one. So, that’s kind of the first thing that I look at. And so, when you get into crypto, you have to understand what you’re investing in. There’s the VC route where there’s all these different companies, all these different token projects, and they’re trying to create these ecosystems, that’s more of like investing into an early-stage SaaS company or something that you actually want an exit on to publicly traded company. It’s just in the crypto market.
And then there’s the different sectors of crypto with different blockchain projects. Sure, they’re serving, and who are they attaching themselves to? So, some projects, they’ll attach themselves to Walmart, they’ll attach themselves to banking infrastructure in order to just develop the tech on their dime. Now, when I was first getting into Bitcoin, I understood that concept, the debasement of currency, because I have grandparents that were born in the ‘30s and ‘40s that are still alive. And they’ll tell me that a nickel bought them freaking five-course meal back in the day. I’m like, “No, there’s something there. That’s not adding up to me.”
I was studying finance in college, and so, when I went down and took the orange pill of Bitcoin, I was like, “Oh, they’re just printing money.” They’re printing money because after World War II, we won that war, we had all the gold, and we had the biggest power. So, just like a company that has strong cash flows, they will lever up. They’ll go either take on more debt or they’ll issue new shares to go raise more debt or raise more capital to invest into other projects. Same thing happened with the US. It’s a business.
After World War II, we had all the gold, we had all the power. So, we can infinitely print this dollar, so it takes more dollars for us to actually buy things. But for them, because we had such a strong foundation, the dollar can then be used to land grab different markets so we can go invest into, for example, Africa and go put our currency debt on their country, what we’re doing right now with the Ukraine. We’re giving them a bunch of money, so that way when that country needs to go reproduce, rebuild, etc., or hey, the borrower’s always a slave to the lender and you have our currency, so you have to pay us back. So, I understood that concept going down the Bitcoin rabbit hole and I was like, dude, they have the controls in place and now, they can just continue to issue more debt. We saw it again in COVID.
Bitcoin is finite. So, it’s not necessarily that Bitcoin is just going to go to million to millions of dollars, $2 million, etc., because it’s worth so much, it’s just the hedge against the dollar. If every single fiat currency goes to zero at some point, this thing is finite. If you just understand those two concepts, you would choose the finite resource over the thing that just could be infinitely printed. So, no matter the bad actors, no matter the exchanges that went under, people are obviously doing bad actions, just like in any market with cash and drugs, whatever, but to accumulate as much of this as possible because they know every other show that they do, they’re selling products, whatever mechanisms that they’re doing to just make money can just be stored in a reserve asset that has money prints. No matter what you do, this thing will go up because there’s a fixed supply.
Brad Weimert: I love that fundamental. Somebody might challenge that by adding the asterisk of that is true if we agree that there’s value to it. And the thesis of Bitcoin has changed over time from it being a crypto currency to it being a stored value. And for those that don’t track this, currency is used as a medium for exchange to purchase products in economy. And that’s what the dollar does, right? Stored value would be like gold. Gold is not a currency. We do not buy things with gold today because it’s not practical. Bitcoin is also not practical to purchase things with, at least now, for a lot of reasons. One is that because it’s finite, the fractional nature of it as it goes up in value is weird. If I want to buy a coffee with Bitcoin, it’s like 0.00143, whatever, right?
Robert Miller: Yeah. And then it makes, is it even worth it? You go a little bit of a friction in the purchase process.
Brad Weimert: Friction in the purchase. Because of that particular Blockchain, it’s also very slow. So, Bitcoin runs takes 30 seconds to two minutes to run a transaction. And there are ways to accelerate that, but it defeats some of the purpose of Bitcoin, meaning specifically the decentralization element of it. So, somebody could say, to that argument, if we know that the currency isn’t the driving force anymore, it’s stored value, is there any concern in your mind that at some point, people are going to say, this is fabricated? And yeah, there’s a finite amount, but who f*cking cares? I don’t want a Bitcoin, this idea. And if it’s not concerning to you, why?
