I'm Taylor Sicard. I was an early Shopify employee who helped build and scale the Partner Program, co-founded WIN Brands Group (a nine-figure DTC operator), and built and sold a software company to Tiny. Now I work as a fractional growth advisor to consumer brands and Shopify-ecosystem apps, the senior judgment to get the big calls right, without a full-time executive salary.
The brands and founders I help are almost always at a real inflection point, the moment the playbook that got them here stops working and the next decision genuinely matters. If that's where you are, you don't need more theory. You need someone who has stood exactly where you're standing.
Founder-led brands pushing through the walls that come at $5M, $10M, and $25M: CAC discipline, channel mix, retention, retail and wholesale expansion, and the operating systems that survive scale without wrecking margin. Brand strategy and growth from someone who has run the P&L, not just advised on it.
App and SaaS founders from six-figure ARR up who need ecosystem-native go-to-market: App Store distribution, partnerships, pricing and packaging, and the founder-led to team-led GTM shift. Advice from someone who helped build and scale Shopify's Partner Program from the inside.
Most founders reach for a full-time executive when they feel a gap. It's the most expensive way to solve a part-time problem. The same caliber of leader runs close to $25,000 a month fully loaded full-time, versus roughly $10,000 a month fractional, and that's before a three-to-six-month ramp and the real chance you have to hire twice. The gap you feel is usually ten hours of judgment, not forty hours of work. Hiring forty to get ten is how founders end up hiring twice.
| Your gap | The right tool | Why |
|---|---|---|
| You don't know what to do | Fractional advisor | Senior judgment on the few calls that move the business |
| You know what to do, need hands | Agency or junior hire | Execution capacity once the strategy is set |
| A whole function, all day, ongoing | Full-time hire | True forty-hour ownership the business can't run without |
I wrote the full breakdown on this, with the cost math and the failure modes of each option, in fractional advisor vs agency vs a full-time hire. The honest version: an advisor is the wrong tool plenty of the time, and I'll tell you when it is.
Four places the work lands. Which of them apply depends on whether you're the merchant or the one selling to merchants.
Finding the one binding constraint, fixing the channel mix, and getting CAC and contribution margin to a place that compounds instead of bleeds. The work in scaling from $5M to $25M.
Brand architecture, positioning, and the move into retail, wholesale, and marketplaces without losing the margin or the brand that got you here.
For apps and SaaS: App Store distribution, partnership motions, pricing, and the go-to-market shifts most founders get wrong. See ecosystem advisory.
Whether to raise, sell, or keep compounding, and what has to be fixed before any of it. Brands and apps get valued on different math. I've priced both, closed acquisitions, and sold a company of my own.
First we settle whether you sell to merchants or sell as one. Everything after that depends on the answer. Free.
I go through the storefront, or the app listing and the distribution, then hand you my read. You tell me where it's wrong.
Weekly rhythm on a monthly retainer, twelve months to start and month to month after. A brand's weekly agenda and an app founder's look nothing alike.
It ends when your team makes the call without me, not when the contract runs out.
I joined Shopify early to help build and scale the Partner Program, which gave me a vantage point most people in this space don't have: the infrastructure from the inside, the builders selling into it, and the merchants growing on top of it. From there I co-founded WIN Brands Group, the acquirer behind Homesick, Qalo, and a portfolio of scaled consumer brands, and built Uptime from scratch and sold it to Tiny, a publicly traded acquirer.
The problems repeat. Consumer commerce and commerce software each run on a small set of them, and I've watched the same ones land at $5M and at $500M. Which is the argument for buying judgment that has already lived your problem, whichever side of the ecosystem you sit on. More in what DTC operators know and the full background.
Take the free 30 minutes. Tell me whether you sell on Shopify or into it, and what stopped moving. I'll tell you honestly when the answer isn't me. If you'd rather see a read before you talk, the free Store Audit scores your storefront from the URL.
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