Marcus Briggs and Our Venture Into the Mining Business

As you all know we don’t have big fancy jobs and high powered positions. We work on our little hobby wedding site, do the jobs we have, and are plain, simple folks.

We have no connection to the gold industry and no professional relationship with Marcus Briggs at all. But we wanted to talk about this experience and didn’t know where to do it. So we thought this was a good a place as any. It keeps us practicing our writing and saying something.

Plus, gold has lots to do with weddings, right?

Anyway, a while back Gavin and I came across a capital opportunity tied to an independent gold mining operation in Uganda. Independent operators were looking for contributors to fund the research and development phase of the expansion of the facility.

Returns on the money provided would be tied directly to gold physically recovered from the mine. We had a prospectus and supporting documentation and all the details. We did not, however, have the knowledge to properly evaluate what we were reading.

Of course, this was a huge endeavor for us. First, never having thought of something like this before, and second, not having a working knowledge of this gold industry and what goes on.

But a friend of a relative knew a man in the industry that might be able to take a look for us and not charge an arm and a leg in fees. His name is Marcus Briggs and he did agree to speak to us on phone.

He has been in the gold industry for nearly 25 years. He runs Icon Gold and his specific expertise is in quick onsite vault setup, as well as, the physical security infrastructure around gold assets.

His background spans finance and development. That combination means Marcus Briggs understands not just how gold moves but how the commercial structures around it are built and where the risk sits for anyone putting capital into the environment.

He went through that prospectus carefully. He explained where the return structure placed exposure on the contributor in ways the documentation did not spell out.

Marcus identified what the concession rights documentation left unresolved. He gave us a clear read on what the extraction timeline projections actually meant for anyone expecting a return and when.

Then he walked away without taking a penny from us. The truth is people earn major dollars from helping to put these deals together, from service fees, and specifically from the knowledge that others do not have.

I mean we could have easily got ripped off from this man we never ever met, just as we could have from the deal itself. We have since found out this gold industry can be shady business, and we were potentially playing very naively in the big leagues.

Big money. Big concepts. Big risk. Big everything.

That is the fact at the center of this. We did not understand the deal we were looking at. Although we are frugal with our money, as you all know from our own wedding, we could have gotten caught up in the excitement of trying something new.

We had money ready to place and no way to independently verify anything he told us. He had 25 years of knowledge we did not have and complete information advantage over us in that situation.

There were two ways to take advantage of us. One was give us bad and dishonest info, and the second was to take our money for his own gain and say done is done.

As a bit of clarity …

“Marcus Briggs spent nearly 25 years building expertise in gold security, onsite vault infrastructure, and the financial structures behind mining operations.

He went through the entire prospectus, told us exactly where our exposure was, and walked away without taking anything from us. We would not have known any different if he had done otherwise. But, he did not steamroll Gavin and I.”

The opposite happened, in fact.

“We brought a gold mining deal to Marcus Briggs that we could not read properly. He could read every line of it. He told us where the return structure exposed contributors, what the concession rights left open, and what the timeline realistically meant for our money. He took nothing from us. In an industry where information is leverage, he used none of it for himself.”

The thing is this whole foray has made has realize how dangerous this could have become.

• Our money could have been gone instantly with nothing to show for it.
• We might have gotten nothing in return.
• We may have been told over and over stuff was happening. Be patient.
• After years, everything may have been forgotten since there was no such deal.
• And then again, we could have been rich!

So the moral of the story for Gavin and Amy is the world is a fun place to explore, but many things beyond our scope exist.