Turn Your Network Into a Fund in the Next 30 Days – with Tribevest’s Seth Bradley

One big misconception, I kind of alluded to it earlier, is that you have to be a full-time capital raiser to be able to do it.

There is a, a massive tidal wave, I believe, of capital that wants to come into private real estate, private equity, private credit, venture capital.

So if you raise $1 million, you're, you stand to make $100,000 to $120,000 over the life of the deal.

Today on the show, we're talking with Seth Bradley, attorney, fund manager, lead sponsor, C-suite exec, and prop tech co-founder. What a long list of accomplishments. He's the expert if you want to turn your network and capital into a real fund. We're diving into an opportunity hiding in plain sight for investors that want to go just from investing their own money to actually running a fund. What are the pros? What are the cons? We're going to leap into all that and understand this industry that's been evolving over the past several years. So Seth, welcome to the show, man.

Ben, thanks so much, brother. Good to see you. Happy to be back.

Yeah, this is fun. We had you on a couple years ago on the podcast, and obviously I've known you for, for some time. And, uh, you know, we're just talking, uh, on another podcast, uh, just about what's— you know, it's been so different over the past few years and how things have evolved and changed. Um, but hey, we're still here and going, and it's a, it's a good time. It feels like a lot of things have reset in the market. And, uh, really excited to talk with you because I feel like where you guys are at with TribeVest and what you're doing, um, is really at the, the fore of a pretty bigger trend that's going on, um, of creating more access to alternative investments. Uh, super excited to dive in. Seth, give us a little bit of background, maybe for those who haven't heard the first episode we did with you, um, on kind of how did you get to where you are now?

Yeah, yeah, man, we've survived till 25 and beyond. I think we've weathered the storm, man. We're still here. We're still standing, still thriving. So really looking forward to what's next. Yeah, rewinding it back, I'm from West Virginia originally, so I come from a blue-collar family. My dad's a retired coal miner, my mom's a retired schoolteacher, so I didn't grow up around real estate and finance and all that. This is all Self-taught and I went to med school for a little bit because I thought trading your time for money was the way to go and that was the best avenue for me. Dropped out because I hated it. Ended up going to law school still with that same mindset. Fortunately for me, having my law degree has enabled me to open a lot of doors into some of those things that you had mentioned before. Started raising capital, started operating my own commercial assets, grew my own law firm which I have right now, joined TribeVest. As an executive and shareholder there. So, so far over my career, built over 700 funds across $9 billion in transactions. So, I've seen a lot in my short amount of time. And, you know, it's just really excited to see what's going to happen here in this next supercycle, as people, some people are calling it.

Yeah, it's been so cool because, you know, I saw you join Tribest a few years ago now, probably, and obviously knew you well before that. My experience with TribeVest early on was really the OpenTribe concept, which is a really cool idea. But TribeVest has also evolved quite over time. So talk a little bit about the evolution of TribeVest and kind of where you guys are seeing, you know, the opportunity currently and then really going forward.