Robert Miller: Yeah, it’s not concerning to me because I’m a digital entrepreneur. So, it clicks for me. The easiest way for, someone that may be older or is used to real estate and stuff like that, imagine if there’s a finite plot of land and everyone’s trying to move there, the home values are going to go up. Even if the underlying value to build the home or whatever isn’t near the value that they’re quoting you on, like, Miami property out here, the land is worth way more because of everything that’s going on around it.
It’s the same type of concept. However, with real estate, and this is just how maxi you really want to get. I mean, you can compare apples to apples when it comes to a real estate cash flow is, Bitcoin doesn’t. Real estate has tax advantages, Bitcoin doesn’t. But you’re buying things for different reasons. Real estate’s a great tax write-off kind of play, so you can accelerate the depreciation, but you don’t own it because if you piss off the government enough, they’ll come take it. And there’s property taxes every single year on that. So, you’re kind of renting it while you’re still here on Earth. So, you just kind of take a bigger step back. What can actually transmit through time? The value in the energy that you’ve actually deployed to earn all that money and what can you actually pass down that will hold its value and doesn’t really need to be managed.
If you look at real estate, dude, my condo when I first moved in, like seven or eight things break within the first two months. I’m like, “This sucks, dude. I don’t want to own real estate at all. This is terrible.” I’m having people coming through, fixing everything. So, it’s a business. And that’s what real estate really is. It’s a business. And people should look at it like that. Gold, itself, the bar is not a business. So, don’t compare it to other assets like that.
But it’s a better asset to compare to digital gold to Bitcoin because it’s like a digital gold, where with gold, the biggest change between these two is that you can accelerate the production of gold by throwing more fiat currency at people that will go produce more of it and go mines and that we actually have a gold mine investment, which is a totally different topic. So, I still believe in commodities overall. You can’t accelerate the production of Bitcoin. It has its finite schedule.
Brad Weimert: I’m 100% with you on that. The point that I think is a curious one is let’s take diamonds. So, diamonds, gold, and let’s eliminate the fabricated diamonds for the moment and let’s just say only mines diamonds, right? It’s very similar to gold from that perspective. However, diamonds are only valuable because of a massive marketing engine behind the diamond industry that tells us we’re supposed to buy diamonds for marriage. That’s what makes diamonds valuable. That’s it.
So, Bitcoin right now is caught in a hype cycle, has been, and it’s gone up and down. But it’s caught in a marketing engine that is producing this response. And I’m not even saying that I necessarily buy into one or the other. This is an approach to producing logic through this thesis of finite amount. So, what happens if that marketing engine dissipates and people just don’t value the Bitcoin anymore?
Robert Miller: Yeah, it’s an interesting concept because, one, there’s a lot of people in this world that I think will find and do find value because of the currencies that happen in other markets. It’s not just a US-based thing. Even though we are the biggest market out there, there are still other countries that will adopt it because that is better than their banking systems. So, there still is a demand for this type of tech overall. Blockchain is real. Banks are using it, like the underlying tech is very, very valuable. But you make a good point of, is Bitcoin going to be the thing that lasts with this whole marketing engine?
And I took a step back and thought about, okay, how do we actually perceive value and everything that we have now with real estate as an example. All the single-family homes, all the multifamily projects, Fidelity or any one of these banks, they’ll offer money at some sort of discount, or they’ll create some sort of program to lock people in into even fixed investment, or why? It’s like, how do they actually execute on that? How do they execute to say, hey, you can lever up into this property 5% down or 10% down, you now have a home, but now, your mortgage is going to have so much interest on it that you’re almost paying two times of the actual principal amount? How do they convince you to do that? It’s a marketing play. So, everything’s a marketing play if you really look at it and it’s just making bets at the end of the day.
