Why don't more exploration companies pay their contractors with shares? Are there any prospectors out there who are willing to work for shares? It's my pleasure to share another exhausting (sorry, Francine) recording that details my thoughts on corporate strategy as it happens. Read the full transcript below. What next?
https://drive.google.com/drive/u/1/folders/13290nUe1cytIGrV0TNuWK9hfUqtaFARm
(Audio recording on the cloud here)
Yesterday we had news releases announcing shares for services agreements with prospectors. One of them associated with their projects on Vancouver Island and the other associate with our projects in Newfoundland. That's a cool way to start the year because I see only a few other people using these shares for services agreements. A bunch of people told me that it was impossible to find prospectors who will work for shares. It's surprising to me because it's a basic tool that we have as a public company to print shares in exchange for exploration work. Normally, we print shares to raise cash and then we spend the cash. That's a couple of steps: find the investors, sell them shares for cash, take the cash, and use it to pay the prospectors for work. Wash, rinse, and repeat. This situation with the shares for services is a little more direct. Prospectors do the work, then they get paid and shares. Either way, we're printing shares but how much we print and when is very different. With shares for services, we print after the work is done and we print in an amount equal to the work that was done. If we do a financing, then we have to raise all the money upfront and sit on the cash. If we're doing shares for services, we are printing just in time like manufacturing philosophy "just in time". That's more like what we're doing with this shares for services agreements.
The shares for services agreement doesn't guarantee any work gets done, it just provides a facility whereby we can pay for the work with shares.
We had a good discussion about this at the board level with one of my new directors, Maxime Lepine. He was asking questions about this because he's not a “professional” junior mining investor. He doesn't have the background as an investor in private placements to be able to instantly appreciate some of the basic trade-offs that I'm talking about, but he has done some investing in junior mining stocks and can get there eventually. I ran him through a few scenarios of what 2023 will look like if we do these agreements where the work gets done, the work is productive, and the market appreciates the work. We also talked about the scenario where we don't do any work. These were some of the most productive discussions I’ve had at the board level so far with Kermode. Going through different scenarios with Maxime to explain the basics was fun. He got the upside scenario pretty quickly. And the boring scenario where nothing happens is fairly obvious -- look around the junior mining business, and you can see lots of examples of it where people are waiting, worrying, and wondering what's going to happen next. Maybe some of the better financed companies with more advanced projects or production scenarios are able to keep going, but it seems like many juniors just “turtle” to survive.
People joke with mining companies that the exploration budget is one of the first things to get cut in down cycles. Sometimes, it seems like that's the case for the exploration companies too and the last thing to get cut is salaries. I don't know about that because I haven't been in a company like that. I've inadvertently invested in a few of them, but those left an impression on me. What gets done, who does it, when, how, and why? My investing adventures are reflected in how I'm trying to run Kermode now. I only have a playbook from what I've been able to put together myself. I don't have anybody telling me what to do but I seek out all the input I can get from every angle.
One of the things about bear markets is a classic line that I heard from Ian Cassel recently on Twitter. I had heard the line, "The bad part of bull markets is inexperienced people giving advice to other inexperienced people." But I hadn't heard the other part of the line, "The bad part of bear markets is experiencing people saying I told you so." That comes back to me for this discussion about people saying it can't be done -- that there are no prospectors out there who are willing to work for shares. That one always made me scratch my head. What? You're telling me there are people out there who want to option you their property, but they only want cash on the property deal? And they'll do work, but cash-only for the work? Hold on, do they believe in the property? Taking cash only leads me to believe they don't want to have upside exposure to it. If they say, " well, we can't afford to get paid in shares." Then that’s okay. I understand that. This strategy is not for everyone, but I've found two groups who can option projects and then contract-back the work and do the work for shares. To me, that was a surprise because it's proof positive that these people are out there. They're not making inadvertent mistakes.
