About Us
West 4th Holdings is led by long-time business partners Scott Ogur and Zachary Venegas, who have launched, led and successfully exited a string of companies in the 20 years since they met while pursuing their MBAs. West 4th Holdings is their latest venture and is focused on sharing their decades of achievement and hard-won experience with startups and small to medium-sized businesses so those companies can realize the market success and wealth creation envisioned by their founders, executives, and investors.
Case Study in Success
The Fintech Startup
Technology startups possess unique market dynamics around adoption, scale and channel access that can face powerful headwinds from existing technology. We invested in a small fintech startup that had a market-ready suite of best-execution algorithms and beta customers who were providing valuable feedback and rave reviews.
Our first two years came with a board seat, but no operational role. During this time, despite having a better “mousetrap” than competitors, the company’s sales lagged projections, and promised surefire solutions failed to produce results. Recognizing that we needed broader avenues to influence outcomes, we got more involved, with Zachary focused on the sales process and the competitive landscape, while Scott became the de facto CFO.
Optimizing Operations
Meanwhile, it became clear that the team was not fully functional. All decisions still flowed through the founder, making the business difficult to scale. As a team we implemented organizational and operational changes to shift the business to a more functional operating model in preparation for a sale.
By year four, we had begun the process of selling the company to a large New York-based financial services firm. The firm had a strong focus on M&A as a growth strategy, and had executives with recent transaction experience in the same space – a knowledgeable and interested counterparty.
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Closing the Deal
However, the founder viewed the transaction through the lens of imagined expected outcomes, and not the reality of the market metrics and operational track record. That left a wide gulf to consummate a deal. With the support of the other executives of the company, we were able to reconcile the gap and move the founder to see that the far greater risk was refusing a lucrative transaction, given the increasingly competitive state of the execution algorithm industry (by this time, some firms were giving away algorithms in exchange for other services they offered).
After more than a year of balancing operational focus and difficult negotiations, we closed an excellent sale of the business which benefited all stakeholders – founder, employees, investors, and the buyer, who today uses the product as the basis of its algorithm business.
A Record of Achievement
The fintech company is just one story among many in which we’ve parachuted into challenging situations and driven great outcomes for everyone. Our track record of success in business transformation includes getting a company off the OTC pink sheets and onto the NASDAQ, taking another from a negative EBITDA of $800,000 annually to one of $750,000 per quarter while massively expanding its footprint in the legal cannabis industry, and buying and investing into a venture portfolio at $7 million and exiting at three times that. We’ve started and successfully exited multiple companies and served on the board and in the C-suite in many others.
Let’s talk and find out how we can work together!