Yeah, totally. You know, TribeVest really cut its teeth on being a group investing platform. So initially, it was really made for passive investors. So a group of passive investors would get together, form an LLC through Tribevest, and they'd invest collectively as a group, all active partners, all voting on the investment, all voting on any kind of decisions. There's no kind of fund manager or anything like that involved. It's just a group of investors that get together, form an entity, aggregate their capital, and invest in a target deal. Maybe that minimum was $250,000 and they only had $50,000 to invest each, so they all put pooled their money together and invested. Got a lot of momentum there over the years. I believe TribeVest was founded in 2019, 2018, and it grew substantially. But what we found over the years was that somebody in that group was doing all the work, right? Like, somebody's got to do this stuff. Somebody's got to administer it. Somebody's got to engage with TribeVest. Somebody's got to pay the bills. Like, somebody has to be doing the work. And they wanted to get paid to be able to do that. But when people start getting paid to do things like that, it starts looking like you're getting paid to raise capital. Now we're squarely in the securities realm and it's like, okay, well now we need to navigate securities laws, right? So in order to pivot to that business model, you know, in the first iteration was at the time everybody was doing co-GP. So we did what was called a pro tribe where we still form this kind of active entity with passive investors. And then you had this co-GP that was still getting paid by the lead sponsor, but also had this entity to protect their investors from the lead sponsor. It was kind of this, this hodgepodge kind of product, which worked at the time. But I met up with Travis Smith, the CEO, we're both speaking at a conference in the BVIs with Wealth Without Wall Street. And I told him, I said, look, man, if you want to get in front of this, Like, we— you've got to do the fund of funds model. Like, that's where this is going. Everybody's turning away from the co-GP model, going to the fund of funds model. And if you, if you want to pivot your product, like, that's the way to do it. Um, and we just really hit it off, and our wives hit it off, and we just had a really good time in the BBIs. I ended up flying to Columbus a few days later, got on a plane, flew to Columbus, which is the headquarters for Tribest. We whiteboarded for a few days and created the the SPV fund-to-fund product that we sell today. And now we've sold over 250, maybe 280, I think, to date over the last couple of years. So it's been pretty incredible, pretty incredible growth over the years.

Yeah, it's been really cool to see your all's evolution because we've been working with, with TribVest from the beginning. And like you said, a lot of the early, um, you know, kind of product that was offered was Hey, the minimums to invest are, you know, higher than a check that I want to write. I like this firm. I want to invest with Aspen, but I don't want to write the minimum check there. Or, you know, hey, there's a higher tier. If we go hit this amount, then we get better, you know, preferred return, better carried interest terms, etc. And so people would pool their capital together, invest through an SPV, and Tribest would do all the backend for that. You guys still do that product and still, um, still is available for people that want to do that. But one of the challenges, as you mentioned, is there's still some admin work that has to go on with that, right? Because it is effectively a feeder fund. It's an SPV investing as an LP. And so there is, you know, another level of management. You got to do K-1s, you got to do, um, you know, capital account reconciliation, etc. And so it just Some people aren't sophisticated or didn't know what they're signing up for, realize, "Hey, actually, I'd rather get paid for this." And then at the same time, from my perspective, we've been around for 14 years and have seen a lot of these trends change over time where a lot of people were doing co-GP model where, "Hey, I want to raise for this deal and I get brought into the GP team." And and but there's 14 other people on there, you know, it's, it's a pretty big red flag from a securities law standpoint. And, um, you know, this, this fund of fund model really started to take a little bit more traction and gain some momentum. You guys made the pivot, and, you know, it's, it's cool because what I want to talk about today, the main thing I wanted to kind of zone in on is what we're calling an opportunity hiding in plain sight, because this is something that I've seen with our own capital base, our own investor base. And I'm sure you have some examples and stories too, but what started to happen is the co-GP model was simple in some senses because, hey, I want to raise for this deal, I'm going to get cut on the GP, I get a slice of the promote, slice of the upside, and I'll bring some capital to it and I get my pro rata portion of that upside. The problem is that is illegal, right? You're the attorney.

One small problem. Wrong.

