Round Ready Academy — Lesson 11 of 11
Ten lessons is a lot of framework. This lesson compresses them into one thing: a 90-day plan. Three 30-day phases, weekly deliverables, and the specific output at each stage that moves you from "we need to raise" to "we are ready for first partner meetings."
The plan is written for a founder at £1M-£4M ARR who expects to be in first Series A or Series B partner conversations in six to nine months. If you are closer than that, the phases compress; if you are further away, they expand. The structure stays the same.
Round-readiness is not a single output; it is a compounding preparation. Each 30-day phase builds on the last. By day 90, a founder who has worked this plan has: a scored asset base, a built-out Series A register, a defensible metrics tree, and a prioritised capital strategy that includes equity, bridge, and non-dilutive options.
Day 0 — The Baseline
Before the plan starts, one thing has to happen: the diagnostic. The Round Readiness Diagnostic produces the baseline Opagio 12 profile, the sector comparison, and the prioritised gap list. Without this baseline, the 90 days risk being spent on work that is not the highest-leverage work.
Twenty minutes. Free. The starting point of everything that follows.
Primary action: Run the Round Readiness Diagnostic.
Phase 1 — Days 1 to 30: Evidence Extraction
The first 30 days are about surfacing what you already have. Most founders are surprised by how much evidence already exists inside the business but has never been extracted into a form investors can read.
Phase 1 — Weekly Outputs
| Week | Focus | Deliverables |
|---|---|---|
| Week 1 | Cohort data | Gross retention, net retention, contribution margin per segment, last 8 quarters |
| Week 2 | Customer concentration and contracts | Top-10 concentration trajectory, contract length distribution, auto-renew terms |
| Week 3 | Team and organisational evidence | Org chart with hire thesis per senior role, attrition analysis, one-page decision-rights document |
| Week 4 | IP and regulatory schedules | Trademark schedule, patent schedule, trade secret register, regulatory permissions list |
By the end of Phase 1, you have the quantitative skeleton of the Series A register — the most-cited evidence items, in investor-readable form. This is the foundation everything else builds on.
The common pitfall in Phase 1 is perfectionism. The weekly deliverables are designed to be "good enough, shipped" rather than "perfect, delayed". Investors value existence over polish. A complete cohort file with rough cuts is more useful than a beautifully formatted one that is still being assembled.
The single most common Phase 1 failure is letting one missing data point block an entire week's deliverable. The fix is structural: produce the deliverable with a named gap and a date by which it will close, not a delay until the gap closes. Investors price visibility-into-gaps higher than they price polish-without-visibility.
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