The Fedtrade® Podcast recently interviewed William (Bill) Hite, CEO and Founder of HSA Global, as part of our SelectUSA Investment Summit Spotlight series. With locations in Boston, Chicago, and Germany, HSA Global helps with the navigation of international expansion, offering services such as running back office, managing financial, tax and legal services, and providing CFO as a service. Members of HSA Global will be attending the 2025 SelectUSA Investment Summit in National Harbor, Maryland, from May 11-14, 2025.
Learn more about HSA Global on their website hsa-global.com or follow them on LinkedIn. Connect with Bill on LinkedIn.
Key Takeaways:
- Clients often underestimate the importance of legal agreements
- Securing intellectual property rights are crucial for technology companies and their global success
- Managing cultural differences is an underestimated challenge when entering an international market
- SelectUSA offers valuable insights for companies looking to enter the U.S. market
[a copy of the written transcript is here]:
Hello, welcome to the Fedtrade® Podcast. I’m James Hastings of Rothwell Figg. Joining us on the podcast today is Bill Hite, Founder and CEO of HSA Global. Bill is a recognized leader in international expansion and understands local laws, customs, and regulations critical to the success of a company’s global expansion. This includes the lucrative U.S. marketplace. Bill, welcome to Fedtrade®.
James, thank you very much. It’s an honor.
Bill, briefly, what is HSA Global?
We’re an international business services company, and we focus on setting up and managing foreign subsidiaries for companies around the world. Basically what that means is we start off with back office functions, which is primarily payroll, treasury, and reporting. We also manage their tax work, some of their legal work, corporate insurance in the U.S., for example, compensation plans, due diligence for fundraising, and also M&A transactions. And we also have an international fractional CFO service as well.
Sounds like you have a busy business.
A little bit.
So how did you get into the particular business of HSA Global? And what need did you see in the marketplace that prompted you to start the business?
It’s actually a great question. My experience goes back to 1995. I was living in Boston at the time, it my first technology company. We took it public, and then we started buying companies and opening offices around the world. And I was the corporate controller at the time. I was really the only person in the company and also with the legal firm that we used that knew SEC compliance laws. Between setting up and managing all of the SEC compliance filings, I was responsible for basically opening and managing these offices for the company around the world, which included obviously quite a bit of travel. So I moved to Munich in 1998. I’ve been with many venture-backed startups since that time and I just really kind of fell into this. People kept calling me and asking me “how do I set up a payroll in the UK? I’d like to hire a guy in the U.S. What do I do?” And there was a guy that was a former business partner of mine from a number of years before and I had helped him with a couple M&A deals, hiring and firing a CEO, and getting one of his U. S. offices open. He called me one day and said “can you just run this thing for me?” And I said, “you know what? I actually can.” One client turned into three really quickly. One of them started off as an employment agreement, not far from where I’m living right now. And within 18 months, we had them in 14 countries. And, our thing was, you know, I was with Coopers & Lybrand in Boston back in the eighties. It was during a time where we actually serviced our clients. It wasn’t just about, you know, auditing services or tax services. It was really a high-quality service. That plus all the SEC experience and also watching how companies were trying to take service out of their offering and putting people into like a technology platform. And that’s great for companies that can manage that or have the staff and expertise to manage that themselves. But what I had seen over the years was that, for example, the reporting expectations for companies in the United States is fundamentally different than it is in rest of world. The quality is very different. The reporting timelines are fundamentally different. So it was really a handful of things. One was to put the service back into the industry, which is what our number one goal is – we really, really service our clients. And number two, it’s strict deadlines and quality. We have a number of people that are ex-big four people. We all kind of come from the same cut of cloth, so to speak. And yeah, this has been our focus for the last 20 years. It resonates exceptionally well with our clients and also the investors. So they rely on the reporting, the quality, the timeliness. Also because of the experience with our staff and also myself, we’re able to anticipate and really kind of be out in front of it. Our core clients are all growth companies. So primarily technology, but we also have other industries as well. And with that comes a level of expectation.
That’s really interesting. It seems like your expertise covers all trades.
I would say specialist in all trades.
Well said. The services of your company span the globe, not only, but also sectors. Now you had mentioned the high tech sector. Are there any other sectors that you service?
Yeah, I mean, we’ve got like, there’s telco, and we have clients that are selling pots and pans that are made in China, India, and Turkey to Aldi, both in the U.S. and also here in Europe. We’ve got a food company out of the Chicago area. We’ve had lighting companies. So what it boils down to are really companies that are growth minded that need certain support and skillsets in the markets that they’re actually expanding into.
Your services also cover legal management services. Can you tell us a little about that?
Correct. So a lot of this comes back to my years as a corporate controller back in the nineties. And that is one of the things that surfaced quite quickly prior to the IPO was for example, in employment agreements and in customer agreements, there were differences in intellectual property rights. So for a technology company, this is the Holy Grail. And what I did at the time was we standardized a company policy and we rolled that out through all of our agreements. And it’s something that we are very active with today and doing it for all our clients. It’s mandatory for us. It’s one of the first questions that we ask when we’re onboarding a new client and we want to make sure that their intellectual property rights are robust, they’re protected, and it’s not only in their partner and customer agreements, but it’s also in all their employment agreements worldwide.
