The fundraising tax

During my last seed raise at my CPG company, I spent six months building pitch decks, financial models and “strategy documents”. Investors loved them. Our revenue didn’t.

August to December is our biggest season. We’d planned for growth to average 20% a month over the final three months of the raise. Instead, while I was polishing slides, I let our paid marketing campaigns slip. By the last month, growth was flat.

We still closed the round. Then the board meetings started, and every one opened with the same question: why did revenue stall in the best months of the year?

That’s the part nobody puts in the funding announcement. Fundraising carries a hidden tax, and you don’t pay it in hours. You pay it in focus. Every hour you spend managing an investor is an hour you don’t spend talking to customers, improving the product or unblocking your team. And if your team is small, the engine probably still relies heavily on you.

Here’s the irony. What investors are buying is traction. If you starve the revenue engine to raise money, you weaken the very asset you’re selling, and you inherit a board that wants to know what happened.

Fundraising gets glamorised because it’s visible. A round makes an announcement. A solid month of customer calls doesn’t. But money raised isn’t progress. Customers, revenue and eventually profit are progress. Funding just buys you time to make more of them.

So now I run a raise like any other expensive, high-stakes project. Four rules:

1. One owner. One person runs the process, and if you’re the CEO, that’s you. Investor requests come to you, not to your ops lead at 9pm. Everyone else stays out of the data room.

2. A fixed window. Set a target and a deadline, say £500k in six months, and hold yourself to it. If you can’t close in that window, treat it as information. The market is telling you something about the business, and the answer might be a smaller round, a different kind of capital or a path to profit on what you already have.

3. Hand the team the engine. Before you start, tell your core team you’ll be heads-down on the raise for its full length. Be explicit that they own the day-to-day business while you’re out: sales, marketing, ops. None of it should stall because you’re in pitch meetings.

4. Delegate the work you’d normally keep. If I could rerun that seed round, those paid campaigns would have had one owner on my team and a 30-minute check-in each week. Not a heroic late-night effort from me. A clear owner and a short weekly update.

Raise when you need to. Just don’t let raising become the job. The best pitch you’ll ever have is a revenue chart that kept climbing while you were out pitching.

Keep building.