Brad Weimert: Yeah. Mortgages are such a f*cking scam. It’s crazy because we have usury laws in the US that prevent lenders from charging egregious rates on things. But there are all sorts of perverted permutations of those laws. And mortgages are a reasonable example where, yes, the annual rate is X, but like you just said, what people totally ignore is, first of all, that what you pay into a house is usually more than two times the value of the house with the interest. And second, the amortization tables are f*cked. I mean, like interest, when you look at a 30-year mortgage the first seven years, you’re not even paying yourself at all. The first seven years is only interest going to the bank, mostly. But about seven years on a 30 is where you start to get some principal pay down. So, you’re right. Sorry, hot button there.
Robert Miller: Yeah. No, it’s true. And so, that applies to a lot of the investments that we look at now. Traditional money management, the modern market portfolio theory, same thing, why are we believing the beliefs of other people about money? And what is money? And you go down a whole ‘nother rabbit hole. And so, I implore everyone to go down that rabbit hole. So, when I first got started with the education to tie that in, it was just free value, just like e-books and videos. And at first, I sounded like a freaking, like a psychopath, like a crying wolf about monetary systems, all this stuff because before COVID, it wasn’t as obvious what was happening. After COVID, a lot of things got exposed and people started waking up because of the extreme reaction to something that maybe was big, maybe wasn’t, and I’m here to comment on that, but just the extreme natures that went through with media protocols with, obviously, the lockdowns, that monetary policy, everything changed. They printed 40% new debt in that time period. That’s crazy. That’s crazy.
Brad Weimert: You think?
Robert Miller: Yeah, like, I get why they would do it. There’s a scapegoat to print that much. Everyone around the world knew the crisis, like an issue, the debt over it. And what’s actually a really cool theory, this is by John Pennington. And if you don’t know who he is, big hedge fund manager. He looks at the US dollar as a product, an e-comm, as an example. It’s the number one product they can print infinite supply, but everyone needs the dollar, everyone wants the dollar. So, you can print as much as you want. And people will still have the demand for it, which means you can still lever up on top of it. You can still do all these crazy sponsorships, or you can do all these crazy donations to countries and stuff like that to fund what they’re doing because that’s what they need. And you’re just giving that debt out. And so, that’s why I don’t think that this US system will stop unless there’s a war that challenges it, which is where we’re seeing all the tensions come from.
Brad Weimert: So, relative to the marketing side of Bitcoin, what I think I heard was that you think the value prop of Bitcoin is strong enough that the marketing engine is going to support it no matter what because in contrast to the other marketing engines or the other products that have similar marketing engines, it has a stronger value prop.
Robert Miller: Has a stronger value prop. And now, you have BlackRock and Fidelity. They just issued their ETFs and a few other people. They just want to capture market. So, it’s at a stage now where it’s not only validated, but the big boys are making money too.
Brad Weimert: But that also, to me, diminishes some of the value, right? So, one of the points that you made, which is a good one, is that the entire stock market, you are getting destroyed by the people “managing your money” because they’re taking their returns, whether they produce a return for you or not. They’re taking a fee regardless of the outcome they get for you. And that works heavily against investors that are putting their money into mutual fund or just trying to buy stocks through somebody trading for them, right? They’re losing 1% or more to that person regardless if they actually get a return or not.
Bitcoin, up until this comment that you just made and the reality of what just happened, you didn’t have that exposure, right? You could buy directly. There isn’t this crazy markup, there isn’t this oversight and management. But now enter the ETFs, now enter BlackRock and traditional capital markets, isn’t that going to change the product? Isn’t that just going to turn it into, hey, we’ve got Wall Street involved, gouging us again to buy a fund for Bitcoin?
Robert Miller: If you don’t get educated on how to manage and hold your Bitcoin, then yeah. It’s the same thing with what Warren Buffett said about choosing stocks. If you’re not a good stock picker, just buy the S&P 500 because all that’s going to happen anyways, whether or not you’re a good stock picker. And I have some hedge fund manager buddies of mine that are great at picking stocks, it’s not my game, but they’re making a killing on just choosing five to six stocks. So, you don’t need to go down the whole route of trusting other people to manage your position.