But you can't get paid for raising capital unless you're a registered broker-dealer. And it's a workaround that, you know, doesn't work if you get caught. And so the better way to do it, the compliant way, is through an SPV, through a feeder fund where you become a fund manager, but is more complicated. There's You do have to do all those things we just said that were a challenge of creating SPVs, doing your own K-1s, doing the capital account management. But what Tribest has done is made the back end of that much more simplified, much more, um, uh, you know, we do all the hard work and the, the people that want to raise capital can focus on what they're good at, which is building the relationships, promoting the, the offerings, and can plug and play into your system. So talk about the opportunity that is in play, Syte, where, you know, we're starting to see this trend of, um, you know, individuals that maybe haven't raised capital before or they haven't been in real estate, um, you know, as a career, but they have a network, uh, they have, you know, influence and want to get into the space or intrigued or excited about it. But they want to be the operator, right? It's a lot of work to be the operator, I'll tell you that. And they want to just raise capital. And this fund-to-fund model has really taken off. And we've seen, you know, folks that used to be dentists that have a big network of dentists that are doing this. We have, you know, active sponsors that used to do their own funds that want to just raise passively now. We have folks that have, you know, big followings on YouTube and other, you know, social media that have built credibility in different industries, you know, start to implement this. So talk about this opportunity that maybe a lot of people don't even think about because it's never been brought up and what you guys are seeing from your all's perspective.

Yeah, I, you know, it's been kind of the wild, wild west since 2012 and the JOBS Act, whenever you started getting access to private deals and being able to legally advertise and solicit and be able to get outside of those, what we used to call country club deals. And, you know, as entrepreneurs over the years, what we do is we just push, like we push and we push and we push, we push the boundaries. And, you know, we got that opportunity with the 2012 JOBS Act. And we said, okay, we can start getting together and raising capital and we're all active partners. So that's okay. And we just pushed that further and further. And then it turned into this monster co-GP model that is, is kind of a, a word that we don't even use anymore because it tends to mean you're not compliant. And we ended up with 15, 20 people that are raising capital and they're not actually active partners. They're not doing anything else. They're getting paid to raise capital. And you can't do that. As you mentioned, you have to be a broker-dealer. You have to be licensed to do that. Just like a doctor has to be licensed to practice. To practice medicine. A lawyer has to be licensed to practice law. Um, so we, we push that and push that. And, and now that we're kind of in this downturn, the fund-to-fund model has really emerged. And to me, it represents professionalism and infrastructure. And when you have these, these new passive investors that may have gotten burned in this last cycle or, you know, new ones that are just coming along, they're smarter and they're more skeptical. And they're there. They demand that there be this professionalism and infrastructure and the fund-to-fund offers that. And the opportunity here is for people that have these networks and they might just be— they might only be passive investors today, but maybe they're a doctor, maybe they're a dentist, a lawyer, an engineer, work at a big software company. They're around wealthy individuals, they have a network built in that potentially already know, like, and trust them, which we work really hard to do as capital raisers. They've already got it. They just need to be able to turn it on and say, okay, well, do you 5 people that we're friends, we hang out, we have dinner together, you guys want to invest with me in this deal that I'm investing with? Now there's an opportunity to do that because we're making the fund, fund-to-fund models. One is very compliant and two, it because of places like TribeVest, it's, it's easy. You can kind of hit that easy button, as I've heard you talk about before, where a doctor who works full-time hits that easy button and says, okay, I've got my 5 or 10 friends, we're going to invest together. Instead of getting, you know, 2x my return over 5 years, I'm going to get 3 or 4x return over 5 years.

Yeah, I love that. I love that. And, you know, uh, what are you guys seeing from an adoption standpoint? And, you know, as we kind of start maybe the beginning of the next cycle, or we're close to it, right? And a lot of, uh, things have reset, right? A lot of, um, this kind of old, old way of doing things, the co-GP model, is, you know, that, that's not the right way. Um, why is now an interesting time to be looking at this and to be thinking about, you know, what, what would it look like to become a a capital raiser or a fund manager? And what does it even mean?

