How Founders Become Investable | Tyrus Shivers on Capital Raising, AI & Going Public

Tyrus Shivers (00:02.349)
Yes.

Shivers.

Arthur Andrew Bavelas (00:06.815)
Hello, welcome everybody to another episode of Arthur's Round Table. Super grateful for everybody's paying attention and sharing and listening. And so again, thank you for that. We're glad to have Tyrus Shivers with us today. We don't know each other, but we're glad to have him. And it is germane to our subject matter what he's doing, and so I think you'll enjoy the show today. So again, thank you everybody for paying attention and Tyrus, thank you for being here.

Tyrus Shivers (00:35.106)
Thank you for having me, Arthur. Look forward to this conversation.

Arthur Andrew Bavelas (00:38.377)
Me too. So let's, if it's okay with you, let's start at the your beginning and then we'll move on to the beginning of the enterprise.

Tyrus Shivers (00:46.612)
Absolutely. So I grew up in South Alabama, about an hour north of Mobile, very rural area. I'm talking dirt roads, cowfields, cotton fields, peanuts. not a lot of opportunity.

Most people that I know either worked on a farm or they worked in a woodyard or in some sort of factory. And we're talking twelve, fifteen hour days, or rig work as well, right off of Mobile and into New Orleans and Louisiana off the coast. And as a young kid, I grew up with my great grandfather in the house and my grandmother, his daughter, and my father was in prison and my mother was working two jobs. But as a young kid, I grew up with the stories of him growing up in nineteen nineteen being born and

Chopping cotton for a nickel a week. I grew up with the stores of my grandmother. Yeah. Yeah, 1919. my great grandm my grandmother, his daughter, she picked cotton. I remember her talking about ten dollars for every hundred pounds of cotton they would pick. And

Arthur Andrew Bavelas (01:34.599)
Wild. Wild, right? Wasn't so long ago.

Tyrus Shivers (01:54.177)
My great granddaddy always say, Learn all you can because you're gonna need it. I walk by his house every day going to school. So education has always been central to our family. And I told my mom one day, I was like nine or ten, that I'm not gonna work hard like you guys, because you work very hard but don't have a lot. We didn't have much.

Arthur Andrew Bavelas (02:09.021)
Mm-hmm.

Tyrus Shivers (02:13.716)
And for me, that first job, that first kind of step into entrepreneurship was printing business cards for local churches and small businesses. And I did that with my great aunt, my grandmother, my grandmother's sister. She had a computer we didn't. And so that's kind of was my introduction into entrepreneurship. Yeah, absolutely. I was about eight, nine years old.

Arthur Andrew Bavelas (02:33.897)
Spark, right? Entrepreneur Spark. Yeah. How old were you then?

Arthur Andrew Bavelas (02:41.395)
Yeah, wild. Nice. Enterprising.

Tyrus Shivers (02:43.446)
Then yeah, then graduated, went to university on full scholarship. Two years in, I lost that scholarship and not doing the right things. And I did the thing that I said I wasn't gonna do. I went and I started working hard. I worked at a HVAC company eight hours a day, and then overnight I worked at UPS loading trucks. And so now I'm working twelve hours a day.

making a little bit of money and working hard. And I knew that that wasn't my goal. So I didn't jump right back into entrepreneurship. I went into the military. I went active duty Air Force in 2007. I was planning to do twenty twenty-five years, go to OTS, become an officer.

And then 2009, I was medically retired. And so for everybody listening, life is all about pivoting because we can have goals, but sometimes those goals just don't work out. Luckily, yeah. Luckily, I was in the cleared environment. And so I left the Air Force in Korea, went to Maryland, and got into GovCon. And from 2009 to today, I still have some feet in the GovCon world.

Arthur Andrew Bavelas (03:39.635)
Yeah, no kidding.

Tyrus Shivers (03:58.207)
doing system administration engineering, making good money, but that wasn't gonna create generational wealth. It was gonna give me a great paycheck, decent lifestyle, but I couldn't give that to my son. I couldn't pass down a whole lot of wealth. So around twenty fourteen I launched a property management company.

And I went from zero to 1.2 million, one 1.3 million in 18 months. About 250 units managed. And I grew that business and continued to grow it until it started to stress me out. And I started doing too much and running too many projects, got into a lot of debt, and in 2019 I shut that business down.

I didn't sell it because I didn't have anybody to tell me to sell it. People told me afterwards you could have sold it, but at that point it was too late. I just wanted to get out. so I had the experience of making a lot of money, growing it really fast, and then having it implode and understanding, okay, how do I keep this from happening again? And that's where I got into consulting, which leads me up to today of what we do primarily at Legacy Wealth Capital Group.

Arthur Andrew Bavelas (05:07.039)
So Tyrus, and they're just words, but I'm wondering you said you didn't want to work hard like the people doing the cotton and oil rigs and all that. But building that company was hard work, was it not?

Tyrus Shivers (05:22.518)
It it was tremendously hard. I think my mindset was I didn't want to work hard and not have anything. Not own it.

Arthur Andrew Bavelas (05:24.245)
Yeah. Yeah.

Arthur Andrew Bavelas (05:32.745)
Right. Yeah, you just didn't want to trade trade time for a pay for a paycheck, right? Yeah.

Tyrus Shivers (05:38.389)
Exactly. Like not un like not understanding that yes, they built the foundation because everything that they did is is who I am is built in my character of working hard because I do work hard. It's work I work different. It has more impact. I'm able to bring more. but looking at just you work 12, 15 hour shifts, 21 days straight, get seven days off, what type of life is that?

And then you sleep the other twelve hours. That is something that I didn't want.

Arthur Andrew Bavelas (06:13.385)
Yeah. Well, it's pretty accepted that unless you build equity build equity in something that is exponentially more valuable than the time that you put in, that's the only way to build wealth, right? It can be a business, a company, real estate, whatever it is, but if all you're doing is trading your time for a paycheck, that's not likely to amount to

something that you can transfer to the next generation, right?

Tyrus Shivers (06:44.11)
Mm, precisely.

Arthur Andrew Bavelas (06:46.409)
So what happened during this meeting chance meeting that you had with your two partners? Tell us a little bit about that.