Now, in a historical sense, gold was an ETF, or they made an ETF for gold because it’s kind of hard to manage gold. I actually had some gold and silver coins. I’m like, “Okay, now, what do I do with it?” I just put it in my drawer. And this sucks, like this is weird, like, I don’t know.
Brad Weimert: Which, by the way, Bitcoin is also a horrible thing to manage personally or has been over the last 10 years. Wallets, keys, passphrases, what the f*ck are you talking about? Cold storage. Yeah, I mean, like, humanity has a hard time with that. I’m a tech, I have a f*cking software company. It’s still a pain in the ass for me. So, an ETF also simplifies that for people.
Robert Miller: It simplifies the investment exposure. But just like how it’s manipulated with gold ETFs and all these other ETFs, it’s going to have a deep hedging from the actual movement of the underlying asset overall. So, it’s at a stage now where if you own the actual crypto, if you own your keys, if you own the actual Bitcoin itself, that becomes more valuable, mostly because these institutions are gobbling up and throwing their fiat money that they’re making from fees and just the money that they’re getting from the Fed and the governments and stuff, just throwing it directly into accumulating as much as possible.
And that’s why I think Michael Saylor made a brilliant move back in 2021 of just accumulating this stuff, buying, buying, buying, even through the entire sh*t show of 2022, because it’s a balance sheet asset that you can creatively finance. And he’s already spitting out a bunch of cash flow. And at a certain point, you can’t invest into more stocks. You can only have so much real estate in a publicly traded kind of company way. There’s actually law against kind of what you’re talking about earlier about how much exposure you can have to certain things, so that way that the stock doesn’t get to liquidate it down and over-collateralize and overleverage. So, he had to go to Bitcoin because that was the only other asset that can stop the debasement of his cash that he was actually generating into a better reserve asset.
So, I think it’s a time horizon thing. I think, if you look at Bitcoin by holding your keys and having the custody, it can be a pain in the ass. But if you actually do that, you’re in a better situation than letting BlackRock take care of it or any of these big institutions because they don’t even hold it. Coinbase is the company that custodies every single big institutions Bitcoin. So, Coinbase is the selected one, where everyone’s pouring their money in, where everyone’s actually betting under their custody.
Brad Weimert: And by the way, the call it top five competitors for Coinbase all collapsed in the last 18 months.
Robert Miller: And they’re the Holy Grail, man. When you get selected by governments to manage an entire asset class, you have different treatment. All the new stuff about Bitcoin being bad and blah, blah, blah, it’s all FUD as they call it in crypto space. But it’s all to get them the time that they need to put the proper things in place.
Brad Weimert: What’s FUD?
Robert Miller: Fear, uncertainty, and doubt.
Brad Weimert: Got it.
Robert Miller: Propaganda. Just hey, don’t worry about it. Nothing to see here. It’s bad. It’s sh*t. It’s rat poison, like it’s whatever, so that way they can put the proper rails in place for people to get involved. And in one way, I understand it because not everyone’s ready to own their Bitcoin. Like, you’re saying, keys can be complicated. My grandma is not going to do this, like it’s just not there. So, in one way, I get it, but who benefits? They do. They own the asset. And with this whole new world order where you will rent everything and never own anything, if you go really maxi with it, it’s like, hey, don’t own my Bitcoin, I want to own that.
Brad Weimert: Do you think that the US government has a master plan to control Bitcoin?
Robert Miller: It’s not the US government, it’s the Federal Reserve. They learned from JPMorgan how to manipulate markets. So, JPMorgan, I think, it was in 2021 or 2022, got fined a ton of money because they’re manipulating the gold market, the price action the gold market for about 10 years. They got fined billions of dollars. And what they did essentially was placed trading volume. It’s a strategy called spoofing, essentially, put 45 days of trading volume at a certain price and 45 days of trading volume at a certain buy price.