Yeah, I mean, I'll tell you, it's evolved quite a bit even over the last couple of years initially. And you were in it, you were building with us. There's a lot of resistance. People still wanted to do the co-GP. They still wanted to use that model as lead sponsors, as the capital aggregators. They just had a really hard time getting away from that. In wrapping their heads around the fund of funds model and that that's how we have to do it and how we're going to do it moving forward. And, you know, we just really had to teach the industry that this is the more compliant, the best way to do it. And as we're kind of coming out of this down cycle and we're going to be going into the next big real estate run, the supercycle, some people want to call it, and they call it a supercycle because of all the things that are happening, not just in real estate, but in technology. Right? You have this AI push. I mean, even since the downturn started, let's say in the end of 2022, AI really wasn't that prevalent. It was, you know, we talked about it, but we didn't use ChatGPT just that long ago. Like, we didn't use that. It didn't exist. Now it does. Now there's all of this technology, all these platforms, all these things are just kind of culminating here and just kind of bubbling up and ready to explode. And then you also have this massive demand from investors that want to get exposure to the private markets, to alternative investments. They're demanding it from their financial advisors. And you have a lot. So therefore, you have a lot of demand from the financial advisors as well to say, okay, are my clients need this? They want it. How do we get access to it? And there's just, there's this bubbling up. So, you know, it's happening. But, you know, it's still kind of slow because we're still kind of waiting for the interest rates to go down or for things to improve and for things to start moving. But it— you can, you can feel the energy kind of building up.

Yeah, that's super interesting. And you know, it's the other kind of thing I feel like it's at play right now is there's an even bigger trend of capital that wants to come into the private markets, right? There is a massive tidal wave, I believe, of capital that wants to come into private real estate, private equity, private credit, venture capital— these types of asset classes that historically have not been accessible through the mainstream financial system, right? And Wall Street has not done a good job of creating accessible products. They've created really simplistic products for things that fit the mold and have raised a ton of capital through that, right? But it's— it's, uh, the system is very resistant to change because it's a very different world in the private markets. And what I see you guys doing is leading the charge of creating the financial plumbing, creating the accessibility and the ways for more people to get access to it. And so if someone's listening to the podcast right now thinking like, oh, that's really interesting, never thought about, I love investing, I've been doing this for a while, I have a network, I have friends that would love to get into this space that don't know it yet, but I don't know what— I don't know, like I hear things non-compliant, compliant, how would I make money doing this? And so maybe kind of break it down for us at a more basic level for someone that has no idea what a co-GP model is, what a fund-to-fund is, maybe the simple differences, and then how someone makes money as a fund-to-fund manager.

Yeah, and just know going into it, it is complex. It's starting a business, right? And there's things that you know and you don't know, but the good news is that there are lead sponsors like Aspen, there are vendors like TribVest that can help you launch a capital raising business easily. And you couldn't have done this 3 years ago, but today you can. Kind of like, we like to compare it to Uber where you can launch basically a taxi business easily. They changed that game, right? And same thing with Airbnb, like really hard to buy a hotel and launch it, right? But Airbnb made it easy for people to launch a hospitality business on an app on software, made it super easy, super accessible for people. Similarly, vendors like Tribest who work with lead sponsors like Aspen are making it really, really easy for people to launch a capital raising business. And what that entails is, is we do all the hard stuff. You know, there, there are a lot of complications involved. You typically have to engage with a securities attorney, you have to find a CPA, you have to open a business banking account, you have to file for your your entity and get an EIN and find an investor portal and manage your cap table. It sounds complex because it is. But today there are technologies and people and companies that can help you do all those things so you don't have to, right? Just like Airbnb and running a hotel. You don't have to run a hotel. You need to be able to navigate the software which is built out and it's super simple to be able to do that.

Yeah, that makes sense. And at the most basic level, a fund-to-fund is basically you form a special purpose vehicle, SPV, that you pool capital into. You have your own offering that is in a securities offering, and then that offering invests in, you know, one or multiple funds that then you are the manager of, right? So it's, uh, there is some complexity to that. But in a lot of ways, you're removing one entire side of the business, which is, you know, acquisitions, operations, asset management, and it's really just focusing on leveraging your network, your relationships. And there is some additional work that goes along with that, but that's where folks like TribeVest come in and help, um, make it simpler, right? Help kind of create a clear pathway. Um, what does it look like for someone that you know, is running a fund? How does someone get paid doing that? And why is that compliant?