Tyrus Shivers (06:56.96)
Yeah, so I was speaking at an event, the Power Networking Expo, and I was talking about funnels, websites, how to scale businesses, because over that time, people did come to me. They wanted to know how I grew a property management business so fast. And it was just me and a handful of VAs and how did I just do everything that I did? So I got into that consulting, fractional integrator, part-time COO, work for influencers, celebrities, and pretty big.

Names and I had a have a presence online and I was speaking at this event talking about those things, and two guys walked up to me, and they first they wanted to meet a celebrity I was with, and then second, the guy was like, It was a definite exend agenda, and then the guy said, I saw you on my Instagram feed last week. We have this course.

Arthur Andrew Bavelas (07:40.201)
They had an agenda, right?

Tyrus Shivers (07:52.185)
Called Capital Raising Academy, and we want you to help us scale it because I have helped others build masterminds, scale courses, bring in 10 million plus in revenue in a year just on masterminds. And so that was a reputation that people knew me for. And he said, We want you to help us scale this course. And I said, Well, what is it? And I went, they were vending, and I went to their booth and he showed me a stop certificate of when they took their company public 20 years ago.

I had no real this was a year ago, Arthur. So what I'm about to tell you, you're gonna see the collapse in time based on just being around someone with experience. I never really thought about taking a company public. Didn't know that everyday, you know, you know it happens, but you don't think about everyday business owners doing it. You think it's for a special elite, but they had done it. And they told me that they had been in venture capital for 30 years and they wanted to scale this course. And me

military background, government background, I trust but I verify. Before I put my name on it, I need to go through it. And when I went through the course, I saw the information. And I've always had this wanting to be wealthy, wanting to own assets, wanting to have a Shark Tank type ecosystem. And I saw a pathway that would shortcut that long-term vision for myself.

Arthur Andrew Bavelas (08:56.925)
Right.

Tyrus Shivers (09:20.076)
And I gave them an ultimatum. I said, I can help you scale this course, make you $10, $15 million, but I don't want to. I want a partnership. And I want you to show me how you took your company public and let's take a company public together. And that's the only way I work with you.

If you don't want to be a partner, then okay, that's fine. And that was it. And they said, okay, let's do it. And that's what landed us with Legacy Wealth Capital Group.

Arthur Andrew Bavelas (09:50.813)
Isn't it interesting that you you were able to through experience to get to the mindset that getting a check for doing some funnel and campaign work is nice, but doing it and you know that the outcome is gonna your benefit is a completely different energy, right?

Tyrus Shivers (10:15.126)
A hundred percent and learning that from doing it because when I tell people I've helped other people make ten, fifteen, twenty million dollars on masterminds or courses, I then go back and tell them the truth. I only made two hundred, three hundred thousand. I had no ownership. I got a fee for putting it together.

But I had no ownership. And even when the projects I did have Rev share, it was limited and it was only on certain things. So I still didn't have such a huge upside. I learned then that no, now I want equity. Now I consult for equity. Now I want a piece of things that I'm helping build. Because without that, I'm still just trading time for money.

Arthur Andrew Bavelas (11:04.007)
And isn't it not true? And I'm I'm I'm not trying to set you up, but I've seen this happen so many times. Is if had had you not done what you did prior, helped those companies make $15 million, for example, you wouldn't know what you know today, which is first of all how you do that well, right? If you do it a lot of many times, you know how to do it well. And then you realized, okay.

Why don't I just do it for something that I own, right?

Tyrus Shivers (11:36.479)
A hundred percent. And that that is the key point. And my partners say this all the time about they really love the notion and the idea of going public. They did it, they believe in it. That's a mandate of theirs to help more companies go public. But it makes sense to me now to hear when we hear people talk about investing in the stock market, most of the time they're talking about large cap. They're not even thinking about small cap stocks, which you can get a huge return if you go on the small cap size.

But they never talk about how about you create your own company and take it public and have people investing in you. Instead of just investing in the big five, Tesla, Nvidia, whoever's at the top at this given moment in time, why not you go public? And we never ask ourselves that question. And most small business owners don't. They never ask themselves that question.

Arthur Andrew Bavelas (12:29.429)
So let's talk about that. What causes you and your partners, besides the obvious, which is going public takes some money off the table and gives you a met a multiple that is anticipating future growth, but you get the cash today, and then you operate in a public environment, which is a whole other issue, right? So what what is it that aside from them having done it before?

Tyrus Shivers (12:53.806)
Mm-hmm.

Arthur Andrew Bavelas (12:59.413)
causes you to believe and and let me just ask this question so I make sure I frame the question the right way. Are you thinking about taking this company public or helping others take their company public and participating it in that way? Yeah.

Tyrus Shivers (13:15.202)
Both. Both. So we're about to launch a regulation CF crowd fundraise as a start. With that raise, for those who are not familiar, you can raise up to five million dollars in a year from both accredited and non-credited investors using general solicitation, open marketing.

And so that's a stepping stone. That's one of the ways. And then we'll look at a reg D506C in the future onto a Reg A and do the mini IPO and go that route. That's our plan. And we're gonna step this through over the next five to seven years. But also we want to help those other companies.

Take a similar pathway or something adjacent to that. They may be further along. They may want to go through OTC and up list. It just depends. There's not one pathway to going public like we think. Everybody wants to go to New York Stock Exchange. Everybody wants to hit NASDAQ. But they don't talk about the tiers of Nasdaq. So there's no deep knowledge of there's different ways that you can go public.

And so our goal is to go public and to help others go public as well.

Arthur Andrew Bavelas (14:26.357)
So let's talk about the companies that you help and what you do for them. Can you give us you don't have to tell us who they are, but give us an example of what's a good fit for your platform as an entrepreneur might consider being involved.

