A staffing investment start-up success story
HUCAI – Human Capital Advisory & Investments – has grown significantly in its first financial year: The team now has five employees and the list of customers has grown to over 30 well-known companies. We owe this success to our experience, recognizing a gap in the market and the right timing. Up until now, there has been a lack of management and transaction planning advice in the German-speaking market, such as that offered by HUCAI.
The lively demand shows the enormous need for professional support when entering the market, strategic growth and when buying and selling companies (M&A). The market is large and offers further growth potential for HUCAI. Below we describe how our success story began and why HUCAI is an ideal business partner.
Wo plays part in HUCAI?
Thomas André Sola is CEO of HUCAI AG and founded the company together with Paul Beeke, Managing Partner. It’s not the first time the two have started a business. Paul was the founder of EarthStream in 2010 and at that time asked T. André to become part of the founding team and to be responsible for the German-speaking area. Paul and T. André successfully built EarthStream into the TechStream brand, which was eventually acquired by RiverCo in January 2020 with private equity financing from Universal Partners.
In 2021, the two entrepreneurs recognized a large market need for the commercialization of a new service and founded HUCAI. Both Paul and T. André bring a great passion for the recruitment industry coupled with extensive experience from entering and scaling into new markets to selling the staffingcompany.
Paul Beeke (Managing Partner) is a luminary in the field of finance and reporting and has extensive M&A and advisory experience in an international environment. Thomas André Sola (CEO) maintains an extensive German-speaking network, very strong knowledge of business processes and a high level of consulting expertise, especially in the M&A environment. CEO Thomas Stiegler brings with him an enormous knowledge of financial valuations of companies, taxes and accounting. Hermann (Teddy) Bär is an industry expert in the life sciences sector who is very familiar with the UK, Swiss and German markets. He works as Head of Life Science at HUCAI in the advisory function. The team is supported by Tobias Emmert as Office Manager, who runs the back office.
Where is HUCAI based?
Our home base and office are located in a beautiful old renovated building in St. Gallen, Switzerland, close to the famous University of St. Gallen. Like many of our customers and other companies, we have learned from the Corona pandemic and are now working virtually, as far as possible. Nevertheless, we try to meet our customers and our team in person as often as possible.
What is HUCAI's mission objective?
Interestingly, HUCAI is a quite common name in Taiwan and stands for responsibility and discipline. Although we feel connected to these values, the name does not derive from them, but stands for Human Capital Investsment Advisory.
Human capital or human capital means that our customers are companies whose added value takes place in the minds of their employees. Our focus & passion is the recruitment industry, i.e. staffingcompanies and service providers who work in this industry.
For us, this industry is a catalyst for overcoming many of the challenges that companies face: digitization, innovation and a shortage of skilled workers. The last two letters stand for our business areas Advisory, i.e. the advisory activity, and Investment, which stands for transaction planning (M&A). We follow the trends of the more mature markets of the recruitment industry (UK/USA), where the HUCAI team have witnessed numerous best practices and developments that have only arrived in many other countries 3-5 years later. We encounter a completely different situation in many non-Anglophile countries: most of the managers we have worked with knew little to nothing about the M&A market in the DACH region.
Staffing Business Advisory
The concept of advice by a Non-Executive Director: This concept has already proven its worth in Great Britain, while it is hardly ever used in many other countries. A non-executive director supports the operational managing director in making business-critical decisions regarding employees, finances and processes, to overcome obstacles more easily and to achieve business goals more quickly.
M&A Transaction Partners
Transaction planning focused on the staffing business. If you talk to a manager in London, you will quickly find out how well informed he or she is about multipliers, venture capital investments, trade buyers and financial investors. However, this knowledge is crucial in order to use attractive business potential. We stand from the first idea to the successful purchase, financing or sale at the side of the owner.
