NYA FOUNDER SPOTLIGHT ‒RYAN HANDEL, FIXE, C0-FOUNDER & CEO
After working in the restaurant industry for over 20 years, Ryan Handel, CEO and Co-Founder of FIXE, founded the restaurant bookkeeping and management software company because he was tired of the challenges and expense of outsourcing bookkeeping and accounting. With Ryan’s experience in restaurants combined with Co-Founder Scott Leabman’s experience in finance, the two built FIXE to bring visibility to the bookkeeping process and save restaurant owners 100s of hours and expense. Ryan shares how startup fundraising is different from fundraising for a restaurant, how NYA members helped them refine their pitch from a 2/10 to a 10/10, and why it’s critical for founders to have experience in their industry.
How did you first meet New York Angels?
My business partner, Scott, was close childhood friends with Gary Cohen. Gary helped us when we first started fundraising, and then he connected us with NYA Member Jon Tiktinsky in August of 2022.
What were you looking for in investors when you were fundraising, and why did you choose to work with New York Angels?
When we had started FIXE, money seemed much more available than it is now, so we wanted to take our time to find the right advisors to support us. While I know restaurants and Scott knows finance, there were still a lot of things we didn’t know. We wanted to make sure that we had the right support on our board.
When we met Jon, we loved his personality. We loved the idea of NYA and having people from different backgrounds involved in our company. With the reputation and experience of NYA, we knew that we would have the right type of collaborative support and guidance when we needed it.
What was the process like for you when you were fundraising?
When you first start fundraising, you think you have a great product to sell, and you think fundraising is going to be easy. As soon as you start diving into it, you realize that your pitch is probably a 2/10 of where it actually needs to be. We met Jon at NYA in August of 2022, and it took us until the end of the year to refine our pitch. It wasn’t easy though – refining our pitch to be very concise in our communication to investors was one of the biggest learning areas that we had. Once we figured out our pitch, it became a much easier process along the way, and I felt like I could pitch to just about anyone. Jon and Gary, one of our other board members, were instrumental in kind of preparing us for the fundraise.
What have you enjoyed most about working with New York Angels?
It’s a very collaborative environment. We have two New York Angels members on our Board of Directors – Simon Hopkins and Jon Tiktinsky. They have been awesome to work with and great friends, investors, and advisors to us. They've always been available to us when we need their help, and they have provided very good guidance along the way. I've never felt at odds with any of the investors. They've been upfront with expectations – what we need to do and what the next steps need to be. Their open communication and their experience have helped us steer some of our decisions down a better path.
What advice would you give other founders who are looking to fundraise?
You really need to spend the time perfecting your pitch deck. Don't be afraid to practice in the mirror or on a computer by yourself. Then, practice with friends over and over and over again until your initial communication is extremely concise.
If you're a founder, you usually have a strong passion about what you're trying to raise your money for, but don't underestimate how that needs to come across when you're fundraising. It’s easy to think you have the coolest product out there, but until you start talking to people about it and you're able to describe your business in 5-10 minutes, your pitch won’t be ready for investors.
I have raised money for my own restaurants, which is a different animal altogether. When you're fundraising for a startup, especially through Zoom where you need to show your slides, you need to go through the deck pretty quickly. You also need to be prepared to address the breadth of tough questions that you may be asked. If you are asked a question that you’re not 100% sure on the answer, it’s okay too, just be honest about it. Overall, you want to make sure to have all of your t's crossed and your i’s dotted going into any meeting with prospective investors.
What advice would you give other early-stage investors who are looking to invest in companies?
If I were an early-stage investor, I definitely would want the founders to have experience in the industry that they’re trying to raise money for – at least someone on their team should have expertise in that industry. It would be hard for me as an investor to invest in a product that someone has created in an industry they read about in their room. When an investor asks me a question about our product, I can say I worked in the restaurant industry for 20 years and I know this is a pain point from experience. I think that is a good story that we tell, and it has helped us along the way. If I were investing in other companies, I would look for a similar story of industry experience.
What has driven FIXE's success?
We have been successful because we are a bookkeeping accounting software company, but we're restaurant people to start. While we have more recently invested in paid advertising, our clients and our growth has been driven primarily by word-of-mouth in the industry. We relish the fact that we are restaurant people to start, and that we understand the vertical of the restaurant industry. We understand restaurants not only from the bookkeeping side but also from the operational side, so we can answer a lot of questions on all facets of industry. This allows us to develop the technology that we want to provide the KPIs and the statistics that our clients want to see as opposed to someone thinking out of thin air, “Oh, a restaurant wants to see this.”
Since we've ran restaurants before, we know what our clients need to operate their restaurant. We are very good at collaborating and understanding the needs of all of our clients, whether they are a mom-and-pop operator selling hot dogs with $500,000/year in sales or a fine dining restaurant with $15,000,000/year in sales. We understand the ins and outs of all of those different types of clients as well as what the owners are looking for their franchisees. I think that we are constantly able to add products and services to our platform that can appeal to all of those different segments within the restaurant industry.
Another key to our success is that we’re focused on the restaurant industry. We’re not trying to go outside of the restaurant industry because that’s where we have the expertise.
Do you have any other advice for founders?
The process of working with angel investors, whether it's NYA or other angel groups, is a very different experience. When you're raising money from friends and family or other investors in the beginning of your startup, they tend to be not as detailed and they won’t tell you what is right or wrong. Working with angel investors makes you a better fundraiser, not only for now, but probably for the future, because you are more buttoned up going into your meetings and discussing your business. Whether you raise the money from the angels or not, it makes you a better owner-operator. You’re able to talk about the business in such a more specific, different way than when you’re talking about it with friends, family, clients, or peers within the industry. What an investor wants to see is different than what a client wants to see, so knowing the differences in how you're talking to those people has also been a very valuable lesson to me.