Tyrus Shivers (14:41.344)
Absolutely. Most companies that we work with are less than ten million in revenue. So they sit around that five hundred thousand up to about ten million. They are founder dependent in the beginning. They are we're industry agnostic, but we stay away from restaurants, new restaurants, we stay away from clothing, bre beverages, film. We get a lot of businesses that come to us in that space, but we don't have that experience, so we don't want to be

trying to navigate those and those are brutal industries and most of the time they come to us because they need help figuring out how to become an investable business. They have a great idea, they have some revenue coming in, but they're doing it all on their own. Nobody's ever really told them how to structure their business properly, how to establish it properly to even raise capital. A lot of them are LLCs. Not raising a lot of money with an LLC

A lot of them are not tech enabled. I have a strong tech background. So we talk about AI, we talk about automation, we talk about integration, and then we help them put together the basic business blocks.

Making sure they have a marketing engine, sales engine, product and service delivery. And with all of that, now you become a capital ready business. You become an investable business because now you have systems and processes. You have SOPs. You have a rep you have repeatable systems across the frameworks that you need. Now you're a legitimate business. Now you're ready for capital.

Arthur Andrew Bavelas (16:22.311)
And do you get involved in structure like you mentioned L L C's, having them convert to C Corp and do a QSPS and that sort of thing?

Tyrus Shivers (16:31.756)
Yeah, so my partner Sean, that's his specialty. He will go in, he will talk about

what the share count should be, what it should look like, how your board, all of your governance docs, what that should look like. And then we always will pair them with and give them options. We have a lot of attorney partners in the space. And we'll say, hey, look, here's recommendations. Now take these to an attorney and make it right for you. If you don't have a CPA, here's some recommendations so you can go and make sure that this tax situation fits you because we're not those people we can give you recommendations, ideas.

Now we want you to take that and go tell them to make it legal and tax worthy of you.

Arthur Andrew Bavelas (17:13.715)
And so how do you source these people?

Tyrus Shivers (17:17.142)
Yeah, great question. I happen to sit on a lot of incubators and panels for different states, different counties, different universities. So around 2,500 businesses pass through me as a mentor every year. And I get to have a first line. They always look at these businesses before they accept them into their programs. And then if I'm a mentor on the panel, it's almost cherry-picked for me that these are viable candidates.

Now I'm looking deeper and saying, who has the mindset to be a hundred million dollar business? Who has the mindset to be a unicorn? Who has the mindset, the staying power, the experience, and the desire to go further than just graduating an incubator and making a couple hundred thousand?

And when I look at those businesses and they come to me for mentorship as a part of the program, I'm free to offer them everything else that I do. And that's where most of our deal flow comes through.

Arthur Andrew Bavelas (18:18.355)
Not not to put you into a box, but would you consider yourself a venture organization?

Tyrus Shivers (18:27.138)
We have an ecosystem. And I'm glad you mentioned that because I am in a venture capital cohort right now. And we will launch our first venture fund in Q3. The other parts of the ecosystem are education. That's where we teach, train. I own a FINRA registered funding portal that can conduct direct CF raises.

I own a podcast studio where we can do content. And so inside the ecosystem, we have different businesses and the our clients typically circulate through those businesses.

Arthur Andrew Bavelas (19:09.329)
And aside from what is seemingly meaningful meaningful reach with the incubators and the pitch organizations, there's obviously a presence that you have in social media. Are you getting two hundred people that wanna look a month? A hundred, a thousand?

Tyrus Shivers (19:35.107)
We typically flow people through when we run paid ads and we will run them for campaigns. We'll get two or three hundred per month that come through the pipelines and then we will qualify them down to about fifty that may enter the program.

10 maybe less that are ready to raise capital or even have that interest. We spend a lot of time educated because a lot of businesses sub 10 million in revenue don't know how to raise capital properly or that they can. They know venture, but then they have the horror stories. Well, I went to a VC firm and they wanted 30% of my company, and then that's all they know. Or they went to a bank and got denied, or they took out a business credit card. Like this is the mindset of funding.

Arthur Andrew Bavelas (20:16.969)
Right.

Tyrus Shivers (20:21.872)
getting access to capital, the buzzword, access to capital that they have. So we spend a lot of time nurturing them through our programs to position them to raise capital and do it in a different way. And so

We will hold webinars. We're bringing back in-person events. We're going to do them in Atlanta, here in Maryland, and in Charlotte, where my partners are. And I think Nashville is another state we're looking at in Chicago. And so we're bringing in-person and we're going to do online so we can continue that pipeline and that deal flow. But I would say we have more demand at this point than we are serving.

Arthur Andrew Bavelas (21:03.049)
Yeah, there's capacities just 'cause it's a lot of work, right?

Tyrus Shivers (21:06.4)
Yeah, a hundred percent.

Arthur Andrew Bavelas (21:08.942)
hand holding entrepreneurs it's a lot of work.

Tyrus Shivers (21:13.494)
Yeah, and you're doing that. You're absolutely doing. I used to try to figure out how I can get in a position where I'm not hand holding them. But if you want them to be successful, and I don't care if you're taking advisory fees, I don't whatever you're doing, you are helping them, especially if they're not mature enough along that journey. Now, if you're working with a $20 million business, $50 million business, it's different. But beneath that, it's a lot of hand holding.

Arthur Andrew Bavelas (21:44.022)
So beneath that number, are you surprised that a lot of these folks that have good ideas that are arguably fundable, you know, get being tightened up properly, are you surprised that they don't understand a lot of the stuff that you would expect an entrepreneur to understand? And maybe it's because they're first-time entrepreneurs and that might explain it, but

Are you surprised at that?

Tyrus Shivers (22:15.532)
I am not surprised and it's just because I've been around a long time, but I do know the reasons. A lot of times they're not going to college.

Not a conversation for today, but I have an MBA and I appreciate the lessons and the theories that I learned when I went and got an MBA. It helps me. When you don't have that and you haven't hired someone with one, you're missing the KPIs. You're missing forecasting. You're missing those components of the business that make the business, the data. You're missing that. A lot of entrepreneurs become, I call them accidental entrepreneurs.

They're just like accidental landlords. I was working at a company for 15 years. I did a great job. I'm an expert. I think I can do it for myself. Well, you can do that thing that you were doing in the company for yourself, but what about all the other components of the business that they had no idea about? So they're accidental business owners and then they get kind of get stuck. And that's why they're always operators and never really owners.

