Welcome To Spectrum Business Ventures
At Spectrum Business Ventures, we minimize the risk and maximize the return on unique, compelling, and complicated business opportunities, both traditional and non-traditional.
About Spectrum Business Ventures
In 2002, Amit Raizada founded Spectrum Business Ventures in partnership with Phillip “Chuck” Rouse, a noted business attorney. Prior thereto, Raizada successfully launched, operated, and sold retail wireless stores for Nextel, T-Mobile, and AT&T in California, Colorado, Michigan, and Kansas City. From inception to late 2005, Spectrum Business Ventures grew to 40 operating companies in numerous locations throughout the world. Raizada and Rouse have significant transactional experience operating businesses and companies in a variety of industries, with specialties in finance, compliance, technology, communications, energy, and retail operations. Additionally, Spectrum Business Ventures has diverse experience in real estate transactions through public and private financing and other advisory projects.
Read more...
In 2006, Raizada and Rouse partnered with Michael Gortenburg and Scott Asner. Both brought extensive real estate and transactional experience. As far as experience and past success, the partnership with these four individuals covers almost every industry and sector. Since then, Spectrum Business Ventures has grown a more diverse portfolio of combined interests that includes in excess of seventy businesses with locations in the United States, Canada, Europe, Central America, and Mexico. Over the last three years, Spectrum Business Ventures has doubled its business holdings and continues to expand into new territories, making diversity in networking potential and financial stability one of its strongest assets.
Collectively, the four principals of Spectrum Business Ventures work continually with numerous companies in the areas of strategic planning, business planning, business valuation, management and risk-profit analysis, debt and equity financing, loan workout, debt restructuring, and financial reporting. The diversity of expertise is integral to the success of each business with which Spectrum Business Ventures becomes involved. Spectrum Business Ventures offers unparalleled value to unusual and intricate business opportunities and transactions. Funds for partnership opportunities are pooled only after an attractive business opportunity is identified, significant due diligence has been performed, and the transaction has been structured to minimize risk and maximize partner return. This business model distinguishes Spectrum Business Ventures, in that the time period for securing capital is significantly reduced. Additionally, Spectrum Business Ventures does not charge traditional fee rates for securing transactions, and the principals are individually invested in all partnerships with their own assets. In fact, no salaries are paid; instead, the partners’ vested interest is their only respective upside from an equity position. The commitment to integrity, transparency, and trust are the basis of this ongoing business concern.
With these characteristics in mind, Spectrum Business Ventures’ financial and strategic planning teams create detailed plans that capture the spirit of the endeavor, identify suitable markets, and facilitate fund raising, with the objective of minimizing risk and maximizing return.
Principals
Collectively, the partners at Spectrum Business Ventures possess over 63 years of experience in venture capital and have successfully assisted over 150+ companies through the journey from startup to initial public offering. This proven track record, combined with a depth and breadth of expertise in next-generation technologies, allows Spectrum Business Ventures to collaboratively work through numerous strategic issues with both established, experienced and emerging management teams.
Amit Raizada - CEO / Principal
Amit Raizada was born in New Delhi, India, when at two he moved with his family to the United States. His family settled in Farmington Hills, Michigan, where he was raised through high school and then attended Michigan State University. He received a Bachelor’s of Art in Economics with a minor in Marketing, graduating with honors.
Mr. Raizada is the founder and Chief Executive Officer of Spectrum Business Ventures. As CEO, Mr. Raizada is active on a full-time basis in mergers and acquisitions, financing of various business and real estate ventures, as well as management and retail operations. Mr. Raizada maintains close personal relationships with company partners and leaders, fostering an environment of trust and respectful openness as well as a commitment to mutual success.
Mr. Raizada started the first Nextel Retail Store in Grand Rapids Michigan in 1997. This was done as a beta test for Nextel Corporation. He pioneered and grew the business model to 17 retail stores over an 18-month period, exceeding Nextel’s required performance benchmarks. As a result, Nextel Corporation purchased the business and used this model as its basis for a national retail distribution rollout.
Leveraging his success with Nextel Corporation, Mr. Raizada moved to Kansas City in 1999 where he secured an opportunity to open Southwestern Bell Mobile Systems stores throughout the Kansas City metropolitan area. Southwestern Bell Wireless became Cingular, which is now the new AT&T. These stores continue to be in operation today and are part of the family of Spectrum Business Ventures’ platform of success.
Based on the early success of these AT&T stores, Mr. Raizada was asked in 2002 to open the entire Southern California market for a new wireless company called T-Mobile. Partnering with Los Angeles Lakers player Rick Fox and celebrity Vanessa Williams, the three opened 32 stores over a two-year period of time. At that time, Mr. Raizada lived part time in the Los Angeles area to directly oversee the fast paced development of these stores. In 2004, T-Mobile purchased the stores to and used the stores as the basis for a corporately run retail operation. During this time, Mr. Raizada also repeated the same development model for T-Mobile in Colorado and subsequently sold those stores to T-Mobile as corporately operated units.
In 2002, after having built three highly successful cellular retail operations, and while continuing to oversee the operations of the Kansas City AT&T stores, Mr. Raizada started his venture capital organization, Spectrum Business Ventures. He partnered with Chuck Rouse, a highly successful business attorney and quickly engaged in using their collective expertise to execute diverse and sophisticated business transactions. Here, Mr. Raizada built a solid foundation of transaction and management expertise in private equity markets, executing everything from financial advising to corporate finance and strategic planning.
