THE H&S DIFFERENCE

H&S invests and works alongside founders to facilitate funding and provide mentorship and leadership. By working with the company founders, H&S will help scale your company rapidly by being an active board member. A company can accelerate greatly by having H&S on their board. H&S has the experience to increase the companies size and scale by helping with meaningful operational improvements, repositioning the business toward more highly valued industry segments, an acceleration of the business organic growth rate and/or profitability, and the accurate timing of a cyclical upturn are needed to increase the company’s EBITA before exit. H&S gives a clear and concise vision for growth and exit. We help with debt reduction leading to more equity value for the company on a dollar for dollar basis.

The H&S founders can introduce you to advisors, key C level leaders, industry Titans, and other potential investors for friends/family, seed or Series A rounds. This is called simply " The power of the H&S Rolodex” Leveraging the H&S extensive network can help you amplify your story, accelerate your growth and change your company’s trajectory.

H&S Investment Criteria

1. Technical Founders: Founders with the ability to build their own product and have the potential/inclination to lead the business. The team must not only be technically able, but also have the utmost integrity and a willingness to consider the advice and feedback they receive
2. New Technology or New Market: The product must involve some kind of new technology or a new market
3. Direct Revenue: We like to invest in companies that have a way of getting direct revenue from its customers (“I deliver value to you, you pay me”)
4. Capital Appropriate: Companies whose capital needs over the life of the business make sense given the potential size of the opportunity/exit

A GOOD COFOUNDER

Cofounders are for a startup what location is for real estate. You can change anything about a house except where it is. In a startup you can change your idea easily, but changing your cofounders is hard. And the success of a startup is almost always a function of its founders.

BUILDING A TEAM

Despite bringing financial acumen, many investors have never cut their teeth building a company and a team. Everything can look right on paper, but if the right people aren’t on the team, even the best idea with the best capital is doomed. At H&S Capital Group where our investment team has run companies, we spend more time advising our portfolio on relationships versus strategy. We’ve found, over and over, that the right people will find a way.

Once an Entrepreneur Always an Entrepreneur
If you are made to lead a team, build companies and make something out of nothing — it can be deeply unsatisfying to just write a check, hope that it all works out and a return is made on that capital. For our team, being entrepreneur investors often means we are investing in people over ideas and sticking with a quality team even if they fail.

Nothing Beats Helping Others Get What They Want
You’ll have more fun and enjoy more financial success when you stop trying to get what you want and start helping others get what they want. That’s a good way to explain our version of “working capital.” If we can pave the way for other people in their 20s to do what they love and build companies that make people’s lives better, we are successful early investors.

Sales is Still the Weakest Link of Most Startups
We understand the gritty side of making a deal — the dozens of phone calls and emails to crack the door open with a potential customer. A misguided attitude still exists in startup culture that if you build a good enough product, it will sell itself.

We’ve Already Made the mistakes
The way we look at it, the H&S founders have stressed out about cap tables, screwed up hiring and firing decisions and lost sleep over making payroll so that we can hopefully steer startups away from the same brutal experiences.