And the other thing is just mindset. They my partners always talk about think like an investor and not even an owner or not even an operator. Think like an investor because when you think like an investor, you look at the business as an asset in your portfolio, not as your baby, not as a thing that you love the most, not as a thing that nobody else can do but you. No, you look at it as an asset in a portfolio.

And is it bringing in a return or not?

Arthur Andrew Bavelas (23:53.908)
It's really an interesting perspective to have. And if you don't mind me sharing, some of the work that I do is I sit on I don't even know what to call it, deal flow review for half a dozen family offices who are actively investing in companies. And they have their own favorite type of company.

And because I've been, you know, we get 200 applicants a month of entrepreneurs or funds that want to pitch to the family offices. So we see a lot of deal flow. And so we've gotten pretty good at asking the next best question as an it from the perspective and the point of view as an investor. Because when people come on to our pitch webinars, we're not promoting the entrepreneur to the investors.

We're trying to help them decide whether this is something and you know, we're highly focused on asking them the right questions in a short period of time so the investors can decide to bail or move on to looking closer. Right. So we're not we're not banking the entrepreneur or the fund. We're acting as a a way for people to look at things that are potentially

Tyrus Shivers (25:04.608)
Mm-hmm.

Arthur Andrew Bavelas (25:18.823)
Interesting. And so I sit on a a a place where we're doing exactly that, asking the hard questions before a family office deploys capital into them. And you can't do anything except do it and get that experience to know what questions look under the hood. you said that. Well, does that mean this? You know, without experience like you have, you don't know the next question to ask, right?

Tyrus Shivers (25:39.351)
Right.

Tyrus Shivers (25:48.685)
Yeah, that's exactly right. And a lot of businesses don't know how to go into those conversations and succinctly say what they do that will answer those questions. Most of them are gonna tell you about their widget, their gadget, their thing, and that's not the point. It's not I was looking and doing a pitch review for a a biotech device and some data and it was he i I told the

The founder that you wrote this like you're talking to scientists. You're not gonna get any money from investors unless they come from a pharmaceutical background. You can't even understand it. Yes, I could read it. Yes, I could I know it's DNA, but I don't have no clue what it is. The messaging was off. And so a lot of founders go into these.

Arthur Andrew Bavelas (26:26.991)
Right.

Tyrus Shivers (26:47.224)
pitch reviews, competitions, deal with that. They're they're leading with passion. They're leading with why they want to do it. They're leading with all the things that make it great. And then they say all the things that will make you think red flag. nobody else in the world is doing this. I don't know if there's many things nobody else in the world is doing. Maybe you have a unique take on it, but

This is unheard of anywhere in the world and I'm thinking I saw something like this last week.

Arthur Andrew Bavelas (27:19.721)
Yeah, exactly. You know, I I used to do a lot of business with hedge funds and the the revealing question would be, okay, when does this not work?

And you would immediately head for the exits if they said, it we'll we'll always make this work. Right. The right answer is it doesn't work when our thesis doesn't work and then we'll either have to fold our tent and go home or change, right? Yeah.

Tyrus Shivers (27:40.312)
Yeah.

Tyrus Shivers (27:53.165)
Right. Yeah, you gotta be able to pivot. And a lot of founders they don't take failure well. And they don't understand that failing fast is how you get to the thing that works. And another thing that I think we've lost sight of since COVID is what true business was. We no longer study the founders or the fathers of business from the eighteen hundreds, early nineteen hundreds, and what they had to do to build the businesses that they built.

And we miss out on that. Now it's everybody thinks you can get into business and become a millionaire overnight when less than seven percent of businesses ever make a million dollars. It's it's the data, the math is there. And so

It's not about just hustle and passion. It is all about building infrastructure, owning infrastructure, controlling data, being able to see 20 years down the road, but implement it now immediately, and knowing how to map your pathway through that. And so it's thinking long term and falling in love with the process. That's a lot of things that business owners today don't know. There's a great book by

is it Geno Wickman? Maybe Michael McAlloway's the entrepreneurial leap. And it really asks you, do you want to be a founder? Is this for you? Because it's hard. Exactly.

Arthur Andrew Bavelas (29:12.318)
Not a for everybody, that's for sure. Yeah, it's really Yeah. Yeah, forget about

things that you would often just accept that you'll be able to do this or that, depending on what holiday it is or weekend it is. That it you do what has to get done. And if you're not willing to do that, then it's not for you. Just go find a good job. You know, work for SpaceX and, you know, make ten million dollars a year if you have that skill set. It's probably the right place for you. And let's face it, we need those people too in our society. No doubt, right?

Tyrus Shivers (29:31.192)
Exactly.

Arthur Andrew Bavelas (29:50.449)
we need people to do that work for all the right reasons. So what have you found? I'm gonna set you up on this one. How difficult has it been to get passionate, smart, thoughtful, inexperienced, let's just say, entrepreneurs to engage.

in a way where they acknowledge that they don't know everything and they need help.

Tyrus Shivers (30:24.786)
I give you a two two part answer to that.

It's been easy to get them to the point of understanding that they don't know what they don't know and they're in a pain point in life. It's been extremely difficult to get them to implement anything that we tell them to do. And a lot of it is lack of capital. And that's where we focus because yes, they will go through an incubator, an accelerator.

They'll go to a pitch competition. They'll be told they need all of these things in order to be successful. Well, I don't have any money to hire somebody. I don't have any money to run a marketing campaign. I don't have any money to put technology in. And so implementation is the hardest part of it. Everybody knows that they're not where they want to be. Some are just intellectually lazy and don't want to do the work that's necessary.

Others just can't find a way to implement. I was on a panel last night, and a lady was just like, Tyrus, you gave me gave us such clear information on a roadmap. It was all about doing compet competitive research, buyer personas, just basic. This is for a startup group. And she was like, With so much information you gave, I don't know if I'm in the right room. And I said, Well, what made you say that? It was like, it's just a lot. And I'm like,

Yeah, business is a lot. But what is the one thing that you can do immediately? So I like to always at the end of panels give a one-week sprint because I know that if you can do something for a week and create some momentum, you can repeat it. And if we can just repeat it week by week by week, then we create discipline. And discipline is what moves us forward when we lack motivation.

