Dear Friends, 

After twenty years of lessons in building and selling companies — including enough mistakes to fill a book — I’m fired up to introduce you to my next professional chapter, Human Flourishings Holdings. 

I wrote this letter to share why I started Human Flourishing Holdings (H2F), what I hope to achieve, and ways you can participate if compelled.

My vision is not for H2F to be the largest or most profitable holding company; I aim for it to be the most cherished by teammates (aka employees) and customers. If we achieve “most cherished,” I expect top-decile profits in the long term.

By “flourishing,” I mean thriving in every way.

Why I Started Human Flourishing Holdings (H2F). 

My six-month sabbatical reinforced several insights and convictions from my prior experiences. Here are three of the biggest: 

01. 

For example, the mobile game development company I co-founded successfully brought retro brands PAC-MAN, Q-Bert, Galaga, and #1 NBA and WTA athletes to mobile phones while cultivating life-transforming growth in our employees. But, paradoxically, the product itself fostered customer addiction.

Going forward, I desire all three missions of work to be transformational:

• The mission of work: how the product/service affects customers’ wellbeing. The pasture-raised eggs I buy at the farmers’ market are better for my body than the ultra-processed food at the grocery store. 

• The mission to work: how functional practices, such as sales, marketing, hiring, and firing, affect customers, employees, etc. Brett Johnson’s 10P drivers of impact is a powerful resource. 

• The mission at work: the ways employees usually engage each other and interact with customers. Companies with rare customer service often excel at this, e.g., Chick-fil-A.

At GoCheck, we pursued these three missions in tandem more than any other experience I’ve had. 

It felt discordant when I pursued business success with a one-dimensional focus on employee well-being. 

While building a company is more enjoyable and simple when my business partners and I are devoted to the same principles, this alignment is not sufficient.

Regenerative companies, the opposite of destructive companies, elevate flourishing for customers, teammates, and vendors. Customers develop more physical vitality, resilience, and financial strength, and teammates (employees) grow in their emotional awareness, professional skills, and resource stewardship. 

For instance, LCI Industries, a ~$4bn RV parts manufacturer, is pursuing regenerative practices. For example, LCI helps employees achieve their dreams, such as losing weight or quitting tobacco. Their annual employee turnover plummeted from 120% to 25%. On the contrary, the greed inside destructive companies leaves customers, employees, and vendors worse physically, emotionally, and financially. They also make business more expensive for everyone.

Are “regenerative” and “sustainable” companies the same thing? They are not. No matter how we define sustainable, “regenerate,” which speaks to renewal, is a higher bar than “sustainable.” It means growing goodness. “Sustainable” means a balance of renewal and depletion, or good and bad. 

I provided high-performing stocks as Destructive and Regenerative examples and shared an incomplete “spectrum” view on both Warren Buffet and America’s “healthcare” system in this recent LinkedIn post.  

Human Flourishing Holdings exists to help customers and employees thrive through business, advance the mission-driven business movement, and demonstrate the goodness of regenerative business. 

Legacy Outcomes has reinvented sell-side M&A for midsize companies

While serving on a board with one of America’s top M&A advisors, he convinced me that protecting the legacies of midsize business owners ($20-$100M enterprise value) should be H2F’s next business adventure. I know firsthand that entrepreneurs regularly leave millions on the table when they sell.

The dirty secret in this market segment is that the odds are overwhelmingly stacked against sellers. Brokers and standard M&A firms bring knives to gunfights with professional buyers, who systematically erode seller leverage. First-time sellers are blindsided by sophisticated tactics, resulting in deep regret over deals that significantly undervalue their (professional) life’s work.

Our team has adapted techniques from Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and Lazard to deliver the upper hand to midsize company owners. By seizing and maintaining leverage and control throughout the transaction, we’ve delivered unparalleled results—ensuring that owners leave with peak value for their families and charitable priorities, powerful employee opportunities, and preservation of the culture they’ve spent decades cultivating. 

Connect me with business owners considering selling their business, and anyone who has lessons on book writing and marketing. Our book is more than half complete.  

Let us know if you know of aligned sponsors (GPs) we should have on our radar or anyone we should talk to next time we bring on like-minded investors.

Revenue Factory propels the impact of mission-driven companies 

I finished my season at GoCheck in June 2022. Vision impairment is among the most prevalent health issues kids experience, affecting one in five children, and experts expect the prevalence to keep rising. Thanks to our driven team, the equity valuation grew by over 100x over five years. We were selling AI before it was sexy. But most importantly, when I left, more than 20,000 nurses and doctors were screening children for vision problems with our low-cost AI screener. 

During my six-month sabbatical, I focused on my health, marriage, and kids. My sabbatical ended when my wife Annie told me she prefers “our bank account to grow, not shrink.” 

At the same time, regenerative entrepreneurs kept asking if I could help them with revenue growth, namely digital customer acquisition and product/customer retention. With Annie’s stated preference, entrepreneurs’ requests to help, and my desire to save others from making the same mistakes I have made, Revenue Factory was born. Over time it’s grown into a collective of many of the best people I’ve worked in customer acquisition and retention/product.  

NSite is a startup pursuing regenerative impact and a typical Revenue Factory client/partner. Dr. Mike Gardner, Stanford Orthopedic Surgeon, came to Revenue Factory with AI in development, pre-seed funding, and, most importantly, a vision to reinvent scoliosis care. Over 50 million American adults have scoliosis, and over 80% feel abandoned by the “healthcare” system. After combing the world for the most effective treatments, Dr. Mike discovered a dynamic and non-operative therapy in Germany and made it 10x more affordable via National Scoliosis Clinic (NSC). Revenue Factory team joined the mission and created a MVP that is delivering people with scoliosis a 31% reduction in pain in three months and delivering the company predictable revenue. 

Numbers are fun, but customer breakthroughs are even more fulfilling.