TL;DR — for busy investors
I asked four mining CEOs: if you could get just one piece of information on a company or a project, what would it be? I got four different answers: grade, drill results, capital structure, and "an indication that there is metal there in the ground."
They don't contradict each other. Each one looks at the project from a different layer: the rock, the room to grow, the ground and the country around it, and how well the work gets done.
Keep listening, and all four land in the same place: people. The right management team will find you a project. With the wrong one, even a great deposit won't make the company work.
My shortcut as a non-geologist: go one layer above the people. Who are the shareholders? Good shareholders pick good people. Good people pick great projects.
The rest of this piece is how they got there, and where I'd start if you're not a geologist either.
In Munich on 6–7 November? You can ask mining CEOs yourself. Details at the end.
If you could get just one piece of information on a mining company, what would it be?
I put that question to four mining CEOs:
Grade (Michael Williams, Chairman, Aftermath Silver)
Drill results (Blaine Monaghan, President & CEO, Pacific Ridge Exploration)
Capital structure (Mark Saxon, President & CEO, T2 Metals)
"An indication that there is metal there in the ground." (Bob Archer, President & CEO, Pinnacle Silver and Gold)
Four experts. Four different answers.
Four CEOs, four first answers.
Sounds confusing at first, doesn't it?
If they're all experts, why don't they come up with the same answer?
To see why, you need their full answers, not just the first word.
Michael: what's in the rock, and can you get it out?
Michael Williams started with the rock itself:
"You need to know what type it is, first of all. But that's a basic question. That's easy. Number two is your grade and size and then your metallurgy. Can I get the manganese separated from the rock?"
Michael Williams
Four points, and each one feeds the next:
Type. What kind of deposit is it? It's a structural question, and it influences everything that comes below it, size included.
Grade. Depending on the grade, a certain percentage of the property is metal you can actually make use of. Grade drives size.
Size. How much is in it?
Metallurgy. How easy is it to separate? How much of what's in there can you recover, and what does it cost?
From how much is in the ground to what it's worth: Michael's points, mapped onto the project.
That last part is where metallurgy plays a really big role.
Blaine looked at it from a similar angle. He just expressed it differently.
Blaine: drill results, and room to grow
"I'd like to see drill results. If the project has been drilled, that would be the key bit of information for us to look at."
Blaine Monaghan
Drill results give you a first indication of how big a project is. Depending on the stage, they say even more about its shape.
But for Blaine, the important part isn't the current size. It's the optionality:
"Where's the potential for this to continue to get bigger, whether tonnage or grade."
Blaine Monaghan
Can I expand this?
Blaine's view: drill results, size, and the potential to grow beyond the current size.
And that's where geology alone stops being enough.
Who owns the ground next door?
Even if the rocks have room to grow, do you?
"Do you own enough of the ground surrounding these intercepts? If you continue to have success, be able to expand it out? Or is it constrained by other property owners or rivers or oceans or lakes or mountains?"
Blaine Monaghan
The rocks may have room to grow. The ground around them may not.
Maybe it's on the edge of a park. Maybe it's one small land package surrounded by other owners, and you'd have to do a deal with all of them.
Mark Saxon added the next problem: if there are lots of small landholders, you have to deal with lots of people just to gain access to the rights to do your work.
And in some parts of the world, like British Columbia, Blaine asks one more question: are First Nations in support of exploration and development in that area? Can you get agreements to move forward?
Some places are just riskier to do business in.
Which brings us to Bob.
Bob: which country are you even in?
Bob Archer went straight to the big picture: jurisdiction, so country risk.
Everyone has their own expertise and the places they're comfortable working in. That usually comes from experience. Which territory do I know? Where do I know how to navigate regulation and how business gets done?
Michael put it bluntly:
"For instance, Russia has great geology. Great mineral endowment, but I'm not going to risk being there."
Michael Williams
Mark: the Australian and Canadian systems work extremely well.
Bob: from a regulatory standpoint, most countries in the Americas now have a reasonably good mining act framework you can work within. He has been in Canada, the US, Mexico, Peru, Indonesia, a little bit of Australia, and looked at some things in Chile. Mostly the Americas.
The jurisdictions Bob has been in so far: mostly the Americas.
Michael has several projects in Peru and Chile. Here's what a jurisdiction you trust gives you:
"I always make the comment I go to bed at night and I don't worry about losing the projects when I get up in the morning. But it's all about managing risk-reward."
Michael Williams
Can you even get there?
Then there's something so practical that Bob didn't even expand on it: access.
In a presentation or on Google Maps, a project is a spot on the map. But can you actually walk onto the property? In some locations, you just can't.
"And access, regional geology, the presence of metals in the ground and the grade of those metals."
Bob Archer
Grade. Size. Metallurgy. Drill results. Expansion. Land. First Nations. Jurisdiction. Access.
So many different first, second and third answers.
Shouldn't they converge at some point?
Mark: work done vs. results
Mark Saxon answered from the highest level:
"Capital structure is incredibly important. People are incredibly important. If you look at the highest level on a project, it's often you try to assess how much work has been done on the project versus the results."