Tyrus Shivers (32:19.31)
I used to work with Dr. Eric Thomas, the motivational speaker. Motivation, people love to get motivated. But what happens when mo motivation runs out? How do you keep going?

Arthur Andrew Bavelas (32:31.156)
Yeah, and those small wins engage you further to keep on moving, right? Because we're emotional beings. We if if we're, you know, make twenty two s sales calls and not get one sale, it's no fun, right? So what you what what's gonna cause you to make that twenty third sale, right? twenty-third phone call, right?

Tyrus Shivers (32:35.98)
Yeah.

Tyrus Shivers (32:54.572)
Yeah, that's the discipline component. It's the knowing. It's the I think being around other people in the space. Like when I became a licensed realtor back in 2014 for Keller Williams, and they wanted you to come in the office and do 300 dials a day and get hung up on and cussed out and everything else. What made you do 300 dials a day? Well, that agents is next to you that's getting those listings.

Because they went through it. So you had an example. I think that what we do in our organization is we hold everybody to a higher standard and we put that out front. Most of my partners in all of my different businesses are prior military. And so we all have a similar mindset of mission work. You do the mission. It doesn't matter how you feel, it doesn't matter if you don't agree with the current administration, it doesn't matter what you're thinking.

It's the mission that gets done. And so when you raise that bar, yeah, when you raise that bar and we talk to founders and say, hey, look, we're not wasting our time. If you want to be in our ecosystem, this is how we operate. And it changes the game.

Arthur Andrew Bavelas (33:48.016)
It's so good, right? Yeah.

Arthur Andrew Bavelas (34:03.478)
So what's your leverage? Are you funding them as well?

Tyrus Shivers (34:07.586)
So we're not funding them today. When we do launch this VC fund, our first fund, we will do funds then. Our real, I would say, embed, how we embed ourselves is as they decide that they want to grow this business to either exit, acquire other companies, or go public, we take a percentage.

And in that percentage, we're motivated to get you to where you need to go because then we get to participate on the upside. And then as they work through our other businesses in that ecosystem, we know that if they're making money, we're making money.

Arthur Andrew Bavelas (34:49.023)
So everybody's familiar with Y Combinator. Is this similar?

Tyrus Shivers (34:55.308)
I will say yes. It is similar to a Y Combinator. We do take that percentage d once they come through the cohort. Today we are not giving them money that Y Combinator does. In the future, we will do that in a capacity. And so we're similar to a Y Combinator. We don't typically go on a safe. We do if they go through a Reg CF or we get them, we participate in that.

where we'll get granted. And so it just depends on the relationship and what we're looking to do. We had an example of a business that turned down a $2 billion deal because they believe in their product so much so that they didn't want to get bought out early. Now, you better believe we want to be on that train because if you I had to look at it author, a $2 billion offer come through. It'll make me think two or three times. But they believe in what they have and I understand it.

Arthur Andrew Bavelas (35:51.903)
So, how do you make money in the meantime?

Tyrus Shivers (35:55.673)
Through cohorts. And so in the meantime, if they come into Capital Raising Academy, there's a fee there. If they want just straight advisory, some just want like for me to look at a pitch date to give them straight one-time advice, I will do that for a flat fee. And then others will come in if they come through the FENRA registered funding portal. That's a flat fee to get started. It's a percent of the raise. and then a monthly fee to keep going. If they come through our podcast studios, our content.

Those are all fees, monthly fees. Some use us for marketing and advertising. That's a fee. We run our own SaaS software CRM, so that's a fee. So we're making money on everything that they're doing in the business. If we refer them out, we have relationships with everybody we refer with. So that's a referral fee.

Arthur Andrew Bavelas (36:44.981)
So I'm asking this question because I'm an investor in this company. So full disclosure to you and everybody else on the call. One of the challenges that you have as a somebody who's deploying capital, me and our friends, is that the due diligence process is if you want to be polite, is a shit show.

s somebody has a data room, even if they have the best data room software, it is a nightmare. And it's also static. Right? So let's just say it's a company. So what we found is if we compel the founder to go through the heavy lifting of doing, and I'm just gonna call it a data room the way we want to see it, including

Bad actor, background checks, the whole thing, and lots of really hard questions. If they're willing to do that, then not only does it give us data to make a more informed decision, we make that available to everybody. Meaning they only have to do it once. But it's in the in in a format where

Tyrus Shivers (37:45.709)
Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

Arthur Andrew Bavelas (38:11.239)
It has to be kept up to date and it can be shared, you know, in a safe way with other investors. Because in in what often happens with with our group is that somebody is the lead due diligence person and then brings in a few of their friends, right? have you found that people would benefit from that sort of thing? And if n it how do you handle the the whole

Tyrus Shivers (38:16.897)
Yeah.

Arthur Andrew Bavelas (38:41.279)
due diligence process presently.

Tyrus Shivers (38:44.152)
So presently we are dealing with very similar. We have some technology that does have data rooms, looking at that data, depending on broker dealers, like some of the bigger names to do AML, KYC checks. However, in about two, three weeks from now, we're gonna launch our own fund management software that's going to encompass a lot of what you covered, as well as bringing in data from the crowdfunding space. So we're gonna

gonna kind of we're gonna marry those things together because that has been a point of contention with investors in crowdfunding. It's like, once I invest in that, what happens to that company? Who's tracking it? Where does it go? Year five, where do I get my data from? And so we're we have built over the last six months our own software to remedy or mitigate some of these things. And then we will launch that and utilize that and start pushing that out to the world.

Arthur Andrew Bavelas (39:17.492)
Nice.

Arthur Andrew Bavelas (39:45.416)
And what do you separate subject? Thank you for sharing that. Separate subject is in the current environment with how fast AI has caused a lot of things to improve, let's just say. coding, building software, outreach. On the one hand, outreach.

Tyrus Shivers (40:09.198)
Mm-hmm.

Arthur Andrew Bavelas (40:12.041)
Has suffered because we're an attention economy, right? It's hard to get people's attention more so now than more noise than signal, right? And do you think that the traditional funnel marketing campaign type stuff still works? And how does AI help that or not or not?