In 2006, Mr. Raizada and Mr. Rouse incorporated the expertise of two longtime Kansas City real estate partners and investors to broaden the expertise of their partnership. The four principals continue to build on the foundation of their collective successes. Mr. Raizada has significant transaction experience in a variety of industries, with a specialty in finance, technology, communications, and retail operations.
Chuck Rouse - General Counsel / Principal
Philip C. Rouse was born in Tilden, Nebraska and received his undergraduate degree from the University of Nebraska at Kearney (Magna Cum Laude). He received his law degree from the University of Missouri (Cum Laude; Law Review) and has been admitted to practice in the state of Missouri, as well as numerous federal courts.
Mr. Rouse served as law clerk for the Honorable William H. Becker who, at the time, was a United States District Judge for the Western District of Missouri, a Circuit Judge with the United States Temporary Emergency Court of Appeals, and Special Master to the United States Supreme Court. Mr. Rouse joined and later became partner at Baker Sterchi & Cowden, LLC. In 1995, he co-founded and became a member of Douthit Frets Rouse Gentile & Rhodes, LLC.
Mr. Rouse has since served as lead trial counsel in numerous large commercial, lender liability and insurance cases across the United States. He also has extensive trial and appellate experience in commercial cases involving insurance coverage, reinsurance contracts, lender liability and contract disputes.
Mr. Rouse currently focuses his practice on entrepreneurial business activities, including work in the financial services and payment systems sector and regulatory compliance matters for stored value card products. He serves as General Counsel and is a principal of Store Financial Services, LLC, where he has designed card backs and card agreements for millions of gift cards issued annually, and has designed compliance systems for over 400 gift card programs in the United States, Puerto Rico, Canada, and the United Kingdom.
In 2008, he was co-leader of the project of SFS and a leading bank to provide federal preemption based, bank issued, private label card programs in the United States, and the launch of the first federal bank issued private label card programs in Canada.
Mr. Rouse has participated in lobbying and drafting unclaimed property and consumer card statutes in several U.S. states, including recent statutes in Kansas, Michigan, Missouri and Oregon. He is the co-organizer of the Canadian Multi-Store Stored Value Card Coalition, which addresses regulatory compliance issues in Canada.
In 2007 and 2008, Mr. Rouse led an industry project to create exemptions in provincial regulations permitting fees to be charged on multiple retailer stored value cards in Ontario, Manitoba, British Columbia and New Brunswick.
In 2009, he co-led the project to implement regulatory exemptions for bank issued cards with respect to provincial regulations in Alberta, Saskatchewan and other Provinces. He is the inventor and owner of pending patents in the payments industries.
Mr. Rouse’s law firm provides legal counsel to Spectrum Business Ventures and continues to be an active partner in Spectrum Business Ventures’ enterprises.
Mr. Rouse lives in the Kansas City area and is married with three young children.
Michael Gortenburg - Principal
Michael Gortenburg is a life long resident of the Kansas City area. He attended Coe College, the University of Kansas, and Boston University. He began his career in real estate more than two decades ago. He has expansive experience in all areas of real estate. His specialty is identifying and procuring value-added investments and purchasing and reviving under-achieving assets with strong growth potential.
Mr. Gortenburg has been successful in securing and transitioning real estate in over fifteen states, Mexico, and Panama. He has managed, supervised, and operated the real estate holdings for both his personal and partnership entities. In addition, Mr. Gortenburg has comprehensive knowledge of the financial aspects of real estate operations and transactions. Partnering early in is real estate career with Mr. Scott Asner, the two investor partners have accumulated a well-respected and successful portfolio of real estate assets.
During his prolonged profession in the real estate industry, Mr. Gortenburg has dedicated himself to combining an entrepreneurial spin with a pragmatic weighing of risk to achieve relative safety with high rates of return in his investments. In the mid-1980s, he began purchasing various real estate holdings and has since built a portfolio of apartments, office buildings, industrial complexes, retail centers, hotels and residential development.
Mr. Gortenburg has established an extremely firm foothold in real estate as well as in multiple other arenas. Through his principal relationship with Spectrum Business Ventures, Mr. Gortenburg has equity stakes in multiple operating companies that span across diverse sectors including, but not limited to, technology, finance, and natural resources.
Mr. Gortenburg is married with two children.
Scott Asner - Principal
Scott Asner is a life long resident of the Kansas City area. Mr. Asner graduated from the Wharton School of Finance at the University of Pennsylvania in 1972 with a Bachelor’s of Science in Economics and received his Jurist Doctorate degree from Stanford School of Law in 1975.
After earning his law degree, Mr. Asner engaged in the general practice of law until 1994. In 1994, he began to spend the majority of his time engaged in investment activities with a heavy emphasis on real estate investments. Focusing on commercial and retail projects, coupled with a mix of multi-family developments, Mr. Asner has a unique diversity of expertise in the real estate and financing industries.
He has extensive experience negotiating the sale and purchase of property and acquiring and refinancing loans. He has been an investor in and principal of over forty entities formed to own real estate. He has been partnered with Michael Gortenburg, another life long resident of the Kansas City area, for the majority of his real estate career.
Mr. Asner serves on the Board of Directors for Hillcrest Bank as well as the Executive Loan and Audit Committees. For over twelve years, he has been on the board of Kaw Valley Behavioral Health Care Center, the largest provider of care for at-risk children, and has also served as the Chair in the past. Mr. Asner serves on the advisory board of Challenger Sports, which is the largest soccer camp provider in the United States. Just recently, Mr. Asner was nominated to become part of the board for the Menorah Hospital Legacy Foundation.
Mr. Asner lives in Florida and has part time residency in Kansas City. He is married with two daughters and a grandson.