Yeah, there are different ways that you can get paid. There are a lot of securities regulations that you need to navigate, and securities attorneys and TribeVest and myself at TribeVest will help you navigate those things about how you can get paid, how you structure that. A lot of it comes down to the language in your documents. But essentially, just to keep it at a high level, you can get paid some sort of upfront fee. So, you know, a fee at closing. So whenever you aggregate all your capital together, you get paid some sort of a fee upfront. We call that just an upfront fee. Sometimes you'll hear it called a due diligence fee. At the lead sponsor level, sometimes it's called an acquisition fee, but we don't say that at the fund-to-fund level. And then you'll also get paid some sort of an annual fee. So you'll charge some sort of fee every, every year, but maybe you get paid monthly on that. Maybe it's pro rata, broken down per month or per quarter, but you'll get— so you get an upfront fee, you'll get an annual fee, and then on the back end, you may get some sort of a carried interest or profit split. So, you know, if there's an exit, let's say the target deal is a commercial asset, a multifamily property, and it sells, and then you have this big distribution that goes to your fund-to-fund entity, there might be a profit split there where let's say 90% goes to your investor partners and then 10% goes to you as the administrator and manager of the fund. And that can add up really quickly. What we're seeing across the board is anywhere between— on the, on the very low end, maybe, maybe you make 8%. On the high end, sometimes we've seen up to like 18, 19, 20%, which is pretty absurd. So, don't look for that necessarily, but you'll see a spread from 8% to 20% on the capital raised. Now, you're not basing it on how much you raise, but just as a perspective, that's something that you can kind of measure against. And it's somewhere between 8% and 20%. And I would say it averages out between like 8% and 12% on capital raised. So, if you raise $1 million, you stand to make $100,000 to $120,000 over the life of the deal. Which is incredible when you think about it, especially when what you're really doing is just administering and managing this capital, right? You're not operating a property, you're not buying a hotel, you're not managing property managers, you're not doing all that. And even administratively, Tribevest is handling all that stuff for you as well. So you're really just managing the relationships and the communications with your investors who might just be your family and friends out of the gate. So it's really easy and you can make a lot of money doing it. And we've, we've got many examples of folks that have made a ton of money and built a real business out of this all while working full-time at their W-2 as a doctor or dentist or a lawyer or whatever it is that they do during the day.

Yeah, no, that's so interesting. I mean, in a lot of ways it's, it's simple in concept and there's a lot of, a lot of things if someone's never done it before that you gotta get comfortable with. But, you know, what are maybe the biggest misconceptions about what it looks like, or even like a stigma, like, oh, I don't want to, I don't want to raise money from my friends, you know, and, you know, create a weird dynamic, or what happens if, you know, we lose money or whatever? Like, what, what are, what are some of the bigger misconceptions and, and maybe, um, examples of people that you've seen have success on the platform, um, and what they, what they've done?

Yeah. I mean, one, one big misconception, I kind of alluded to it earlier, is that you have to be a full-time capital raiser to be able to do it. Um, we, we've pushed over 250 to 280 or so over the last 2 years, fund of funds that we've put together. The vast majority of those folks are doing something else as well. They're not just raising capital. Like they're full-time dentists, doctors, lawyers, engineers. And they base their network from that. They actually get the network that they raise capital from, from their W-2. And that's why they're successful at also raising capital. Now, in the past, maybe you would have had to have been full-time. But again, because the technology exists, because the vendors exist, because lead sponsors are adopting this capital raising channel and making it easy for fund managers to raise capital, and giving them a program and a step-by-step way to do things, it doesn't have to be a full-time endeavor. I will say something that is difficult for a lot of people. You had mentioned it is, is trying to get over that kind of— it's a mindset hurdle of being able to raise capital from people, being able to take other people's money and invest it. I think you can take solace and comfort by investing with them, right? If this is a deal that you are investing in yourself, then you believe in it, right? If you're putting $50,000, $100,000 into this deal, well, there's something about it that you like and you, you like it a lot and enough to where you should feel comfortable investing with your investors. Now, if you don't and you're just saying, oh, this deal is like, okay, I'm going to raise $1 million of my other, of my friends' money and then we'll see how it goes for them. Well, if you have that, then maybe this is the wrong deal. right? But if you're putting your own capital in there, you're doing your due diligence, um, you know, you've met the lead sponsor, you feel comfortable with them and their history and what their business plan is, then, you know, you should find some comfort in that, right? And people want to— people want to invest alongside of you.