Tyrus Shivers (40:39.904)
Great question. AI is going to destroy surface level. So if you don't have the attention to your point already, it's going to be very difficult for you to get it. And I'll use an example of some influencers that I've worked with. There's a difference between a business running five grand a month in paid ads and one running 100 grand a month.

You're never going to compete with them. You just can't because they're putting so much out there. And so, what is AI going to do to help? It's going to enhance that. It's going to give you faster feedback loops to where you can integrate, you can fix, you can maintain, you can correct much faster. And then if you have the budget to commit to continuously staying in front of people.

Arthur Andrew Bavelas (41:05.055)
Yeah.

Tyrus Shivers (41:28.748)
Then you have the eyeballs. I was looking at a webinar, a podcast from an influencer. He was talking about doing 1200 pieces of content a month. They're dropping 40 pieces of content a day. Now, it's all entertainment, it's not in this space, but that's the level of content that you're dealing with people who are just constantly pushing things out to keep the attention.

Arthur Andrew Bavelas (41:45.62)
Right.

Tyrus Shivers (41:54.615)
I'm an AI power user. I think I've over the last two weeks have used 59 million tokens in Cloud Code. And that's how I know when people are either using AI or they're playing with AI. When I ask them how many tokens have you used they're like, I don't know. You're not really using it, then I use 59 million because I'm building things, software. I'm building full fledged websites and databases and things that I s years ago would take six months and a team of developers.

Arthur Andrew Bavelas (42:00.456)
Mm-hmm.

Arthur Andrew Bavelas (42:22.845)
Yeah, isn't it crazy? Yeah. It's crazy. Right. Yeah. Right.

Tyrus Shivers (42:24.82)
Now is me and a handful of virtual, and I see it this way, Arthur. In 2012, we started to see the great migration of customer service leave U.S. to India. That was the first place that it went. And we didn't want to talk to Indians. Hard accent. Didn't really understand. We want to talk to an American. Yes.

Arthur Andrew Bavelas (42:49.043)
Smart smart people, highly skilled, but boy, it was rough. Yeah.

Tyrus Shivers (42:55.54)
Now we're on the age of I'm gonna pick up the phone for customer service and it's gonna be an AI agent. And people may say, I don't want to talk to an AI agent. Yeah, but you will, because it's gonna be the norm.

Arthur Andrew Bavelas (43:06.313)
Yeah, you do. Yeah. You you well, not only that, they're so smart. I mean, look at Bordie. Have you seen Borty?

Tyrus Shivers (43:14.474)
Yes, me and Borty have so many conversations and Borty makes connections. Borty put Borty has launched a fund. Like, this is where we're going. And yes, we're still going to need the old school butt belly-to-belly, face-to-face, get out of the Zoom and into the room networking. Yes, there's going to be still a place for that because we do business with people we know, like, and trust. But all of the initial stuff is going to be AI.

Arthur Andrew Bavelas (43:41.567)
Yeah. You know, it it is I don't think, and this is just me declaring this and I might be wrong and often am, I don't think anything is gonna replace whether it's AI or a person or a combination of both, good storytelling. When people come to me, like your example of the biotech guy.

Tyrus Shivers (43:43.212)
The due diligence.

Arthur Andrew Bavelas (44:09.776)
You you can't have an engineer or a biotech guy do the pitch because they don't think in terms of the storytelling, right? The investor wants to hear about how did you get here? Like what caused you to do this? And then we'll talk about how good your solution to the problem is. Because they're buying a story. They're not buying all the stuff that's underneath. That comes later, right?

Tyrus Shivers (44:37.492)
Absolutely. And I was actually last night talking through it. AI doesn't have the human emotion component. AI, LLM and large language model is just the aggregation of a lot of data and it can synthesize and put that data together and say, you know what? This data matches this data. Let me put it together and give you a response. Doesn't know if it's right or wrong, but it just knows that it matches.

Arthur Andrew Bavelas (44:40.316)
That's true.

Arthur Andrew Bavelas (45:03.74)
There's a new new new word that has entered everybody's lexicon, inference. We never even talked about inference, right?

Tyrus Shivers (45:09.439)
Right.

Yeah. We I think that five years from now, seven years from now, AI will be even smarter. It will be able to handle more and more and more, but feelings, humans as humans, we still have complex emotions and feelings that we navigate. AI is not going to take in just this amount of years the thousands and thousands of years of human evolution and replace it.

Arthur Andrew Bavelas (45:44.893)
I'm sure you've done this, so I'm not telling you anything you don't know, but I've gotten to the point, and we're not power users, we're just delighted users. Like it is just so rewarding in so many of the tasks that would otherwise take not just long, but prone to error, you know, is you we've gone in w and w when it gives you the opportunity to c

Tyrus Shivers (45:55.874)
Mm-hmm.

Arthur Andrew Bavelas (46:13.778)
give instructions on how to reply. You know, we've taken the Mark Andreessen model and say, Don't tell me I'm super smart. Don't t just give me the facts, right? Right. So you can train it not to waste your Yeah. Right. You set you set parameters, right?

Tyrus Shivers (46:21.998)
Right. Yeah, yeah, you have to set guardrails.

Tyrus Shivers (46:29.854)
Absolutely. And you give it roles and you give it experience. Not just your marketing agent, your financial analyst, your deal flow organizer, but your deal flow organizer that's worked at the top ten PE firms in the world doing over all of it, just like a human.

Arthur Andrew Bavelas (46:48.754)
Yeah, wild. You give it a persona, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it's it's I mean, I think it's the best time to be alive. And I've been alive a little longer than you. but it's just fascinating what's going on. So

Tyrus Shivers (47:05.578)
And ability to create wealth now is going and r while we talk about it takes time and it's a process

Arthur Andrew Bavelas (47:09.033)
Yeah.

Tyrus Shivers (47:14.968)
The ability to generate wealth now is going to occur even more rapidly than before for those who know how to utilize the resources to do it. Now you put garbage in there, you're gonna get garbage out. But if you really know what you're putting in there and you're leveraging experience, you're leveraging your network, you're leveraging someone else's experience, you're going to be now. Do I believe you'll do a hundred million dollars with one person in AI? Maybe not today.

But a year or two from now, probably so.