Mark Saxon
A company needs a clear view of what it's looking for, and then an exploration program that actually tests for that deposit.
"We're not trying to do so much work of proving nothing is there, we're trying to find something within the shortest timeframes."
Mark Saxon
And here's the trap he sees:
"And so you see a lot of companies will fall in love with a piece of ground. They'll keep on working and working even though the economic potential is slipping away."
Mark Saxon
I really like how Mark set his priorities. It's basically the same order I use to look at an investment.
The exploration model is the strategy for figuring out the size of a project. You can execute on that strategy effectively, or not.
Work done versus results measures exactly that: how effective the strategy is, and the people executing it.
Mark's ratio.
Which was his next point.
Where all four converge: people
This is where the answers meet.
We step away from the project and the geology, and look at how it's being executed, and by whom.
"You need to have the right management teams, probably the most important, the right management team will find you a project."
Michael Williams
Bob came to the same conclusion from a slightly different angle:
"Even if you find something, you can have a great deposit. But if you have the wrong people, the wrong management, then the company won't work."
Bob Archer
The people outside the company: shareholders
But it's not only about the people inside the company. There's another group outside it with a strong interest in how it goes.
"You also need the right shareholders. A lot of people I think sometimes overlook that aspect. You tend to see better projects because the people that have them want them in the hands of good teams that can advance them."
Michael Williams
That's why management is the best proxy for everything else that comes with success. It's a self-fulfilling cycle: good teams get to see better projects.
Mark gave the money side of it:
"If they have been successful, they'll be able to attract money to the company. And the market's still really tough at the moment. And so you need some people there that have attracted money in the past."
Mark Saxon
The right people let a company do many things that are crucial for its success, but that aren't first-order related to the quality of the project, to what's in the ground.
And then Mark gave the image that stuck with me most.
Junior mining is a burning match
"One of the investors in our company, a guy by the name of Jeff Phillips, sort of makes the comment that junior mining is like holding a burning match. And if you hold it too long, you're going to get burned."
Mark Saxon
That's the crucial part with junior miners. And it's why Mark's ratio, work done versus results, matters so much.
I'd go one step further and connect capital to it. What is money? Basically just stored value.
The same ratio, with capital in place of work done.
What I like best about this ratio is that it shows the rate of change. Not where a company is today, but how effectively it's progressing.
Think of the burning match. Every time a company gets new money, it gets a new match. Is that money driving the project forward in an efficient way?
That's exactly what work done versus results measures.
And it's defined by the people you have in there.
When the rocks don't know who owns them
There was one more thing they agreed on.
"There's a kind of a funny saying. Sometimes the rocks don't know who owned them. So every now and then a group will, they come out of nowhere, they make a discovery and it turns out to be a tremendous asset."
Michael Williams
Blaine described both sides:
"You can have the most well-qualified team there is with the best ideas that there are and be capitalized and it doesn't work, right? You can have some cowboy that you would never think of investing in anything that this person's involved in and they have a fantastic discovery and then the market will forgive that."
Blaine Monaghan
So luck happens. But:
"But more often than not, you're far better served investing with companies that you view as legitimate and truthful and honestly spending as much money as they can on the ground to advance these projects."
Blaine Monaghan
Mark: "That certainly increases your chance of success."
Michael: a good management team increases your chance of success "and certainly de-risks your investment in the company."
Different sides of the same truth
We started with four very different answers.
In the end, the differences are small details. They depend on what each of them was thinking about before answering.
They're all different sides of the same truth.
Honestly? My question was a mean one. And the wrong one.
You can't judge a project by one piece of information. A good project has too much color and depth to fit into one data point.
But once you step out of the project and move to the people layer, which is what actually makes a company, everybody agrees.
That's where the biggest lever is.
Where I start: the capital layer
What I personally always look at sits one layer above the people: the capital layer. Who are the shareholders?
If you get good shareholders, they're going to select good people.
Good people are going to select great projects, and great other people.
So the highest-leverage point we can look at is the shareholders.
Investors pick the people. The people, with their strategy, pick and advance the project.
That's exactly how I approach it, because I'm not a geologist. Probably most of you aren't either.
So here's the order I use:
Capital layer: who are the shareholders?
People layer: who's in management?
Project layer: the geology. You'll learn more and more about it along the way.
You can get so much information here without deep sector knowledge.
Geology is not my strong side. I'm learning every single day by talking to people like these four.
The map I wish I'd had earlier
I did a whole intro course on junior mining: about 20 minutes, the presentation I gave at a Bosnian broker conference. It gives you a basic structure for how to look at a project and how a project advances.
It would have saved me so much time if I had seen it earlier. I hope it helps you.
Ask them yourself: Munich, 6–7 November
Want to put your own questions to mining CEOs?
Come to the Munich Mining Conference (Rohstoffmesse München) on 6–7 November 2026 at MotorWorld München. Investor tickets are free → munich-mining-conference.com
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🎥 Watch the full video: "Why Do 4 Mining CEOs Disagree (At First)?"
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— Andreas
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