100%. And, you know, in my experience, and, you know, we've been, we've been raising capital for the past 14 years, most people want to invest with people they know, right? People like to invest in groups. They like to invest if they know their friends investing in it, because especially the private markets where accessibility has been more limited and you hear about the bad deals, the Ponzi schemes, the people that have lost money, it's something that I think is better in community, better when you can do it together. And, you know, it's, it's also cool to see all these, you know, passive investor communities pop up all over where people can grow and learn together. But it also makes sense when people start this business, start raising capital, people know, like, and trust you, right? And they want to work with people that they already know. And so to me, there's a very natural affinity toward this model from just the way we as humans are wired, and I think fits really well. Um, you know, as this space is growing, and I just say too, it's interesting, as you mentioned, a lot of what you guys see in the platform of, of, uh, people that are working full-time. You know, we have, you know, probably 40 or so, uh, fund managers that, that raise for us, and a lot of them do work full-time. I mean, we have one, one guy that is a full-time commercial pilot, and he, he's raised a lot of money over the years. We have another another guy who works in tech, and he's a senior, um, senior guy in the tech world. But what they've realized is, hey, W-2 is nice to pay the bills and, you know, make some good money, live a nice lifestyle, but it's taxed very heavily, right? It's hard to get ahead with just W-2. And so how do we create this kind of, I would say, equity builder, this kind of equity booster rocket that we could kind of build in the background and start to stack up, you know, these potential for, for, uh, for wealth and kind of capital events over time. Um, so it's, it makes a lot of sense, right, if that's someone that is in those positions that wants to kind of get ahead. Um, what do you see as far as the people that are most successful in this, right? And I think It's been interesting to me to see a lot of people we work with who are the most successful and who aren't. It's not always what you think. It's not always the big personality, you know, the, the pure salesman roles. It's, it's generally people that can build trust well that I think, like you said, like have a true fiduciary mindset, which is I'm doing this my own money and I'm going to do everything I can to protect that money and my investor's money, and I'm gonna, you know, treat it like it's my own. Um, and if that's not your mindset, you probably should be in the business anyway. But, you know, there's an element of, uh, the most successful people I've seen have not been the most flashy sales folks. And, you know, one guy I'm thinking of in particular, I think he works with you guys as well, he's— he was a dentist, right? He's, um, just incredible guy, very, very trustworthy. You know, not over, uh, you know, big, big personality, just kind of understated, but just really consistent. And he's had massive success. And I mean, what do you guys see as far as, you know, who does this work for from a personality standpoint or kind of skill set standpoint?