Arthur Andrew Bavelas (47:48.009)
Yeah. So do you think that there's a and I know I'm talking to somebody that has worked at funnels and campaigns and ad spends and that that sort of thing, but is there a way to end up with the same result without spending all that money on the ad spend?

Tyrus Shivers (48:12.184)
So I believe there are ways, but I believe it's extremely difficult because if that were the case, then Facebook, Google, YouTube, they wouldn't make any money. And right now they control the infrastructure layer.

Arthur Andrew Bavelas (48:28.67)
Yeah.

Tyrus Shivers (48:28.994)
They control the eyeball. So they're not going to allow you. I was looking and watching right when the faceless YouTube video phenomenon came out, maybe a year or two ago. Everybody was like, you can make a lot of money on Faceless YouTube. And people were until YouTube changed the algorithm. And now no more. So I think every time we utilize AI to find a way.

Those brands are going to go back and look and say, you know what? Our revenue is down this quarter. What do we need to do? So there'll be a small window for you to make some money. Now, I do think that the more you're able to get out in the real world, the more you're able to capture real live content because that's what people are looking for. That's being rewarded organically, raw. I'm in the world walking around. This is my routine.

Here's how I analyze, here's how I build. That content is picking up, and that doesn't require paid media.

Arthur Andrew Bavelas (49:30.836)
So give me an example, that's really interesting. So not not the the hot chick that says, Here's my morning routine, my workout routine, blah blah blah. Like in the business Yeah.

Tyrus Shivers (49:43.277)
Give you I give you a perfect perfect example. There's a guy on Instagram. He's a minority guy, black guy. Venture capital and minorities, small space. He has, I think, 50,000 followers, maybe a hundred thousand, but he's getting a million views on his IG videos.

And all he's doing is doing reaction content on SpaceX said they're gonna do X, Y, and Z. Here are my thoughts. That's it. Pitcher in pitcher, millions of views. And it caught my attention because he said, Look, I don't have a huge following. But look at all these views based on my content that's really good. And it's financial services, and it's talking venture capital. And he's a minority. I said, he's cracked the code.

Arthur Andrew Bavelas (50:37.78)
Yeah, totally.

Tyrus Shivers (50:39.512)
So there are people that are able to garner that attention, giving just raw reactionary feedback to what's happening in the real world.

Arthur Andrew Bavelas (50:53.128)
Yeah, I think about that and it is so ananthema to what everybody relates things to their own situation, Tyrus. So I'm saying, like, that's the last thing I want to do. I want to sit and read a book. I don't want to sit You know, this is what I think about, right? Not something that although I've been pitched many, many times, like, holy shit, you've got you know what the one percent of the one percent are doing.

Tyrus Shivers (51:05.044)
Right.

Arthur Andrew Bavelas (51:21.574)
On a daily basis because you're interacting with those people. People want to know about that. I say, okay, what do you want me to do? I mean, I'm not, you know, do whatever, right? videos or I don't even have an Instagram account, right? We use LinkedIn and that's it, right? And we do some X. But that's just us, right? But the last thing I want to do is feel compelled that I've got to tell on a daily basis people what I'm thinking. Like,

Tyrus Shivers (51:34.21)
Mm-hmm.

Arthur Andrew Bavelas (51:51.666)
Yeah, no thank you. But I can see why that would be interesting to to some people, but yeah.

Tyrus Shivers (51:53.366)
Yeah, I agree with you.

Tyrus Shivers (51:58.359)
And I think that the money is still shifting outside of social media. I think that there is like a lot of successful people I know don't have strong social media presence. They're not there. But when they do go on there, everybody follows and they get a lot of attention.

And so I think it's just leveraging when you want to be there, make a lot of impact. Because yes, you could probably do a video and say, I said just what you said earlier. I do the deal review deal flow for X amount of family offices. You put that out there one or two times, you'll have so many comments you can't even follow them. You don't even need everyday posting, but you have what people want, and that's access.

Arthur Andrew Bavelas (52:46.515)
So all right, can I also ask you a question related to my business?

Tyrus Shivers (52:53.589)
Absolutely.

Arthur Andrew Bavelas (52:55.271)
So we've toyed with this in the context of doing these podcasts. And we've done the things that you would think would be important to do. Post it, and it's all LinkedIn, just to be clear, right? Post it on LinkedIn that there's a new podcast, chop that up into 19 different little clips, send it out, and it's gotten

Tyrus Shivers (53:11.308)
Mm-hmm.

Arthur Andrew Bavelas (53:23.773)
A modest amount, like exponentially more than would otherwise happen, but a modest amount of impressions. So I'm just talking impressions right now. And then we created some we had AI create you know nicely done little thumbnails with taking, for example, a part of the podcast that

The guest had shared some wisdom as it relates to family offices, and everybody wants to know about family offices, right? and made it look like a newspaper on a a coffee table with a cup of coffee on it. We got and we spent like $50 in ad spend for LinkedIn. That's it. $73,000 impressions, which

Tyrus Shivers (53:54.711)
Mm-hmm.

Tyrus Shivers (53:59.939)
Mm-hmm.

Arthur Andrew Bavelas (54:22.313)
May not mean anything in your world or to us necessarily, but it was an experiment. And it also caused a f a windfall of people trying to connect with me. Right? So I mean, I imagine if we turn the gas up on that, then it creates a different problem, Tyrus, right? What do we do with all those people?

Tyrus Shivers (54:27.853)
Yeah.

Tyrus Shivers (54:35.074)
Mm-hmm.

Tyrus Shivers (54:49.3)
Exactly. And at that point you would have way more deal flow than capacity. And then you would look for, okay, and in my mind, when I think about okay, I'm coming up on capacity, what partnerships can I create and leverage for other people who need deal flow? And how do we make money off of that transition? Or I just want to help a friend out. I just want to help someone out. Yeah.

Arthur Andrew Bavelas (55:15.377)
We do some of the yeah, we do set. Did we do that? Yeah. The the tr the thing that we ran into is that the preponderance of the people, and this is i symptomatic of LinkedIn, and it's we love LinkedIn because it's made us money, and so we put up with the slop. But of those impressions and of those people asking, 90% of them were all people trying to sell us something. They weren't candidates for

Tyrus Shivers (55:42.313)
Right.

