Los Angeles, CA – October 31, 2023 – Vance Street Capital LLC (“Vance Street”) today announced its second consecutive year being named to Inc.’s Founder Friendly Investors list. Introduced in 2019, the Founder-Friendly Investors list honors the private equity, venture capital, and debt firms with the best track records of success backing entrepreneurs.
Since the firm’s inception in 2007, Vance Street has partnered with nearly 40 founders to provide capital and expertise to help each business solve its unique growth constraints. Vance Street’s playbook is based on years of expertise, refinement and execution, and leverages a bench of more than 40 operators to implement initiatives such as LEAN Six-Sigma, quality/regulatory optimization, digital marketing, goal deployment, sales strategy, ERP optimization, HR, engineering/technology, recruitment, product lifecycle and plant rationalization.
“We approach every entrepreneur by asking ‘how can we help’? No two companies or situations are the same, but their challenges are not unique, especially within highly-engineered, highly-regulated tight tolerance manufacturing environments,” said Mike Janish, Managing Partner at Vance Street. “We have been operating in these industries for our entire careers and have developed a repeatable process to address their challenges. We are not just capital partners, we are problem-solvers.”
Mr. Janish oversees Vance Street’s operating partner network and authored Vance Street’s operating playbook. Prior to joining Vance Street in 2016, Mr. Janish was Chief Executive Officer and President of Avalon Laboratories, a private equity-owned medical device manufacturer of specialty medical tubing, and Chief Executive Officer and President of Precitech, a private equity-owned manufacturer of nanotechnology machine tools. Earlier in his career, Mr. Janish held various senior management and engineering roles at Ametek, Century Specialties, Textron and General Motors Corporation, and is a LEAN Six Sigma black belt.
About Inc.
The world’s most trusted business-media brand, Inc. offers entrepreneurs the knowledge, tools, connections, and community they need to build great companies. Its award-winning multiplatform content reaches more than 50 million people each month across a variety of channels including websites, newsletters, social media, podcasts, and print. Its prestigious Inc. 5000 list, produced every year since 1982, analyzes company data to recognize the fastest-growing privately held businesses in the United States. The global recognition that comes with inclusion in the 5000 gives the founders of the best businesses an opportunity to engage with an exclusive community of their peers, and the credibility that helps them drive sales and recruit talent. The associated Inc. 5000 Conference is part of a highly acclaimed portfolio of bespoke events produced by Inc. For more information, visit www.inc.com.
To compile the 2023 Founder Friendly Investors list, Inc. went straight to the source: entrepreneurs who have sold to private equity and venture capital firms. Founders filled out a questionnaire about their experiences partnering with private equity, venture capital, and debt firms and shared data on how their portfolio companies have grown during these partnerships. The final list recognizes 218 firms that remain actively involved with the businesses they invest in, and that have earned the trust of the entrepreneurs they support to help drive growth.
Disclosure: The 2023 Founder-Friendly Investors list is a third-party rating and was published on October 31, 2023 by Inc. based on information provided by Vance Street in June 2023. Vance Street paid a fee to Inc. for its application to be considered for the 2023 Founder-Friendly Investors list.