So, Bitcoin hit 69k, for example. That trading volume is stacked. So, people are trying to buy through it. But the Federal Reserve can print as much money as they want. So, you’re competing against an infinite supply above a certain price point. And so, they can box things in by putting that trading volume on top and that trading volume from the bottom. So, it’s controlled in a sense, but that’s how the stock market is. Gold was like that. I mean, this is not a new thing.
Brad Weimert: So, you’re saying JPMorgan did that with gold got fined, and the hypothesis is that the Fed is doing that with Bitcoin?
Robert Miller: Yeah, yeah, and it’s mostly John Pennington’s theory. So, I want to give him credit because he put a lot of time into thinking about this theory. But it makes sense because you can’t stop Bitcoin at where it’s at now. They took too long to try and figure out how to stop it. It’s already out of the bag, cat’s out of the bag. So, they have to find ways to control that market by putting it into all of their control frameworks, and then they can place the dollar however they want on top of it. So, Bitcoin will hit a certain price point. But now, there’s just different players involved. And so, the market evolves.
Brad Weimert: Interesting. Okay. So, you have a fund called TRU Capital that is a fund for crypto.
Robert Miller: That’s correct.
Brad Weimert: So, you said you’ve been pushing info for the last while and this fund is present. We’ve talked a little bit about different ways to get into crypto. And your advice minutes ago was if you can hold the Bitcoin independently with your own keys, you’re going to have an edge over doing it through a fund like BlackRock, etc. So, tell me about your fund play and how crypto works there, what the value prop is.
Robert Miller: Yeah, for sure. So, appreciate that. Yeah, if you can first own your Bitcoin and own your keys, that’s the best way to do things long term if you have a 10, 15, 20, 50-year outlook because you don’t care about the advantages of trading and getting out of the markets at proper times. So, that’s your thesis, cool. But what we’re doing over at TRU Capital is we have some proprietary tech, some proprietary algorithms that we use to actually trade on institutional accounts. So, just like with a big, big, big real estate deal, like a big apartment or a big hotel deal, you need a sponsor to get into that deal. And that’s essentially how we’re acting for a lot of investors is we have institutional accounts. You can’t just hook up any algorithm to an account on that level and think that there’s no process to go through.
And so, we have a strategy with two algorithms that we layer in that helps us accumulate more Bitcoin by essentially just buying low and selling high, just doing that over and over. And it runs automatically and we can program in certain ways. But long story short, it’s done extremely well over the past six years. One’s been running for six years. One’s been running for four years. And we have third-party audit results, reports, all that kind of stuff. And so, the value prop there and what is really our alpha are those algorithms. The other portions of the fund are to accumulate more Bitcoin and to have some positions, some of these other projects that we know are going to go up, but our long-term thesis is just to accumulate more Bitcoin and pull out at the right cycle by leveraging these algorithms.
Brad Weimert: Awesome. Super helpful. Who are you looking for to invest in the fund? And do you have a cap on it? What are the parameters there?
Robert Miller: Yeah. So, we can only take on accredited investors and up, so accredited investors, qualified purchasers, and qualified clients. Our minimum check size is $250,000 and we’re raising $50 million as of right now. So, we’re about, or we’re actually finalizing the launch of the paperwork, but we’ll be up in our capital raising efforts here within the next two, three weeks, and we’ll see where we’re at when these things go live.
Brad Weimert: I love it, man. Awesome. Robert, where do you want to point people? They want to find out more about you, about any projects you have going on, where should they look?
Robert Miller: Yeah, sure thing. You guys can reach out to me @therobertjmailer on Instagram, or on Twitter, therobertjmiller_. Don’t fall for any of the scam bots that are out there. There’s plenty of pages, but you’ll see the checkmark and the profile picture. We’ll link it below as well, but you guys can find me and reach out if you have questions.
Brad Weimert: Love it. Robert, I appreciate you taking on the time, man. It’s been great to talk.
Robert Miller: Yeah, sure thing, man. Appreciate it.