Getting one of these shares for prospecting deals may be chance, but what is twice at the same time? I think it's an indication of the fact that there is a special group of bullish people who understand what is going on here and what can happen if this works. Then, it's all just about position sizing for them. For Kermode, we can't be overweight how much we print to them. And they can't be overweight how much work they do for us relative to how much cash they have coming in from other clients. It's a bit of a Cinderella hunt to find these prospectors.
It's a good way to start the year because it's like a tank strategy- a tracked vehicle where it can keep going regardless of what happens. It gives us a base layer. Hopefully, we will raise much more money and work far beyond the scope and scale of what we've outlined in that shares for services agreement, but As I've been saying, I have designed and continue to design this deal for a bear market because there are more bad days than good in the stock market for the junior mining business. I've seen that up close and personal for years. I'm not going to design this on a wing and a prayer when there are tools in place for us to be able to build it to crawl through the mud and actually move forward.
I'm very grateful to these different partners that we found that they are willing to play ball with us like this. Very grateful. They both have brought us exceptional projects and they can do really good work. The two basic factors I was looking for are in place, and then each of them also brings a third thing: a “Wow!” factor.
They each have a “Wow!” factor, in my opinion. With the guys on Vancouver Island, it's the YouTube videos now. And then the guys in Newfoundland is them being in Newfoundland. Is that still a hot jurisdiction? Is our land position in Jonathan's Pond important? Those interpretations are subject to change but there's the potential for the Newfoundland guys to start pumping out some cool videos documenting their fieldwork. I've been at them about that for years and I'm excited to start moving towards that with this public company.
All the things that have happened here, I wouldn't have been able to come up with this story. I wouldn't have been able to imagine the way it is playing out. Lots more to discuss about all aspects of the company. This is not a panacea, it only solves some of our problems. It doesn't give us a balance sheet or working capital, but it gives us a way to show the market that there's a heartbeat in the company. A reason to exist.
If you've been reading and listening back to all my interviews from the start, then that's been a big question I've asked myself. Why does this company exist? Why is this company publicly listed? If we can start to answer that question, then there's a chance the share price will go up and provides a return to shareholders old and new.
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. It's a highly subjective thing to say why this company should exist or not. For some people, its value is solely derived from being publicly listed. I don't like that story because I'm not a shell guy. I don't transact and create entities on the stock exchange. There are better ways to create a shell company than Kermode, anyway. This is supposed to be an exploration company, so please show the markets and exploration. I think we can but what we show may be controversial to a technical audience. The work we do -- the type of work we do may be different from what others do. Even look at our stuff on Vancouver Island so far. We don't have any assays to report. Sorry. But we've spent, Significant amounts of time and money on prospecting and stacked up a bunch of samples that we've taken photographs of and done descriptions of and have videos of the fieldwork where we collect them. All this is signed off by an independent QP so we're following the rules in terms of proper disclosure of exploration results but we're not generating a steady stream of assay results that I thought was necessary for market interest. If you've listened to my past interviews, you've heard me talk about the need to generate news flow. If you're going to be public, you better be doing something and telling people about it. I thought that news releases with exploration results were everything. And I still do, but as I've had time in the role here, it's been a wake-up call regarding cost per news release, and you're looking at the time involved to produce these things.
The most news release we generated so far was in Nevada with Robert Carrington on a few projects under LOI. Working with him was good because he was an executive of a pubco in Canada for 10-15 years. He had lots of experience and I had worked with him before, so we had a shorthand and were effective at getting some stuff done. It was certainly useful for me to work with him because he would write drafts and I would revise them substantially. That was a useful exercise for me, but did the market care about any of that? No, not really. There was heavy selling when we cancelled those LOIs in Nevada, but there was not much market response to any of the results before then. Even when we had ultra-high grades in surface samples with 24,000 grams of silver there was not a peep from Mr. Market. I understand that LOIs are not property deals -- close the deal, and then we'll talk about it. But that created a chicken-and-egg problem for me because working in Nevada is expensive. Great jurisdiction with great projects, but it's big boy country. It’s potentially an order of magnitude greater than what I can handle on a going-forward basis for Kermode. And that's all part of the story of why I ended up dropping those and coming back to work on stuff in Canada.