That’s a very sophisticated way of looking at intellectual property rights and the value of such rights. Do you find that many potential clients do not realize that that should be one of the first steps in their go-to-market strategy?
Absolutely. A lot of them are quite young. They’re very, very bright. Some of them have had successes in the past, so they’re serial entrepreneurs. Some of them, this is their first gig. Things like this, the lawyers don’t really talk about it. The accountants really don’t talk about it; they’re not aware of it. And a lot of these guys, whether they’re German or they’re French or they’re from the Middle East or from Asia, the differences in intellectual property law, for example, between here in Germany and the United States, the approach is fundamentally different. Obviously, the protectionism, if you bring it up to the top, they’re consistent. But when you get down into the details and understanding how it actually works, there are fundamental differences. So getting that aligned and getting that rolled out through the rest of the organization before they really start to take off and grow.
We find also that there are two stories with intellectual property. One is the value proposition, which could lead to higher exit value of the company. Secondly, of course, which perhaps startups don’t want to talk about as much when they’re expanding into the U.S. marketplace, are mitigating risks of potential infringement of third party intellectual property. Have you ever run into that situation?
Yep. Have had a couple of frantic phone calls from clients over the years. We have one client that provides information for movie streaming and on their website, they had had do not anymore, but had had artwork that unbeknownst to them, violated intellectual property rights for the owner of that in the United States. So that was a long and costly legal process to rectify. The other thing that we run into quite a bit is during an M&A due diligence process, not so much on fundraising, but definitely during some sort of M&A transaction. It’s a large topic.
Interesting. Do any of your clients have product regulatory issues when entering the U.S. marketplace?
So one client that we were very entrenched in, we provided all services that we offer worldwide, including I started off as a fractional advisor, then fractional CFO, and I kind of got sucked into the vacuum and became their full-time CFO, along with running the other parts of the business. We sold this company to a very large insurance company, as you could imagine, highly regulated. So it was an interesting process of trying to take a company that started off with seven people in a dingy shared office space in Berlin, Germany, and within two and a half years, it had grown into like 250 people post-two M&A transactions, and trying to fit that into a highly-regulated company. What helped obviously was the standardization of a lot of the intellectual property, but also some of the other terms and conditions. In this instance, it was employment agreements and a little bit on the customer agreements.
Based on your experience, what general challenges do all clients have in common in entering an international market?
Number one, it’s the cultural differences. And this is something that is really underestimated. This is one of the other reasons why we do what we do. And what’s important for us is bridging both sides, right? So you’ve got Americans that are coming into Europe and it’s the small things like the niceties and the formalities and writing an email. And in the United States, especially back in the 90s when I first moved to Europe. These one-liner emails and communicating back and forth with colleagues was common in the U.S. In parts of Europe, it was seen as yelling at staff. So there are small things like that up into the big differences. For example, vacation time. Vacation time during that time was typically two weeks, three weeks maybe for an executive position in the United States. Here in Europe, specifically in Germany and France, It’s somewhere between 20 statutory days here in Germany to 25 statutory days in France, plus, for example, RTT and a lot of the other entitlements that go with it. It’s a long discussion of explaining these things to American clients and vice versa as well. So the landscape these days with employment law differences between each state in the United States, and you get into what we call danger or red zones, like a European company trying to understand the cultural differences between work ethic in California versus work ethic in Europe. Plus on top of that, the employment law differences and also the landmines that they have to gingerly walk around. Yeah, it’s quite a task.
So you’ll be attending SelectUSA this May in National Harbor, Maryland. Is that right?
Our staff will be, yes.
For those who don’t know, can you briefly tell us what SelectUSA is and how it benefits your company and potential clients?
I mean, for us, it was our first venture into it, not really knowing much about it. We have a very close partner, a legal firm out of the Chicago area that does most of our incoming client work in the United States. They’re very active. So we went with an understanding of learning, listening, and then talking. It was quite an eye-opening experience for us. There were people from all over the globe, and it was a true interest in trying to understand how and where to set up in the United States. For us, location is an advisory topic that we get into at the very beginning. So maybe for us, we take it for granted a bit, but for a lot of the other companies that are looking to go into the U.S., it was a major eye-opening experience for them to understand and see what fundamental differences there are between the U.S. and their home country, whether it’s Korea, for example, Australia, or somewhere here in Europe.
How can people find more about HSA Global and its services and get started?
Best thing is to reach out to us, to Bill Peiffer or myself. You can see our website. Our email addresses are there. Contact us. We’ll set up an intro call. Understand what your interests are. We’re very, very pragmatic. So we’re here to help and guide to make sure that our clients have a very smooth transition in entry into a new market and also making sure that they’re actually going to the right place. For like, for example, in the United States, setting up in certain markets makes sense, depending on what they’re selling and/or what they’re doing. It might not make sense in other locations.
Bill Hite, CEO and Founder of HSA Global. Thanks for joining the podcast.
Thank you very much.
Like our podcast? Follow the Fedtrade® Podcast by Rothwell Figg on Spotify or Apple Podcasts, and don’t forget to leave us a review!