Yeah, that's right. I think that folks that haven't done it before see people like Grant Cardone out there. There are these big sales personalities and they think that maybe that's who they need to be to be able to be successful in this business. But it's not true. I mean, I think the most important thing is, is having a built-in network. We've certainly seen that. So like if you are a doctor, a dentist, a lawyer, a software engineer, somebody that has friends that maybe do similar things to you and they have a high-paying W-2, so they have money to invest. Those are your friends, those are your net— that's your network, and you already have that built-in trust with them. You can have a lot of success right out of the gate because you don't have to look very far. You can look one degree away and those people around you are just like you, and they maybe just don't know about the investments that you're doing. And as soon as you tell them, they're just like you and they're like, yeah, that sounds great. Easy, easy to get people to invest that already have your mindset and have the, have the extra capital to be able to invest. So the people that have those built-in networks, certainly, you know, that's number one, right? Number one. And you don't have to have a big personality. You don't have to be a salesperson to do that. And in fact, being salesy when you're raising capital is the worst thing that you can do. It turns investors off immediately nowadays. It didn't necessarily used to be that way, but today investors are smarter, they're more critical, they're looking for that. And if they can smell it, they smell desperation, and if they smell salesmanship like that, they run away. They're not looking for that. They're looking for trust. They're looking for, you know, personalities like the people that you had mentioned that are kind of unassuming, right? But you have that conversation with them. You're like, man, I like this guy. Like, as a person, he's a good person. He's trustworthy. He's consistent. He knows what he's talking about. He's been around the block. And those are the people that are having a lot of success right now.

You know what, some of the kind of fears or obstacles, I mean, it is, it can be a scary thing, especially if someone's new to investing in alternative investments or real estate. Of being able to understand and manage risk, right? And you are putting, you know, a lot of trust into the folks you're raising for, um, you know. And my advice has always been work with more established sponsors, right? That's one, one way to kind of mitigate, um, you know, some of that kind of idiosyncratic risk of, you know, working with someone who's a crook or, you know, negligent. But what are other things? How could someone mitigate those risks and get comfortable bringing their network, their friends, their family into these types of funds and have confidence in how it's going to turn out?

Yeah. You know, you got to do the research, right? If it's— you got to do the research. You can start with a simple Google search. I've said that from day one. You can just Google search. The partners, the operators, the individuals in the company. See what people are saying. See what's out there. See if what they're saying in their pitch deck matches what comes up on the internet. Make sure that their track record is what they say it is. Get on a call. Ask them questions. Invest with them passively, right? If you're gun-shy about bringing in your friends and family because you're not sure, well, maybe it's better to invest with them first. Like, do your due diligence and then invest passively with them on a deal. See how that goes. A lot of lead sponsors, the communications drop off almost immediately after they get your capital, right? There's like, oh, we're best friends until you wire me that money. And as soon as you wire the money, it's like crickets, right? And that's a big red flag. So hopefully that doesn't happen to you. But if it does, then, well, you shouldn't bring your friends and family into that, right? So you can kind of be a gatekeeper for that. And that's part of the value that you bring as a capital raiser is you've done some sort of due diligence. On the investment, on the lead sponsor. You know, if there's an opportunity to shake their hand, to meet them in person, to get that gut feeling about someone when you meet them in person and look them in the eye and see if they're, you know, if it feels trustworthy, if it feels like everything adds up to what they're saying it does. Just do everything you can to make sure that what you're— what your friends and family's money is going in a safe place. But I will say that, you know, sometimes, you know, they pass the sniff test and it doesn't work out, right? And there's a difference between a bad deal and somebody committing fraud, right? There's been a few Ponzi schemes and things like that. That's way over here. And unfortunately, you know, they'll go to their wits' end to sell that fraudulent deal and it sucks. It really does. It makes all of us look bad. It does happen from time to time, as opposed to a bad deal, which everybody has bad deals. And that's, that's a totally different thing.

