Getting Employee Buy-in With Bitcoin

All right. Good afternoon. I think we have the unique distinction of being the only panel that lost its moderator. Our moderator had a personal emergency, so Tony and I are going to moderate our own session. This is Tony Beck with Beck & Bulow out of Santa Fe, New Mexico.

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I'm Mike Coffey with BlueCotton.com in Bowling Green, Kentucky. We are a custom screen printing and embroidery business. We make custom T-shirts and hats for events like this, small businesses, clubs, groups, and organizations. We've been doing that for 30 years in Bowling Green, Kentucky. You might be wondering what that company has to do with Bitcoin.

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We're on the stage today to talk about how you can use Bitcoin in your business, and specifically how it can impact your employees. In 2022, we decided to invest in Bitcoin mining equipment for the sole purpose of giving Bitcoin to our employees. It was pretty unique at the time, and it is still pretty unique. I think maybe we were one of the first.

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We started mining Bitcoin in 2022. We told our people we were going to invest $40,000 a year into mining and Bitcoin, and they looked at me like I had three heads. In 2022, Bitcoin was not even as well known as it is now, but we wanted to do something really unique.

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I'll jump to the punchline. That's what we did, and it totally transformed our business.

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In 2020, during the pandemic, our business stayed open. During the summer, our people had been coming to work for two or three months, and we wanted to do something to say thank you. We had gotten some money, so we went down on the floor one day. We have a lot of production workers. We have about 130 people who work for us in Bowling Green, Kentucky. We said, hey, we're going to give away $30,000 as a way to say thank you.

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Everybody cheered and applauded. We handed out money to full-time people and part-time people, and it was a huge hit. Two years later, our business had recovered. We did not do great during Covid because our product depends on people getting together, but two years later we were doing great. I told my business partner, let's do that again, but this time let's do $40,000.

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I went to one of my most financially responsible employees and said, do you remember when we gave that money away a couple of years ago? He said, oh yeah, I remember. I asked, how much did you get? He said, I don't remember how much I got.

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As a business owner, that just kind of hit me. We gave away $30,000. I did not even make $30,000 for many years, and we gave it away in a day, but it did not have any lasting impact. I thought, what can I do to empower them in a way they will never forget?

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By that time, I was pretty far down the Bitcoin rabbit hole. I thought, what if there is a way to give them Bitcoin? So we came up with this idea. We called everybody together and said, we are going to invest $120,000 over the next three years, $40,000 a year, into Bitcoin on your behalf.

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My people looked at me like I was completely crazy. They were thinking, why can't we just get the money? But we did it, and it has been such a success for our business that we have continued it into years four and five. We make our first payout at the end of next year, so we have a lot of people who are very eager and excited about that.

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What we learned is that even if we gave them a great gift of Bitcoin, if they did not know what to do with it when they got it, we might not really be helping them. We might not be giving them an advantage. So I started doing financial education classes. I thought, if we are going to give them a lot of Bitcoin and it is valuable, they need to know what to do with it.

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We started with finance. A lot of people are not that financially literate. A lot of our people are hourly workers. Many are high school graduates. We had a real transient workforce. They might come work for us for three months and then go somewhere else. So we started doing financial literacy, and that led into other topics like health, nutrition, leadership, and positive thinking.

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Four years down the road, this is why I am here: to let business owners know what happened. Our whole business changed. We had a gigantic turnover problem. Our turnover was 108% in 2022. We had 130 people, and in 2022 we hired 142 people. We did not grow that year; we just hired 142 people for 130 positions.

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Half of those positions were not really leaving. It was the other half that were turning over. So we were really hiring 142 people to fill about 65 spots. You can imagine how expensive that is, but nobody has to write a check for turnover. You just do it and think that is the way it is.

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Last year, three years in, our turnover was 14%. Last year we hired 17 people total. You can imagine what that did to our bottom line, to go from hiring 142 people a year, year after year, to hiring 17 people.

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Now we have employees who are bought in. They are engaged. Our culture is completely different. We have people in the building with experience. When we send out custom products, shirts, and hats, our customers are getting products from people who are engaged, bought in, and have a financial future. They have hope and purpose.

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Our customers get a better product, and the culture in the business is way better. It really started by dropping Bitcoin into our recipe and following that up with a lot of education.

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That is what I want people to know. You can use this incredible technology to impact real people. My people are not going home on the weekends studying monetary policy or debasement or worrying about the Fed. They are just trying to live. So we ask, what can we do to give them some equity, some agency, and some hope? We have done that, and it changed everything.

