Fundraising & Exit Readiness.
The operator work that makes a company fundable, or buyable, before the process ever starts.
Get underwritable first.
Taylor Sicard prepares consumer brands and commerce SaaS companies to raise capital or sell. He is an operator, not a banker: the work is fixing unit economics, reporting and narrative before diligence starts. On one buy-side mandate he ran diligence across 14 acquisition candidates and the platform walked away from 11.
- Fundraising leads, because raising is the far more likely outcome than an acquisition. Both are underwritten on the same numbers.
- Bankers and lawyers run the process. Taylor is the operator who makes the business worth underwriting before it gets to them.
- Sell-side: a beauty brand engagement produced a nine-figure exit in 9 months, built on an operator narrative the buyer could underwrite.
- Buy-side: an operating screen across 14 candidates, 3 acquisitions closed in 18 months, 11 passed on.
Most founders treat raising and selling as events. They are audits. The audit starts the day someone serious opens your data room, and whatever the business was doing for the eighteen months before that is what gets priced.
So the useful work happens early: real contribution margin by channel and by SKU, retention that survives a cohort chart, customer concentration you can explain without flinching, and inventory and cash modelled honestly rather than hopefully. Underneath all of it sits a story about why the next dollar in returns more than the last one, told in language an investor or an acquirer can underwrite. If you want to see where you stand before we talk, the profitability calculator walks a brand P&L down to EBITDA and the app valuation tool gives software founders a defensible range.
Fundraising leads here, because it is the more likely path. Far more companies raise than get acquired, and plenty of the ones that eventually sell raise at least once on the way. The good news is that the preparation overlaps almost entirely. A term sheet and a purchase agreement are both built on the same diligence, so the work that gets you a better round is the same work that gets you a better exit. For SaaS founders, the fundraising narrative is usually the bottleneck, not the metrics. For brands, it is more often the red flags a buyer finds in diligence.
Founders with a process ahead of them.
Four profiles · self-select below
- P.01Founders raising a priced round who need the operating story and the metrics to agree with each other.
- P.02Owners who want to sell in the next twelve to twenty-four months and would rather fix the discounts now than argue about them later.
- P.03Companies that got an inbound approach and are not sure whether it is a real bid or free market research.
- P.04Acquirers and roll-ups who need an operator's screen on what to buy, and the discipline to pass on the rest.
Fewer surprises in diligence.
Four deliverables
- D.01A readiness diagnostic: the specific things a due diligence team will flag, ranked by how much each one costs you, found before someone else finds them.
- D.02The operating fixes that move the number, sequenced so they show up in the reporting before the process opens.
- D.03A narrative that survives contact with an investment committee, because it is built from your real economics rather than around them.
- D.04Someone who has sold a company, run sell-side preparation, and screened acquisition targets for a buyer, working the problem with you every week.
I have been on both sides of the table.
I am not an investment bank and I do not run your process. Your banker and your lawyer do that, and the good ones are worth every point. What I do is the part that decides what they have to work with.
I founded getuptime.co and sold it to Tiny (TSX-listed), so I have been on the founder side of a signed deal. I co-founded WIN Brands Group and helped grow it to mid nine figures in annual revenue on a profitable-growth philosophy, which is the discipline that makes a P&L defensible in the first place. Before that I was an early Shopify employee who helped build and scale the Partner Program. On the advisory side I have taken a SaaS company from under $2.5M to $140M ARR, and I have done sell-side preparation for a beauty brand that closed a nine-figure exit in 9 months.
I have also sat on the buy side. For a PE-backed roll-up I built the operator screen, supported diligence across 14 candidates, and the platform closed 3 and walked away from 11. Knowing what makes a buyer walk is the most useful thing you can bring to a seller.
Is this fundraising or M&A?
Both, and fundraising leads, because raising money is the far more likely outcome than an acquisition. The preparation is largely the same work either way: an investor and a buyer both underwrite the same unit economics, the same reporting, and the same evidence that the business is compounding rather than coasting.
Are you an investment banker?
No, and that is the point. Bankers and lawyers run the process. Taylor is the operator in the room who makes the business underwritable before it gets there. If you already have a banker, this work makes their job easier and their number bigger.
What does exit readiness actually involve?
Cleaning up the things a diligence team will find anyway: true contribution margin by channel and SKU, customer concentration, inventory and cash, retention math that survives a cohort chart, and a plan that reads as a repeatable operating system rather than a lucky run.
When should I start preparing to raise or sell?
Earlier than most founders do. Once a process is live, the numbers are the numbers, and every weak metric becomes a discount. You have the most room to move in the two to four quarters before the deck goes out, while operating changes still have time to show up in the reporting.
Do you work on the buy side too?
Yes. On a PE-backed roll-up mandate, Taylor built the operator screen for what to buy and what to pass on, supported diligence across 14 candidates, and the platform closed 3 acquisitions in 18 months and walked away from 11.
How do we start?
A 30-minute scoping call, no pitch and no deck. Bring the last twelve months of numbers and whatever you have told investors so far. If there is a fit, a readiness diagnostic follows, then a weekly working cadence.
Raising or selling? Tell me where you are in it.
Fill out the inquiry form and say what you are working toward, a round or a sale. I respond personally to every submission.