Investments & Advisory
About Us
Investments and Advisory Services
Our goal is to add value, whether in our investments or in our advisory engagements. This is the touchstone that guides everything we do.
What's in a name?
The partners at Synergy Point have deep experience with hands-on, day to day operations of various businesses. As any business leader knows, there are good years and sometimes not so good years. To be able to articulate what makes the difference is the first step to making more good years.
The word “Synergy” is derived from two Greek words that mean to “work together” and when everything is working together businesses naturally do better.
We believe that there is a point at which synergy is maximized, where supply chains, customer service, processes, team members and production are all working together. We call that optimal condition the synergy point, and that is what we strive for in our investments and our advisory engagements.
Louis J. Basile, Jr.
Born into the restaurant business, Louis has a visceral understanding of the mechanics of good food and service that sets successful restaurants apart.
From the early teen years, his handling of the purchasing and other duties for his father’s New Jersey family dinner taught him about food costs and the importance of saving pennies.
Not yet 21 years old, Louis was hired as a Construction Project Manager to renovate a chain of steakhouse locations into Cisco Café Mexican restaurants, responsible for hundreds of thousands of dollars in capital deployment and gaining a deeper understanding of multi-unit operations.
Still in his early 20’s, serendipity brought Louis to the attention of the founders of Au Bon Pain when they had only three locations. During his tenure and in roles of continually increasing responsibility, including several C-suite roles such as VP Operations, Construction, Development, and Franchising, Louis and his team refined the concept and grew the chain to 250 locations including international franchising.
After a successful IPO, Louis struck out on his own, on a mission to bring truly artisan bread and great food to the [bread] desert in Phoenix founding the Wildflower Bread Company in 1995. An “overnight success” took place over the next 27 years bringing Wildflower’s 16 full-service units universal acclaim and a fiercely loyal following as he grew the concept organically. Louis counts delivering consistently great food among his passions, but is most proud of the culture of service and teamwork that he created with his hundreds of “Breadhead” employees.
Louis founded and was Chairman of the Fast Casual Industry Council, an affiliate of the National Restaurant Association, where he also served as a member of the Board of Directors. He is a past Chairman of the Arizona Restaurant Association. Board member and Advisory roles also include Crisis Nursery, People Report/Black Box Intelligence and People Matter. Louis is a founding member of Changers of Commerce, a collection of business leaders who believe there is a better way of practicing Capitalism.
Steven A. Lupinacci
Steve is fortunate to have had a varied background across a number of industries in senior roles over more than 40 years which has uniquely shaped his insight into business and investment.
His initial career with PriceWaterhouse gave him an understanding of the mechanics of each client’s business at a detailed level. Year after year he observed how his client companies adapted and grew, or shrank and perished, across a dozen disparate industries. He also learned fundamentally how financial scorekeeping worked and how a company’s success, failure, strength or vulnerability was portrayed in the Financial Statements the firm generated.
A key learning surrounded how each client management team made choices when confronted with their own challenges or opportunities. More interestingly, his engagements revealed how different client companies reacted when they were all faced with the same economic downturn, recession, inflation or the lack of capital and credit. A pattern was discernable as to which strategies worked and which didn’t and whether the answer was the same for all industries. Ultimately, as a Partner specializing in M & A, his time at PriceWaterhouse was really a 20-year graduate course in entrepreneurship.
Steve’s first CEO role was to lead an early stage company, Diedrich Coffee, in the deployment of growth capital he had sourced for them. In four years, the company went from $2 million in revenue and 20 employees to $55 million and over 800 employees, concluding with a successful IPO and becoming a NASDAQ public company. During those four years he learned about leadership and the importance of picking the right strategies or pivoting quickly from the wrong ones. Additional roles followed, including CEO of e-commerce company PropertyRoom.com and Board of Directors assignment to Telecom manufacturer PECO II, which led to another IPO and more experience in the Capital Markets. Soon, however, his interests turned to investing.
Steve’s first investment stint was as a Principal with a technology accelerator, followed by investing for his own account along with a group of investment partners. Private Equity investing taught Steve patience, or as he clarifies, “the lack of patience sometimes taught me lessons.” Successful outcomes are based on one’s skill in diligence. Steve learned which indicators were the most important in evaluating a new investment and how they pointed to success. His goal at Synergy Point Partners is to share those insights and to uncover investing opportunities where they can be combined with funding to maximize value.