 and CEO interviews brought to you by Rich TV Live. Hi, how's everybody doing today? This is your host, Rich from Rich TV Live, and I'm here with a very special guest. It is Michael Walkinshaw, the CEO of Tamaya, a publicly listed company in Canada and the United States in Canada under the symbol TCA and in America under the symbol T-I-M-C-F. How are you doing today, Michael? I'm doing great, Rich. How are you? I'm doing very good. I'm excited to have you here on the show today and I'm excited to learn more about your company. Why don't we just get started with who is Tamaya and what do they do? Yeah, so Tamaya Capital provides innovative kinds of financing to recurring revenue software companies. And what's unique about that is that it's really difficult for recurring revenue software companies to get that financing. Well, we've created a couple of very unique financing products that we provide to them and they're very happy to pay for it. Debt financing, interesting. I was reading a little bit about it and so you guys make principle plus interest. Is that correct? Yeah, so what we do is we provide a long-term financing facility for an entrepreneur who's got a company that say has a million dollars per year over revenue. And normally they would go out to angels or venture capital funds to get financing. But for these specific kinds of companies, often it's a better idea if they could go out and get debt. These companies, we like to use the term, they're like the Rodney Dangerfield of small and medium businesses. Software companies have no assets so they can't walk into a bank and get debt. But they really are amazing companies. They've got good growth, they've got super high-growth margins. All they're doing is investing in growth. And so there's a really strong case for somebody to give these guys debt so that they could grow their company and then eventually sell them in a few years for a much higher value. So that's what we do. We give them debt when nobody else will and we allow the entrepreneurs to keep a much greater percentage of the company than they currently already have. Very good, very good. And why are you targeting the software or SaaS market? Yeah, so as I said, it's like the Rodney Dangerfield of small and medium enterprises. They can't get any respect. And the reason they can't get any respect is because they don't have any assets. But these companies are rock solid performers. They deliver year-over-year growth rates that are very sustainable, 20, 30, 40, 50%. They have a very high retention of customer base. So on any given year, they might keep 90% of their customers year-over-year. It's a very, very predictable and statistically quantifiable number. So we use the revenue growth and the number of customers that they retain in order to decide if they're a good credit risk for us to loan money to or not. On top of that, their gross margins are 75 or 80%. So for every sale, most of the revenue flows down to the bottom line. So Michael, how do you participate in the upside of each company's growth? Yeah, so the financing we're providing the entrepreneurs helping them grow their business from 1 million to 5 million or from 1 million to 10 million. And the multiples in this space for any public company investors that are following software companies, they're typically the valuations of these companies are around six times revenue. So you can see that if we're investing, giving debt to a company that's at 1 million revenue, its valuation would be around 6 million. But as they get to 10 million, they have a valuation that's around 60 million. So what happens from our perspective is we provide them with the debt facility. We make a very healthy return on the loan in the form of a current monthly and principal and interest payment. But on top of that, if they sell their company during the term of the loan, well, they have to buy out their loan. And the buy out for that loan is a very respectable return on top of the base return of the loan. And that's where our investors make money is. We make money both from the base payments that we receive, but we also make them from the bonus payments that we get when our companies exit or get sold. Very good. Now, another thing I was looking into, I was doing some research and you guys did a deal with a limited partnership. What does the announcement about the new limited partnership mean? Yeah, the limited partnership is really the fundraising of our, the future of our fundraising model. There are a number of different public market comparables that are out there, such as in Canada, Brookfield Asset Management, who use a very similar model. And that model is a public company that raises external capital through limited partnerships and earns both a management fee and a percentage of the profit of the limited partnership. Why that's great for shareholders is because we don't have to raise a lot of equity in order to dilute the shareholders in order to make the debt facilities. We get the capital from outside people. Our shareholders are effectively owners of a business that is a fund manager and not a direct investor. Very good. And what are the company's plans for the next 12 months? So we're going to continue to take the capital rebraised in this super exciting $10 million limited partnership that we just announced a few days ago. We're going to take that capital and we're going to deploy it into a whole bunch of new and exciting software companies over the next few months. And then later on in the year, I think the investors could expect us to do another limited partnership where we will raise more money and put it into and continue the cycle of raising money and then putting it into a whole bunch of limited partnerships. And all the while, investors should expect that some small percentage of our portfolio on a quarterly basis will exit and we'll see bonus gains coming into our company as a result of those exits. So it's a growth in assets through these limited partnerships combined with an exciting investment program where we're putting that money to work in a whole lot of small and exciting software companies. That sounds fantastic. If somebody that is watching this and we've got over 60,000 followers and subscribers worldwide in over 60 countries, if someone was watching this and they wanted to get in contact with you or they're interested in making an investment, they'd like to participate in some type of capacity, what's the best way for them to get in contact with you? Yeah, absolutely. We love talking to investors. So any investors that want to reach out and contact us, we'd be more than happy to do that. There's a couple of different ways. One is on our website, we have a contact us form and there's a dropdown button for investors. So if you tag yourself as an investor and throw in some questions, we will reach out and either call you or email with you directly, whatever you prefer. There's a phone number on our website. So if you call that phone number, you can get to our Investor Relations Department and you can have a conversation with a real-life human in our Investor Relations Department as well. We absolutely love talking to investors. So please reach out and we'd love to have a conversation. Okay, great. Outside of that, if there's anything that an investor should know before we leave today about the company, Michael, what would it be? So Tomiah Capital is a very tightly held company. We have only 36 million shares outstanding and we are an exciting opportunity to get involved in a fund management model, the likes of which you only see as massive companies on the NYSE. So a couple of the American Comparables, BlackRock, KKR, Hercules, Technology Lending, those are very big companies that you can go invest in today. We offer you an opportunity to get into any one of those kinds of plays at a much earlier stage with much more attractive valuations. So we're not your normal early-stage company. We show net income positive, we have good growth, but we are absolutely an opportunity to get in early on some of those much longer, much larger, much bigger plays that are more expensive. Well, that sounds fantastic. I'm very interested to see the company grow. I've really enjoyed the time here, Michael. Hopefully we can do this again. Our entire community will be watching. I've added the stock to my radar, to my watch list. We'll continue to watch it. We'll continue to break any news that happens. And at this point in time, what we want to do is wish you the best of luck on your success. Hopefully you guys are able to achieve all of your goals and the investors that are watching are able to benefit along the way. Rich, I really appreciate your time today. Thank you very much for your great questions. And I look forward to conversations with any investors that we'd like to reach out. That's fantastic. Thank you very much. This is CEO Michael Walkinshaw. Have a great day, Michael, and we'll talk to you soon. Thanks, Rich. Take care. Bye-bye. Thank you, everybody. Bye-bye.