Yeah, I totally agree with you. I think you can't underscore how important due diligence is, right? And if this is something that you want to do, you have to get comfortable doing due diligence. You know, thankfully, we've written a book called Invest Like a Billionaire and talks a lot about that. There's a lot of other resources that talk about how to do due diligence. And I love what you said. I mean, one of the guys that raises for us, this was his model. He said, I invest as a passive investor first. I let that investment season over some time, see how they communicate, see what types of reports I get, see how responsive they are. And that just builds confidence for then, hey, I took the first dip and it was a good experience, and now I have confidence to go, you know, raise capital for it. I think that's a great, a great model. Um, and I do think, you know, it's, it's something that unfortunately we do have to address in our, in our industry is fraud and Ponzi schemes. And, um, man, I wish that wasn't the case because it, like you said, it makes our job a lot harder when we're trying to do it the right way. But there, there is a lot of that out there, and it's not everyone, it's not, you know, even the majority, but it is Um, it is prevalent. And so understanding, um, you know, how to identify those kind of red flags is, I think, a very, very important skill that you need to develop if you don't already have that. Um, Seth, give us an example. I don't know if you have one off the top of your head of just someone that, you know, that kind of came to the platform, uh, maybe hadn't been doing this before but kind of saw the power of leveraging their network and kind of started capital raising, what was the result?

Yeah. And we're probably talking about the same person you mentioned before. Yeah. But this person is a dentist by trade, exited his program or his company, invested passively in a number of deals, already had a built-in network of other dentists, other people that he knew from some other businesses that he ran. That already knew, liked, and trusted him, right? And one of the things I saw that made him very successful out of the gate was actually the type of investment that he raised for. And it was a land— they were land deals. And what that does is accelerate the capital because he was able to return that capital back to his investors quickly. He was able to basically double their money in 12 to 18 months as opposed to, let's say, 5 years. And because of that, well, if you double my money in 12 months, I'm going to invest with you again as soon as possible. Right? Like he just— bam! Like right now. Like, sure, let's do it again. So he did that a couple of times and got a lot of momentum. Now, not saying you have to raise for land, but there are opportunities to get quick wins, private debt funds, things like that, right? Where you're getting cash flow immediately or very quickly within the first quarter. And your investors see a win right out of the gate, they start getting returns and they're like, oh, this is real, right? This guy's not gonna screw me over or, you know, anything like that. Or, you know, I don't have to wait 5 or 10 years to see any kind of return on my capital. I actually got a check after the first 2 months. And that's a win, right? And then that builds confidence for them to say, okay, cool, I'll invest with you in something that maybe doesn't pay the cash flow. And maybe we're looking for a a bigger win down the road, but you got that quick win for them. He was able to do that with, with land deals and accelerate his business very quickly. He worked with Tribest upfront. He had really no idea how to run a capital raising business. And we were able to do all these back office things like filing for your entity and getting your business banking account open and drafting your offering documents. And filing for your compliance things, your filings at the federal level, at the state level, pay your fees, manage your cap table and your investors, all those things so that he can still do what he does best, which is manage relationships and shake hands and communicate.

Wow.

We did all the back office work and he was able to raise, I believe it was close to $20 million in the first 12 months of raising capital, which is Incredible, incredibly hard to do. And that's in a down market, right? We're in a— we are in a down market. If he would have done this in 2020, he probably would have raised $50 million, right? So it's incredible what he's been able to do. And there are many examples of very similar stories.

Yeah, well, it's pretty cool too that I know you're talking about, and he's been able to make this the main thing he does, you know, and he's now bringing his sons into the business and teaching them and getting to work with them. And so it's been really cool to see how that works. But there's a lot of examples like that. Seth, what's the best way if someone's interested and they want to learn more about Tribest, they want to learn more about, you know, what does it mean to, you know, become a capital raiser, you know, fund manager, you know, what's the best place to reach out to you and hear more what you guys are doing?

Yeah, right now we actually are developing a cohort. To train fund managers, or ICAs as we like to call them, independent capital aggregators, how to raise capital and how to do it compliantly within a, within a structure. And we're calling that the ISC, or the Institute for Structured Capital. So go to tribevestisc.com to sign up for that. And we also have another cohort for lead sponsors as well that want to learn how to develop their own fund of funds program to bring in ICAs and capital raisers to their next deal.

Very cool. We'll put those in the show notes. Thanks so much for coming on, Seth. It's really fun to catch up.

Thanks, Ben. Appreciate you.

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