Eric Hamburg
President and Founder, Industrial Renaissance
Industrial Renaissance is a principal investment and operating firm in business since 1996. Industrial Renaissance is unique in the private equity, venture capital, and mergers and acquisitions industry – we are not a private equity fund or venture capital fund. We are a team of seasoned operators and business executives. We invest our own capital with participation from a select group of long-term investors. Unlike the private equity, venture capital, and mergers and acquisitions industry, we do not charge investors management fees.Our business mission is to buy and build large, dominant, successful businesses. We are not buyers and sellers of businesses. We buy to build businesses. We are, and will remain, highly unique in the private equity, venture capital, and mergers and acquisitions industry.
Our Mission
Industrial Renaissance’s business mission is to buy and build successful businesses.
We have been in business since 1996. Eric Hamburg founded Industrial Renaissance after leaving a private equity fund where he was a partner. Eric wanted to create something he felt was missing from the private equity industry – an old-fashioned business model rooted in his Midwestern values.
Industrial Renaissance is not a private equity fund.
We are a principal investment firm and operating company of seasoned business executives investing our own capital and the capital of a select group of high net worth investors and family offices. We are looking for opportunities where value can be created. We like underperforming businesses that have been around for a long time and need to be taken to the next level. We diligently work to create business models that can fundamentally transform the companies we invest in and the industry segments in which they compete.
Industrial Renaissance is not a venture capital fund.
We have helped launch several startup and early stage businesses, and provided them with both needed early stage capital and management expertise. We like companies with a proven product that need coaching as well as money. We have experience launching companies, have helped companies in their development of new products and created startup factories necessary to bring these new product innovations to market, and have built companies with several hundred million dollars in sales. Therefore, we can contribute experience and coaching at each stage of a company’s growth cycle.
We do not select companies based on the size of revenues or earnings, or the size of our equity investment.
We like businesses that fall into two revenue categories – $2 million to $25 million, and again from $25 million to $200+ million. Earnings don’t matter – we like businesses with lower earnings that can be improved upon.
We are not fee driven and will never build wealth through management fees.
Since our founding, we have never charged an investor a management fee, whereas the private equity and venture capital industry typically charge a 2% +/- fee on their funds. We are looking to build wealth through long-term capital appreciation and successful partnerships with management teams. In other words, the equity we own must be worth something one day for wealth to be created.
We are not buyers and sellers of businesses. We are buyers and builders of businesses.
We want to find investment opportunities that we can own in perpetuity. Although an eventual exit is not out of the question, we are not buying businesses to improve them and flip them. It is too difficult and takes too many years to build a great company with a great business strategy.
Our skills and experience are unique.
We have never worked on Wall Street. We have held real jobs in the types of companies we invest in. Although we are very experienced in structuring and closing merger and acquisition transactions, growth investments, and securing bank financing, financial engineering is only one leg of our stool.
We have made money, and most importantly we have lost some money along the way, too. This is inevitable over the several decades we have been principal investing. We can share our experience with our portfolio companies to create velocity in the execution of their business plans, and we have knowledge of where the mines may lie that can disrupt those plans. If times get difficult, it will not be the first difficult situation we have been in. We will not accept financing into the capital structure from any institution that has never lost money.
We are long-term investors and thinkers.
Our incentives are aligned with, and in the best interest of, the businesses we invest in; they are not designed to enrich ourselves at the expense of the companies we invest in or the investors we invest with. For us to make money all our partners and stakeholders in an investment have to make money. We have a very old fashioned, yet unique approach to the private equity, venture capital, and mergers and acquisitions industry, founded on our core values.