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Tony, your story is a little different but similar. Why don't you tell us about what you do at Beck & Bulow?

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Our story is a lot different. It sounds like you had a problem during Covid. We started about eight years ago. We're in the premium meat business: meat that is good for the earth, good for the animals, and great for you.

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We started selling at the farmers market, or in other words, slinging steaks at the farmers market. We became very proficient at selling meats: tenderloins, rib eyes, and all bison is how we started. It pretty rapidly grew. We started expanding into wholesale. They started asking, do you have anything besides bison? Do you have premium North American elk? Yes. Then Wagyu, the best Wagyu in the United States.

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Covid was very interesting for us because we were a wholesale company, and I was watching the news. California was shutting down. The East Coast was shutting down. I thought, we have a problem here. We are two weeks away from all of our restaurants shutting down.

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So we pivoted right away. We had a warehouse, and we started emailing people. At that time, grocery stores were trying to limit the amount of meat you could buy. It was very scary.

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We were an essential business, so we were able to be out the entire time. People started coming into our warehouse and buying. They would even buy the freezers and pack the freezers. It created local demand in the community.

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Our business had been built with a very strong sales culture. I can't tell you how many doors we knocked on. We were not leaving the kitchen until there was a sale. I said, God willing, someday someone is going to start coming to us. Covid was the start of that.

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I was very aware that the United States government was sending out checks. I thought there must be some equal and opposite opportunity. So we got into brick-and-mortar retail and online.

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Before that, it was just bootstrapping every dollar available. You basically went from a wholesale company selling to restaurants, to a brick-and-mortar location in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and then e-commerce, where you are shipping all over the country.

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Yes. I was just a poor, humble meat salesman who started in the garage. Then you have executives coming over asking if they can sell your meat at their locations in California.

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At that time, we started a podcast and we had a Bitcoin enthusiast come on. He said, you guys should do a sovereign reserve. I thought, really? I thought that was just for Michael Saylor. We are just a little guy.

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So I started learning about it. My accountant said, Tony, with the amount of revenue you are creating, you had better start spending some money, because that is a problem.

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You have these three facets of your business. On the e-commerce side, people eventually started paying you in Bitcoin, and you kept some of that on your balance sheet. But you also did something really unusual for your people. The purpose of this panel is thinking about innovative ways to help our people. You created something fascinating.

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Everybody knows what a 401(k) is. Tony created a self-directed 401(k) for his company, and you filled it with Bitcoin. What did that mean to your employees?

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It has been phenomenal. When we started, there was not really a rule book. People would look at you like you were crazy. We figured it out. It is not too difficult, but it is a little cumbersome with the paperwork. The accountants for the staff that were buying into Bitcoin were saying, oh my God, I have never seen returns like this off a 401(k).

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You have about 20 people who work with you, and they were pretty excited, I would assume.

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Yes. At the same time, we started accepting Bitcoin payments online through the Lightning Network and the Bitcoin network, and also at the brick-and-mortar side through the point-of-sale system. That has been incredible because the staff have exposure to Bitcoin. Then they start saying, hey Tony, you are going to the Bitcoin conference. Can I come? I want to learn more about Bitcoin.

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So you orange-pilled them through your self-directed 401(k). They got in, they saw returns, and that was great. They are contributing out of their paycheck, and you are matching a certain percentage. You are also taking Bitcoin as payment through e-commerce, and letting that build up your balance sheet. That gave you strength in your business.

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One of the other really cool things we talked about is that because Bitcoin gave you so much strength and stability, you were able to do some other things for your employees that are really unique. Tell us about the ranch that you bought and how you are using that to impact your people.

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Because of the Bitcoin we have on the balance sheet, we have stability. It is like a foundation. You are not going out of business tomorrow, or next week, or next month. You have longevity, and the future looks very bright.

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We are based out of Santa Fe, New Mexico, and Santa Fe might be like a lot of places around the country where the cost of living has gotten very high for our staff. Real estate prices are high. Workers in Bowling Green face the same kind of problem.

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You can't touch a house you would be comfortable living in for under $1 million in Santa Fe, and wages are not anywhere equivalent to that. But we have people working for us who cannot afford those kinds of homes.

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What we did as a company is we bought a large tract of land 20 minutes from Santa Fe in the most picturesque valley. It is absolutely gorgeous and stunning. There were houses on the property because it was an old girls ranch. It has a commercial kitchen, a barn, and about eight houses.