We did a bit of share for services in Nevada with Carrington, but it was like 50/50 cash-stock. That is different from what we're doing now where it's 100% shares for services. The scope and scale of work may differ and there may be different things Carrington would do for shares versus what the guys up here will do, but that remains to be seen. The proof of the pudding is in the eating. We've eaten the pudding from Carrington. Now, let's see what happens with these prospectors on Vancouver Island and Newfoundland. These new prospectors have some of the best projects I found anywhere. Others deserve honourable mention, for sure. There are some high-quality people out there, but in terms of people broadcasting what they're doing who have experience working with public companies in Canada, it's a pretty short list and these guys are on the top of it as far as I'm concerned.
Once again, I am grateful to find “Cinderella”, not once but twice. But a question remains, what next? I'm here in England and it's tough to be away, but that's fine. Carry on. I got these agreements done while I was abroad, believe it or not. And there's other stuff going on now, like the audit. The audit always stresses me out. I find it difficult to give over the responsibility to the auditors and our CFO on a process that is opaque to me. I don't know about the IFRS standards for junior mining reporting. My sense of management accounting of what's appropriate doesn't always match what's an industry standard so I'd like to learn more about that. I'd like to be more involved in all aspects of the business, but the reality is that it's a fairly simple accounting exercise. Let the professionals do their work. It's similar to prospecting, too. I like to be involved in the field work and I want to learn more about that, but I'm also happy to let the professionals do their work. I know that these prospectors aren’t gonna work for shares if I’m micromanaging them.
One of the analogies I've said from the start is setting the table for people to eat. We're getting there regarding the projects and prospectors. This is a big step forward with these shares for services. But who's at the head of the table? It's not me. At least, it shouldn't be. The CEO is somewhere, but he's probably the one bussing the table, taking drinks, running orders, and all this kind of stuff. Who's at the head of the table? The investors. Whether you're buying in the secondary or primary market, if you're putting money towards this company, then you're the reason we exist. Without that, this all stops. You may say, "oh, we have a good discovery, and the investors will come." But then we rely on them again so please don't take them for granted.
My experience for years as an investor in this business has given me many battle scars. There have been times where I've been like, nope, not going to do that with Kermode because I saw something similar when I was a shareholder of another deal and thought that that was just a terrible move. There was some fun Twitter chatter over the holidays about management decisions in the junior mining business about metallurgical testing. When does that met testing come in? At what stage of a project and why does it come in? How does it come in? Lots of important questions about pretty esoteric aspects of the mining business that are essential.
And a month prior, there was a picture from one of the Rick Rule accounts on Twitter that posted pictures of drill core from Kamoa Kakula. The caption said, "Hey, do you guys want to see what 82% copper looks like?" Cool! But then you have to think about the chemistry. Read the comments carefully and some people are talking about how this is waste. Others say no it’s ore because sulfuric acid can be used on cuprite to allow recovery. Awesome! This stuff is essential.
Is Grade king? Or is recoverable grade king? Maybe. But ask Whittle – what do they say? Units of value through the bottleneck? That's some esoteric operations research stuff from the Whittle Consulting Group. They worked on Kamoa Kakalua for Ivanhoe, which had a huge amount of underground mine development scheduling where Whittle got involved with some heavy-duty computational work. The theoretical underpinnings of what Whittle does can scale up or down across project size. That project had a huge amount of data to work with, and they did some cool data science. Lots of fun. Was it brute force? Was it a pruning algorithm? How do they even start to figure that out? And there is a lot of talk about data mining and AI and all this kind of stuff right now in the world, the mining business, and the junior mining business.
