Synthesis — Your 90-Day Round-Ready Plan
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.
Phase 2 — Days 31 to 60: Gap-Closing
Phase 1 extracted what exists. Phase 2 closes the gaps the diagnostic surfaced. These are the evidence items that did not exist before the 90 days began and need to be produced.
The specific gaps vary by business, but four recur across most Series A preparation:
1. Sales playbook documentation
Written stage definitions, conversion benchmarks per stage, qualification criteria, ideal customer profile, objection handling. Most businesses have the playbook in practice but not on paper. Writing it takes 5-7 working days and moves Organisational Capital from weak to strong.
2. Onboarding plans by role
30-60-90 day plans for each senior role, with time-to-productive metrics and role-specific playbooks. Typically 3-4 working days per role. Evidence for the Organisational Capital and Human Capital drivers.
3. Comps library and differential
Public comps, private transaction comps, and an Opagio 12 differential against the relevant comp set. This is a week of focused work and is the foundation of any valuation defence later in the process.
4. Metrics tree
Four layers — top of funnel, conversion, retention and expansion, contribution margin — with segment-level breakdowns and trajectories. Not a one-week task, but weeks 5-8 should produce a complete first pass.
By the end of Phase 2, you have the full Series A register in draft, the metrics tree in investor-readable form, and a comps-led view of the pre-money range.
Phase 3 — Days 61 to 90: Narrative and Strategy
Phase 3 moves from evidence to narrative and from preparation to strategy. Three workstreams run in parallel.
Narrative
- Deck v1 integrating the evidence bundle
- IC memo draft (your own, written as if you were the partner)
- "Why this team, why this market, why now" in one page
Capital strategy
- Equity target pre-money range, with structural terms
- Bridge vs extension decision, if applicable
- IP-backed lending capacity, if qualifying assets exist
- Blended capital stack proposal
The third workstream is investor preparation: the list of target funds (partner names, not just firm names), the sequencing of outreach, the existing-investor conversations about follow-on participation and introductions. This is the work that determines whether you are running a tight parallel process in month 4 or a disorganised sequential one.
By day 90, a founder who has worked the plan has:
- A scored Opagio 12 profile with strong evidence in the top five drivers relevant to their business
- A built-out Series A register, 20-40 pages, organised by driver
- A defensible metrics tree with segment-level breakdowns
- A comps library and differential that justifies the pre-money range
- A capital strategy document that blends equity with bridge and non-dilutive options where appropriate
- A target fund list with partner-level sequencing
- Existing investor alignment on the round
This is the baseline for entering first partner meetings with material advantage.
The Certificate, the Badge, and What Comes Next
Completing the Round Ready Academy in full earns you the Round Ready certificate and the Series B badge — the top of the five-badge progression. The certificate is downloadable in PDF form and the badge is shareable on LinkedIn.
More substantively: the final 30 days of the plan surface the tier-upgrade decision. For most founders completing this plan, the right tier is Growth. It unlocks the Valuation Defence Report, the full Bridge Thesis Builder, the complete Opagio 12 scoring across all four valuation methods, and the sector benchmark library. It is the tier the plan has been building towards from Day 1.
The Upgrade Decision in One Sentence
You have spent 90 days building the evidence base. The Growth tier is the toolset that turns that evidence base into the documents investors read — and it is priced at a fraction of the cost of a single percentage point of dilution on a £15M pre-money.
Primary CTA: Upgrade to Growth tier (£1,499) — Valuation Defence Report, Bridge Thesis Builder, full Opagio 12 scoring, all four valuation methods, complete sector benchmarks.
What to Keep Working On After Day 90
The plan ends at day 90, but the underlying discipline — keeping the register current, keeping the metrics tree up to date, keeping the comps library refreshed — does not. The best Series A and Series B founders treat the register as a living document that is re-scored quarterly and updated continuously.
Three practices tend to stick: a monthly Opagio 12 re-scoring (takes under an hour once the register is built), a quarterly metrics-tree refresh against the new cohorts, and a biannual comps-library refresh as the public and private markets move. These are the routines that make subsequent rounds easier to run than the first one.
One Honest Note to Close
The 90-day plan is a template, not a guarantee. Markets move; your business changes; the partner conversations produce surprises. The value of the plan is in the discipline of building the evidence bundle, not in completing every item by day 90.
Founders who do 70% of the plan in 90 days enter first partner meetings with material advantage. Founders who do 90% of the plan in 120 days enter with slightly more. Founders who do none of it — who arrive with a deck and hope — are the ones who spend the rest of the process explaining gaps that should have been closed before the first meeting.
The worst outcome is not completing the plan late. It is not starting it at all.
The Round Ready Academy ends here. The work it teaches is work the best-prepared Series A and Series B founders are already doing. If this course has moved you from not doing it to starting it, the course has done its job.
For the broader context, see the Value Drivers Academy, the Intangible Finance Academy, and the PE Due Diligence Academy. For a live tool, the Round Readiness Diagnostic remains the single most-used entry point.
Ivan Gowan is Founder and CEO of Opagio. Lesson written with Mark Hillier, Co-Founder and CCO, drawing on the Round Ready cohort work. Meet the team.