Arthur Andrew Bavelas (55:44.745)
where we could make money. But

Tyrus Shivers (55:46.711)
Yeah, and I get that a lot. I get that a lot. I usually flip it. When someone reaches out to me and they want to sell me something, I usually sometimes I'll play along with the sale. And if it's something very valid, I might move forward. But for most people, I'm coaching them, putting them into a different s mindset. I'm like, okay, you reached out to me. How are the things you should have done different?

Arthur Andrew Bavelas (56:10.981)
Right. I like that, yeah. Yeah.

Tyrus Shivers (56:12.426)
And so some of these people have become clients. Some have introduced me to other people have who have become clients. And I think what's going to help, especially what we start doing, was leveraging AI to do take them through quizzes.

When you come in and you want to book in a call or something with me, you go through a quiz. And that quiz, are you a founder? Are you an investor? Are you a potential partner? And then ask various questions. That way, by the time it gets to a call, sometimes you get routed to a landing page. Here's more information. Because you're not qualified. So we do quizzes for qualification to cut a lot of the noise out. Do people get through? Do they lie? Yeah, absolutely.

Arthur Andrew Bavelas (56:54.995)
Yeah, we yeah. Well, and it's okay, right? Like we're extra upfront when we reply to some of these people, we have a standard reply. And thank you for letting me share this, by the way. that basically says, Here's what we do, if that's something you're interested in, and here's what it costs. Like we put the price out there. And so we don't want tire kickers.

Tyrus Shivers (56:59.862)
Yep.

Tyrus Shivers (57:21.248)
Mm-hmm.

Arthur Andrew Bavelas (57:24.657)
And it's okay if we lose a few people that might otherwise engage because they the price scared them, right? But that's okay because it would never amount to anything anyway, right? Yeah.

Tyrus Shivers (57:24.696)
Yep.

Tyrus Shivers (57:36.527)
Right.

Yeah, I think that's always gonna be a nature of the business and we just used to it. I think that with more and more people getting interested in things, you have more and more noise and more and more tire kickers because they're interested, they're not committed. And so I just like to ask, are you hey, are you committed? Or I'm not buying anything right now. Or I will just ask, Did you do research on me in my background? Because what you're trying to sell me, I already do. So like

Arthur Andrew Bavelas (58:06.835)
Yeah, right. There's a lot of yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Tyrus Shivers (58:08.128)
what is the conversation? So you're you're using software to just send a bunch of messages out and see who sticks. Does that work? Sure. But that's not the type of relationship building characteristics that you want, especially if you want to grow a business.

Arthur Andrew Bavelas (58:17.448)
You're here.

Arthur Andrew Bavelas (58:26.29)
Yeah, and by the way, we see a lot of complainers on LinkedIn and we're not them. Like we totally get it, right? If you're gonna have attention, you're gonna get some attention you don't want. It's okay. Yeah, it's totally okay. So how what would be helpful to you at this point, for example, if the audience was interested in reaching out and what what are things that are high on your list that would be helpful to you?

Tyrus Shivers (58:40.664)
Hundred percent.

Tyrus Shivers (58:55.542)
Yeah, we're always looking to build relationships with investors for not only future funds for us, but also for our clients, because we're building our clients to become investable. So we're always looking for investors who are looking for great investments. We're looking for founders who want to grow a scale.

who wanna go to whatever their next level of life is, has to meet our minimum requirement of wanting to be a fifty million dollar plus business. I don't wanna work with the person who just wants an extra vacation a year. That's not a good fit, but for those

Arthur Andrew Bavelas (59:29.296)
Isn't it isn't it true, Tyrus? I'm sorry to interrupt you, but I think this is you know, I learned this a long time ago and wasn't my idea. It takes the same amount of effort to do something big as it takes to do it small.

Tyrus Shivers (59:42.476)
Yes. Same effort.

Arthur Andrew Bavelas (59:44.156)
Save amount of effort. Now you have to have an ecosystem that'll allow you to do something big, right? But all those things can be fixed, right?

Tyrus Shivers (59:52.631)
Yeah. And there's just a lot and this is a whole nother podcast we could do or around the money mindset. And a lot of it's dealing with lack. So you never had anyone tell you that this is possible. So you've put on self-limitations. We've had misquoting of different various texts where people think having a lot of money is evil. And and that's not true.

And then it comes down to a fear factor. And what if I get all of this money? What's gonna happen? And how does it change my life? Because of all the negative things that we've heard before. And and money is the only thing, and I tell this to a lot of founders, because that conversation is tough. Money is the only thing that we limit.

Arthur Andrew Bavelas (01:00:27.41)
Nonsense. Yeah.

Tyrus Shivers (01:00:37.738)
If I ask you how healthy do you want your kids to be, you say as healthy as I want them to be. Or how happy do you want to be, as happy as I can be, how educated, as smart as you can. But when we talk about, well, how much money do you want? Just enough to get by. What? Just enough?

Arthur Andrew Bavelas (01:00:54.482)
Yeah, you kidding me? Iris, that's super smart. Nice. That's real wisdom. You know, why would you limit yourself? Look, the people or the text that suggested that the money is root of all evil was wrong. It's the lack of money that's the root of all evil. Money's just a tool. That's all it is. Yeah. Yeah. Super cool. Well, what else would be helpful to you? So investors.

Tyrus Shivers (01:01:02.179)
Yeah.

Tyrus Shivers (01:01:15.555)
That's it.

Arthur Andrew Bavelas (01:01:23.208)
People want to engage in your program so you can have people that want to grow businesses. Anything else?

Tyrus Shivers (01:01:28.992)
And just networking. I love to talk to people. I love to hear stories. I love to add value. So just being a part of an ecosystem of people that are looking to build, peer group. Always helpful.

Arthur Andrew Bavelas (01:01:42.952)
Yeah, super cool. Well, I really appreciate you doing this. It's been a fun conversation and very informative. So Tyrus, thanks for doing the good work.

Tyrus Shivers (01:01:54.018)
Thank you for having me and trusting me with your audience.

Arthur Andrew Bavelas (01:01:57.416)
You're very welcome. So I'm gonna hit stop and hang in there one second.