Believe it or not, I haven't seen other examples of data science creating value other than that one story. I don't have my finger on the pulse of all these things happening everywhere, but much of the chatter I've heard about AI in exploration has no value from anything I've seen. It doesn't mean it hasn't had value for other people, but I have yet to see it. Why did Goldspot sell its exploration business? I don't know where they are now, and I need help understanding what they are doing. And there is Windfall Geotek with CARDS, which is a pretty cool method, but I think it's 20 years old. It's effective, but pattern recognition matching stuff is not cutting-edge AI, from what I can tell. Those are a couple of examples from the junior space that deserves to be mentioned. Still, they are different from production schedule planning at a giant underground mine for a producer with a ten billion market cap. That's a substantial valuation far beyond anything I have any view on but seeing that one example of data science is encouraging. Data science already has a use in very niche situations, and there will be more but it's not something I know how to use yet. The closest we've come is CARDS from Windfall Geotek, which relies on data we don't have for our areas. And CARDS is not my search criteria for project selection, anyway. I don't tell my prospectors where to stake; I talk to them about what they've already staked or what they're looking to stake, and we talk about what that relationship looks like. Maybe we should be doing our own staking, but that requires a lot more geological skills in-house at Kermode. We continue not to have a geologist on staff. The only person getting paid is the CFO, and even she is not getting paid regularly every month right now because we need more cash, and the auditors are the ones that will take the next block of cash we have to keep going.
What about the idea of like hiring a vice president of exploration? One of the prospectors? Suppose one of these projects turns into a hit as a real discovery and becomes significant and we have to focus on it because Mr. Market is screaming at us to work on it. In that case, maybe Wesley Keats becomes a director and an officer. We have got to be careful that the audit committee has a majority of independent directors, but we can find a way. I talked with Wes about that six months ago when we were looking at adding a fourth director. We talked about him because I am bullish on him. People may say that he's never been an officer before and he does not know, but I say great -- bring him on. I would rather work with people who are hungry to be there above all else. Those are the ones who will fight to make it work, especially if we're working on projects where they're involved. This ties into some other discussion with Milo Mielniczuk, one of the new independent directors, and his gold project called Khrysos. It's a high-quality project, and we did an LOI with him on it last summer. I probably cancelled it too early, as I have said before. I probably made a mistake in the timing of when I cancelled that. If we do that project now, it's a related party transaction and it's more complicated. The big complication that we have there now is a valuation report.
If we're going to do that deal, then we need a valuation report by an independent QP. And I don't know what valuation number they may produce or whether it’s in-line with our proposed deal terms. That's a big uncertainty for Khyrsos. And maybe the valuation report needs a field visit which would mean that we're talking about spring-summer after the snow melts. It gets a little frustrating, but that's why it's not a main attraction at this point. It would be a different story if we had done it already and had Khrysos under an option agreement. I would like to have that option in place now because I like directors to own lots of stock, but I also want them to have it fairly aligned with what other people are paying for the stock. It's a bit of a complicated discussion trying to figure that out. Nothing happening anytime soon with it because there are a lot of hoops to jump through and I have been jumping through other hoops first, like these shares for services, the audit, and a BCSC review.
I was wondering if the shares for services would pass an exchange review because I hadn't seen other people do it. All this stuff is always uncertain. I'd never done it myself, but it's pretty simple and leaves me with the question: Why don't more people do this more often? It seems a pretty effective way to match your shares to your work. We'll see. Now, we're going to have to disclose whether we did we do any work on this project or that one this month. What dollar value was it? And we disclose that publicly immediately after the month end, not months later when the financials come out. There’s potentiatl for that to be an "emperor's new clothes moment" if we're not doing any work. Or it could be vindicating if we are busy! Whatever it is, it's transparent. That was something I always looked for in companies where I invested. To be able to provide that to investors is a step in the right direction.
I will briefly mention other property deals. I do not have much in the hopper. There's always stuff coming my way or stuff that I'm hunting out that I like. I saw some people on Twitter recently with stuff that interested me. But it sounds like we're going to lose the Mount Poly East LOI because the vendor, apparently, has somebody else who wants to take it. So the vendor may cancel the LOI for Mount Polley East. That is okay, I designed those LOI so they're mutually non-binding. If the project vendor wants to walk, they can walk. If we want to walk, we can walk. I'm not trying to lock people into things at the LOI stage. It sounds like we have been out-bid by somebody offering more substantial work commitments immediately and telling a story that the vendor wants to hear. Or maybe somebody else was telling that vendor to be careful about Kermode because it has a lot of stock out, we may roll it back, there are not many bids in the market, and whatever other problems we have. Okay, that is fine. Thank you, next.