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We bought that property first with the intention of moving our warehouse there. But when we got it, I thought, oh my God, it is so nice. I can't stand to see semis driving up and down the roads. So then we moved our managers onto the property.

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These are people who were pre-approved for loans, but they just could not touch the market in Santa Fe. Now they have a four-season indoor pool, their own mountain, and hiking trails. I actually moved out there first. I thought it might be strange because we work together and we already have a pretty tight culture, but it has been awesome. To me, that exemplifies taking care of our employees, which it sounds like you are doing too.

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That is really the reason I am here. I want to promote this message, especially to business owners and people who manage lots of people. Even if you do not own the business, how do you really invest in your people?

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I spent too much of my career treating employees like transactions. I thought, why can't they just come to work, do their job, I pay them a check, and we go our separate ways? But that is not the way we were created. We were created to be relational.

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When we made the decision to invest in our people, we did not do it for a business reason. We just did it to be nice. But it came back to us in ways I never could have imagined. So what I want to tell business owners is, treat your people well for the sake of treating them well. Once you do that, they will engage with you in a way you could have never imagined or expected.

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We have seen that in our business. It has been a cascade effect. We did the Bitcoin, then we did the financial education, and this year we added something called a dream manager. People have dreams, and we want our people to identify their dreams and reach them.

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We started this dream manager program. We already have 21 people committed and signed up. They are identifying dreams and getting a roadmap to reach them. We have already had people complete their first two or three dreams, and they are getting momentum.

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I think it is interesting that all of this happened because of Bitcoin. My business partner told me we can employ people, or we can impact people. Bitcoin is so impactful, and that is what we are doing. Clearly, that is some of what you are doing too. We feel good about it because we know we are making a difference.

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From talking to you, what you are doing is investing $40,000 every year. Any employees who stick around for five years get to bear the fruit of those seeds you planted, and they get it for free.

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Yes. Like you, we have other benefits. We have a 401(k), health care, and all those things. This is just an additional benefit. All they have to do is stay five years, and they get it for free. There is no risk to them whatsoever.

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I think it is pretty interesting because if you give someone $10,000 or $20,000, and maybe they have never seen that before, if you give it to them right away, they might go to Vegas and go crazy. But if they have five years to think about it, maybe they say, we should put that as a down payment on a house.

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Exactly. I think what we wanted to teach was that they need to think into the future. During these five years, they have seen it. We did this in 2022, so immediately the price went down to $16,000. It immediately dropped. But then they watched it go from $16,000 to $126,000, and they saw the value in it.

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I am trying to teach them that if they take a five-year outlook, then when they actually get custody of it themselves, maybe they will spend their dollars but hold on to their Bitcoin. That is what we are hoping they will do. It has made a big difference in terms of what they think they can accomplish going forward. That has been one of the most impactful things.

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The other very impactful thing is that there is something about Bitcoin that seems to create community. In this modern day and age, it seems like we are so disconnected. Everyone has an individualized life, their own houses and cars. But for the vast majority of human existence, we have always lived in community. What you are doing seems to create a community.

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We are not special. We are not famous. We are just two business owners. He is a business owner in New Mexico, and I am a business owner in Kentucky. We have found a way to use this incredible technology to impact regular people.

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This morning I had a neat experience. I was eating breakfast and saw Jeff Booth sitting at a table. I really wanted to meet him, so I walked up and talked to him about what we were doing. He said all these people who are here this week, it is not about number go up. It is not just about getting rich. It is about how we use this technology to impact people, to change people's lives, to give them hope, to give them certainty, and to give them something that cannot be taken away.

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Everybody here is working toward that, or at least we want them to work toward that. You are working toward that every day. You are making a difference for 20 people, but that also makes a difference in your community. Those 20 people have kids. Those kids go to school. They coach ball teams. It is making people better, building the community up, furthering adoption, and furthering the network. I am proud to be doing that, and I know you probably are too.

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What is one thing you want to leave everybody with as we wrap up?

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I do think we have a responsibility to take care of our staff and our extended family. Also, come to New Mexico and visit the ranch. It is beautiful. I am very excited about implementing some other changes, like your $40,000 program. What I would like to leave people with is that it is not so much what we take. I feel better when I give.

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If you want to support these businesses, your website is BeckAndBulow.com. You can order meat and have it shipped in two days. We are BlueCotton.com, and we are happy to sell custom T-shirts. Thanks a lot for being here today, Tony.

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Thank you.