Treetop Ventures was established to provide top-notch consulting services to start-up companies.
The Treetop name has its roots in an old Fisher family expression that defined anything that was ‘top of the line’. Whether a nice home, a great watch, a perfectly executed glass of sweet tea or a fine suit, if the product or service delivers a wonderful, best-in-class experience, “treetop” defines it. This “treetop” experience is what all of us at Treetop Ventures do for our customers every day and in every way.
All three of us, the Treetop founders (Bill Fisher, Dwight Hanson and Tom Boje), have roots in the Omaha community. Two of us (Bill and Dwight) worked at public accounting firms before meeting at ACI, where we met Tom. All three of us worked together to grow ACI into one of the largest providers of financial technology software and services in the world. This effort and the friendship born from this work is at the foundation of what has become Treetop and its culture.
Following our successful effort at ACI, we began to invest together. We also became part of the nucleus at Sojern, an Omaha-based start-up. After being sought out by numerous local entrepreneurs and early-stage companies on a variety of business issues, we decided to launch Treetop Ventures.
Treetop earned a local reputation for offering sage, straight-forward, honest advice. We never ever shied away from saying “Your baby is ugly!” … when warranted. Fish was regarded as the blunt guy (and who monopolized the conversations); Dwight was the kind, nice guy; Tom was usually somewhere in the middle. Folks would never leave the Treetop office wondering what any of us fellas really thought, and most came back for more of the same, again and again. We always closed meetings by saying “We’re not always right, but we’re never in doubt. Don’t just take our opinions as the gospel. Go talk to lots and lots of people.”
In 2017, Dwight passed away. This was personally challenging for the team and required frank internal conversations about the future. This led Treetop to consider its mission and legacy in new ways – both to facilitate estate planning for Dwight’s family and for the remaining founders and to ensure a value proposition that continues to bear fruit in the market. Quite frankly, we saw that many of our startup investments could take a decade or more to monetize and we were not sure how many decades we had left.
Therefore, we are concentrating our efforts in three areas where we can be of significant impact today and in the near-term:
- Helping the current portfolio companies toward monetization
- Acquiring established companies that are at or very near profitability, but looking for assistance to get them to the next stage
- Providing consulting and accounting services to other companies in a variety of areas where there are needs matching Treetop’s expertise
Our new Treetop will continue to strive for excellence by providing the same level of blunt wisdom – but we will be more focused on near term strategies and plans. In some ways, this work is in our blood – and more importantly, our wives continually tell us “For better or worse, but not for lunch every day.”