There are no other LOI open at this time, other than Mount Polley East. So if we cancel it, then it will be the first time in over a year when there are no LOIs open.
There are other things, like a land play in Newfoundland that I was involved with privately that has come back. Do I want that now? It's hard to pay cash for that when I was in the founders round of that private company, but then got half my shares cancelled and rolled back while it is still private. What?
There's other stuff, too. There's a friend in Ontario named Mark Brazeau, who we tried to do something with before. It didn't work last time but there are lots of reasons for that. Can we try something there again? Yes, I am happy to try again. I'm not counting anybody out at this point. And there are other projects that people bring me to talk about that are outside my scope. One of the basic things that I tell people is that I want the people doing the fieldwork to be in the room for the conversation about the stock and the property option terms. That often cuts the conversation short because some of these guys on the street have these projects and figure they will find the work crew later. Or they say they know somebody but don’t want to give them any stock because they'll get less. So, we're back to guys who will only work for cash? No, thank you.
Turns out that some of the principles I have for designing these deals are helpful for sorting through opportunities that other people bring me.
I have nothing on the shopping list as a buy-it-now scenario but I hope to find new stuff. I am always looking for new things and I hope that some of the guys we're working with now can help us find things. The prospectors we signed services agreements with here are showing us some cool projects, and I would love to underwrite more stuff with them. As I said, they are some of the best in the business for the specific niche that I'm looking for.
Lots more to say about different aspects of the business, like the stock. We could spend days talking about the stock, but I will keep my comments concise. Suffice it to say, Mr. Market is one of those guys who shows up at your front door every day and offers to buy your house for a different price. Mister market is a manic business partner if there ever was one. It's been wild to see that up close and personal day after day. It's interesting to see him in one of his moods. It's a little sad, but there is opportunity in the wreckage.
And so again, look at, look at the other companies. Look who's doing stuff at what kind of a pace with what kind of objectives. So those things become important for understanding this stock relative to other stocks and the market at large. And even though I mentioned understanding this stock and the market, it's a fool's errand. It's not something I spent too much time trying to understand because it's fickle. It's subject to change. If you're willing to grant me that the stocks are complicated, then you'll also agree that metals prices are complicated and the global economies even more so. Global macro is a bit of a question mark at the best of times and we're in a chaotic environment now that makes it even harder to to understand what the world looks like months or years ahead. I can't do that with any degree of accuracy or certainty, but that doesn't mean we are completely lost. There are useful tools and techniques we have for some of this conceptual work, like minimax and maximin or best-case and worst-case planning. Without getting into the specifics of different scenarios here, I am planning Kermode for a baseline with a continued bear market. I tried to design us to be cockroaches or coyotes so we're hard to kill.
A turkey can fly into a tornado. I'm confident that we've been aggressive enough on the project generation side so we will have things to work on if the exploration financing spigot opens up wide. But that's a hypothetical that I don't have the benefit of living in today. The world I live in is much more sparse regarding financing opportunities, and that's the parameter that matters. The primary inputs for Kermode are projects, people, and financing. We've stacked up projects as best we can and found partners willing to do work in tough times, as evidenced by the shares for services agreements. Those are some foundational pieces. And then there are other things we will need to survive, like working capital and corporate services.
I recognize that survival doesn't get the market excited. Sometimes, it's unclear if discovery or exploration work even gets the market excited. Sometimes it seems like the market wants promotion, whatever that is, and momentum on a stock chart. It's a little scary that there seems to be so much momentum-chasing going on in the junior mining business, but that seems to be the bread and butter of many of the guys who are winning in the stock market -- buy things that go up. Sure. I get that, but I never found myself making much money doing that in the markets. Instead, I found myself making money buying well-thought-out speculations: special situations with highly favourable terms on the way in, and committed management who was eating their cooking all the way down the line from CEO to frontline workers. Those are some of the principles I've tried to implement regarding how I run Kermode now. It's been a lot of fun, but we're just getting started. It remains to be seen how much this will work.
