A family holding company. Here's what we're building.
There's a pattern in every market: people chasing the thing, and someone filling the gap the chase creates. The miners flood in. The shopkeeper notices what they need, builds the thing that fills it, and charges less than it's worth to the person who can't do without it. That's not a product strategy. It's a disposition — and it's what every company on this page exists to execute.
TJM Holdings is that disposition given a vehicle and a structure.
The way I arrived at it: thirty years with a camera. Food television. MythBusters. Finance companies, tech companies, research labs. The credential that got me in the door kept changing. What I was actually doing never did.
I was always the fly on the wall. You get trusted in a room you don't belong to — camera in the corner, department running — and eventually the room forgets you're there. That's when you see how things actually work. Not how they're supposed to work. How they actually work.
That's not a film school skill. It's a disposition. You develop it by being trusted inside rooms you don't belong to, over and over, until you stop being surprised by what you see and start being useful because of it.
What I kept seeing: the gap. The thing the room needed that nobody in the room could see because they were all too close to executing their piece.
TJM Holdings is what happens when you stop watching and start building. Private lending. A marketing agency. A product studio. An experimental lab. An AI team running infrastructure in the background.
The work is different. The disposition is the same. Find the gap. Fill it at a margin. Stay in service of the user.
Private money lending to real estate investors. Consistent returns. No speculation.
Marketing and lead generation agency. Real estate investors are the core client. Creative businesses — bands, studios, independent operators — are the secondary track.
The experimental lab. Off-brand explorations — ideas with nothing to do with real estate, industries we haven't tried yet, things we're not sure about yet.
The branded product studio. Calculators, microsites, tools that carry the TJM name. PMLedger is the first build out the door.
Alan's operating identity. Where it all runs from.
Internal AI infrastructure — the team, the tooling, and the workflows that make the other five units possible.
They're not random.
Thanks June started as a company built for my wife Melissa's negotiations training business — the real on-ramp into building anything. The name is a nod to June Cleaver. She holds, simultaneously, the best and worst of the American gender structure. The tension is the point. Melissa's business is why I started building. The company name should say so.
HR3 is the family. Almost every house we ever lived in became "Hereford Ranch" — a running name for home base, wherever that happened to be. Three of us now: me, Melissa, Simon. Hereford Ranch as a URL was taken. HR3 is what remained.
The rest follow a thread: the California Gold Rush.
Alta California was the name for this territory before statehood — Upper California, when it was still Mexico. Alta ROI, upper return. That's the surface read. The actual idea is the shopkeeper.
During the Gold Rush, miners poured in chasing gold. Most burned out. The shopkeeper sold them what they needed to try: picks, shovels, flour, financial services. Samuel Brannan bought pans for twenty cents and sold them for fifteen dollars. Levi Strauss reinforced the pants. Wells Fargo moved the money. They didn't chase the gold. They built the town.
Mercury was the extreme version of this. You couldn't extract gold from hard rock without it. The mercury mines didn't just outlast the Gold Rush — they produced more total value than any single gold mine in California. Not the flashiest operation. The most essential one.
Cinnabar is mercury sulfide. The raw ore, before anything useful happens. Where it starts.
So: the family joke. The family itself. And then Alta, Mercury, Cinnabar — shopkeeper, infrastructure, starting material. One argument, six names.
Be the shopkeeper.
These are early outputs — working documents from inside the system.
More will be added here as things come out of the oven.