The Road to Gold Goats 'n Guns - Gold Goats 'n Guns

The Gold Goats ‘n Guns Newsletter is nearly ready for publication. It will build on ideas I created at Resolute Wealth while adding new perspectives. This will be the most unique investment newsletter on the market.

When I was first contacted by Jeff Yastine via a private message at Seeking Alpha back in June of 2013 I had no idea what he was proposing to me. At the time I was so focused on simply writing to survive that I jumped at any opportunity.

The initial phone interview was nearly a disaster. I have terrible cell-phone coverage at my place in rural North Florida. And I’m ‘maggoty’ as my mother-in-law calls my incessant pacing and fidgeting.

So, as I walked back and forth on my porch, my reception kept cutting in and out. I’m surprised Jeff and Stephanie Gallagher, my first professional editor (who was my personal Gunnery Sgt. Hartmann, in the best possible way) put up with any of it.

I took the call thinking I would maybe get to write an article here or there for an extra $100 or so.

Maybe $200! Jubilee celebration time!

But, no, I quickly realized they were offering me the opportunity of a lifetime, to take over the editorial responsibilities for their gold-focused newsletter, Gold Stock Advisor.

My name on the masthead.

At the time, more then 50,000 subscribers at $97 a head. A $5 million business.

Believe me, I switched gears really quickly.

Stephanie grilled me hard on why I didn’t like Barrick (NYSE:ABX) as an investment. I gave some rambling response about ‘fat-middle’, diamond-shaped business model, where all of the cost is in logistics and overhead.

I preferred ‘pyramidal’ shaped business models, where small capital outlay creates big investors returns. Unfortunately, the gold business is long on diamonds and short on pyramids.

Write of Initiation

Within a week I was writing them a trial issue.

Now, that was truly a disaster. Because I had literally zero idea of what I was doing. And I had the separate task of writing it as if I was the guy I was replacing.

Stephanie was hard but fair, she knew I had the talent but I didn’t have the particular skill set as a writer at that point to do the job.

I hadn’t ever read an investment newsletter from cover to cover. And here I was trying to write one. When I think back on it, the faith and patience they showed with me was astounding.

After a consult with them again I realized I needed to change tactics completely.

They told me, a good newsletter writer is a great story-teller. Relate you to your ideas. Make this personal.

I was, of course, thinking that I had to persuade them with my ideas first and then I could slowly bring myself to the table.

Why would these people spend good money to hear about my insipid little life?

But, that breaks the first rule of good marketing. Good marketing is about the heart.

Not the head.

In fact, that’s exactly what people are buying the newsletter for. To connect with someone who shares their values, who is real to them. They have to be someone they can trust to guide them to make good decisions, be they health choices, investments.

Turning the Corner

I asked to write the lede in my voice at that next meeting. I went home and wrote the 700 words that changed my life. If I hadn’t wrote them I wouldn’t be here today.

I would have likely given up, crawled back into some dingy laboratory and pipetted myself into oblivion.

For those of you that do not know this, building a house is really hard. I don’t say that to be flip, I say it because I know first-hand how true it is. That experience doesn’t come from a summer job on a framing crew as a teenager like a couple of my friends, either. No it came the good ol’ fashioned way experience comes to you in this life….

…via temporary insanity born of necessity.

The house I ow’ned (short for ‘owed on’) was not acceptable to my wife to start a family in. I didn’t disagree. But, I also knew that the brewing housing bubble had priced what we wanted – a lot of land — out of our future given our income and lifestyle choices. So, something had to give.

My wife and I set about building a house in 2003. While everyone else was busy scuttling about buying debt with dreams of perpetual 20% year-over-year gains using other people’s money I said no, hitched up my pants and set about setting poles, flying trusses and digging trenches in the North Florida summer.

They loved it.

Now I read that today and I’d shorten it by about 30%. In fact, by the time the issue got published the editors did just that. But, that didn’t matter to me.

I got the gig.

Within a year we re-branded Gold Stock Advisor to Resolute Wealth because we felt I needed a better platform and we’d stabilized the subscriber base.

After three-and-a-half years, two editors, innumerable arguments about math and geopolitics, however, all good things come to an end.

The Road Taken

And that brings me to today. This weekend I’ll be putting the finishing touches on the first issue of my new newsletter, Gold Goats ‘n Guns. Sitting down to discuss all the things I didn’t do while with Newsmax: layout and design.

The content is done. The templates are built. Now we begin building a new house, a better house with a pyramid-shaped business model.

This is one where I can spend my time wisely, working for you directly while needing a lot less overhead. In fact, this is the key to understanding how I approach making and/or keeping money. This is the key insight.

The more you approach your life this way, the more of your life is available to you to do the things you want to do, not the things you need to do.

Everyone wants this business model. Most businesses, however, don’t work this way. And the trick is finding ways to turn diamonds into inverted pyramids. Bad investments into good ones.

I have a preview up on my Patreon page of the first isssue of Gold Goats ‘n Guns. It will be available to all patrons for as little as $1 when it’s released on Monday.