Thanks to the audience. I am grateful to the people who listen to me. I appreciate all the banter, positive or negative. So bring it on, please and thank you.
Some of my stuff now on LinkedIn is dated. I'm sorry. Some of it is like a year old. For example, I was looking at a quote sometime recently, and it said, "I've got three LOIs I've signed…." Oh man, that was like 10 LOI ago! Yikes. There are principles in these old posts, but there are also stale aspects. Very stale. Timeliness is important, so I should stop posting some of that stuff. I should cull some of the stale stuff and tighten that up. Then, I should make some new content. I have been making new interviews and recordings online, but haven't gone through all the work of generating the transcripts and posts for Twitter and LinkedIn from them. There are hours and hours of work to be done on that, which is second their order work for me because the primary focus over the last few months has been building the company. Of course, telling the story is important and there has certainly been a lot of talk, but I haven't done these mass campaigns of pre-loaded posts from hour-long interviews like I'm recording here now. I have not been doing much of those lately because I've been busy making things happen on the project generation side. I would like to have been able to make more things happen on the financing side. I'm sorry to shareholders that I haven't been able to raise more money here in the last months and years. And I look forward to doing better in that in the future. This shares for services stuff will be a step in the right direction.
It will give more transparency about what we're doing monthly and show people that we can get work done, even without an immediate cash financing. If we do a keep-the-lights-on type financing for working capital where the money is used for things like auditor fees, lawyers, and CFO, we can at least have some field work for shares. Hopefully, that builds a bridge for us to a better world where we have bullish results and a more supportive market. No guarantee that we will get there. No guarantee that the bridge we build is long enough. Lots of uncertainty on all that stuff, but that's the broad strokes strategy of what I'm doing and why.
One thing to say for all the investors and issuers who are suffering is that I hope everybody's surviving and thriving. Best wishes for the future. Sentiment matches price to a large degree. Price is a liar. Price is sentiment. Liquidity is sentiment. There are lots of different lines like this that speak to people smarter than I talk about in terms of markets.
I also want to say something to those I interact with online: I hope you're doing okay. It's a tough time. It could get worse, be careful. Based on my own experience, please be careful. Don't be afraid to take the risk, of course. I'm not saying to be careful and hide in a cave. I'm saying, be smart. Let's all work to become better bettors. If we can become better gamblers or speculators, the market ecosystem around us will improve.
If we can do deals beneficial to other people we're working with, the ecosystem can become healthier. That's one of the things that I think about when I'm online, interacting with these people. Are we helping or hurting?
If you see me posting online, I'm usually posting something positive. You'll not see me saying negative stuff very often. It's not because I don't have negative things to say; it's just that I prefer to keep those a little more to myself; thank you very much. We can get into it privately. If there are specific things that somebody wants to talk to me about, then I'm happy to get into the negatives, but I try not to broadcast that on a large scale because there's enough of it in the world as it is. And I find that you attract what you put out. I don't want to attract negativity; thank you very much. I hope to see all my old friends running around again in better market conditions, chasing down whatever mammoth we can hunt next. It is a team sport.
Shoutout to Jody Dahrouge and one of his classic quotes about the business. I pinged him on Twitter recently, asking if it was his line, and he said it was. The line was like the junior mining business, where you and 50 friends get together and each put up ten grand to test an idea. I first heard that five or six years ago when we interviewed NTY 92 Minerals, a lithium play at the time. Thanks to Sean Kingsley, who made the introduction there and helped help me meet Jody at the time. Then 92 became Gaia and is now PMET Patriot Metals on its way to a billion-market cap last I saw. Imagine that little NTY five years ago that didn't have much going for it; in 2023 it could be a billion-dollar company. How many rollbacks do you need to get there? How many new projects? How many changes to the board of directors? It's not easy to get there, but look at the chart; these are new all-time highs. It's inspiring to see that happening.
Once again, I missed the lithium bubble completely. I missed it in 2016. I didn't get in and just stayed out. I missed it in 2022, too. If you see me doing a lithium deal in 2023, please call me and ask what am I doing? I stayed out because it's a niche that I don't understand. But I recognize that market prices are signals. And if lithium prices are screaming higher, then it's a signal from Mr. Market to stimulate supply. If we can throw our hat in that race, then let's go for it, but it's not something I've been focused on to date. I have yet to find other people I want to work with. That's subject to change, all it takes is a phone call from the right person in the right circumstance, and things can change.
I try to leave all those doors open for myself and the company because there's too much opportunity to say that I know something won't work. Unfortunately, I'm not smart enough to say that I know something won't work, whether we're talking about speculating on a lithium property play or some metallurgical circuit.
The basics for me are to focus on exploration work. Find simple stuff that we can do cost-effectively to show potential to find a mine. One of the factors for success is to work with groups who've been doing the work themselves under their funding. That's why I like working with prospectors who are used to making it work on a shoestring budget. They know how to do it for years with their own money. I find that those guys treat our money with respect, and I appreciate that as somebody who's been paying for a laundry list of bills out of pocket on my credit card for the company over the last few months. I am very grateful to have partners who treat our money with respect and know how to stretch it.
This gets into some complicated strategic questions about how we're planning our exploration programs and what kind of information we're providing to the market in what way, when, and how. These are important topics that are always up for debate and discussion. So if you're listening and think I'm making mistakes, please call me, tell me, email me, tweet me -- do it anonymously or with your name, whatever you want, it's all good. I'm keen to hear from anyone out there who has an interest in what I'm doing.
This is closing in on an hour now. Hopefully, it's coherent for you. I'll put it up with the other ones and use the automated transcript to get some baseline text. Then, I'll polish up the transcript on this one because there's some relevant stuff here that summarizes the strategy I've been working on for the last year. If this can be a reference document for people to help understand what I'm talking about, that's helpful. It's an ambitious goal, and we probably still need to get there, but that's what I want to provide.
A final closing comment to thank the board of directors that have joined the company and are serving on behalf of shareholders. Milo Mielniczuk and Maxime Lepine are two really interesting guys in their first time on a public board company. They're doing a good job. Max is throwing many ideas at the wall, the same as me. I knew he would. And he's asking lots of questions because things move pretty fast, and I take a lot for granted in terms of other people's understanding. Even simple questions can do a lot to force me to slow down and spell them out. So I'm grateful to him for that. And Milo is also a valuable guy to have in the mix. I'm grateful for his involvement and look forward to working more with him as time passes here.
And I will mention that we have that fourth seat. If anybody is listening out here that feels compelled to get involved, please say hi. I would be very keen to add a fourth director, and I don't have anybody in mind at this point who's expressed a willingness or interest in joining. It's a substantial commitment, legally speaking, as it's a fiduciary responsibility.
If somebody wants to be involved in the capital market side of the business, then that person could be an officer and director. Or they could be an independent director. If we can find someone with capital markets reaches who wants to be involved as an officer and director, then that would be bullish. That is a factor of success that we need to include on the board at present and in the team at large where we are weak. I'll put that out to the universe and say, hey, anybody listening or friends of friends, please? Let's talk about that sometime because we need all the help we can get. Because it is a really bad time in the mining exploration business, people are hunting for opportunity on all sides, and if there are people who understand some of the stuff I'm doing and see potential in this company. Please let's get in touch and talk about where things could go and how we could work together on that. We are grateful to bring the types of prospectors we have been able to get so far, and some of the shareholders have also been very grateful to some of them. But I want to help build out this other piece of the puzzle.
And if we can attract significant Depth there, I would sleep better at night, but for now, we are. This is what it is, and we survived a fight another day. This has been Peter Bell for an hour off in the Liverpool area on January 5th, 2023. Thanks goodbye!
