Startup Advisors

1. Go to market strategy planning: you've found product-market fit, now what?
2. Preparing to raise capital.
3. Leading and managing a growing team.

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I will guide you step by step on how to build your MVP (web or mobile app) within a $300 budget and get your first users.

1. Fundraising Strategy: Build investor-ready financial models and fundraising narratives that clearly connect vision to execution.
2. Growth & Unit Economics: Strengthen pricing, customer economics, and operating metrics to create sustainable, scalable growth.
3. Financial Strategy: Turn financial data into actionable decisions around cash flow, hiring, runway, and capital allocation.

1. Fundraising
2. Business strategy
3. Go-to-market/Customer discovery

1. Anything from hiring your first employee to getting your first customer to scaling out. (Operations & Leadership)
2. Be a founder-to-founder sounding board for the issues you are facing, and champion (and challenge) your ideas. (Strategy)
3. B2B product, go-to-market, and sales

1. Learn SEO Basics
2. Set up a Google Ads Account
3. Set Up and Interpret Google Analytics

1. Founder Math / Financial Clarity: Know what to track and how to build the systems to track it.
2. Business Strategy & Operations: Create a clear timeline and break through roadblocks.
3. Business Model & Early Revenue: Understand what products and services create the biggest opportunity for your business so you can keep creating the revenue you need to keep growing.

1. General brainstorming, storytelling, and market research
2. Simplify problem complexity: Identify problems, design scalable systems and processes, and execute.
3. Accounting/Finance guidance for operations and future transactions: Translate reporting requirements into digestible strategies that align with business goals for various stakeholders.

1. Developing internal operating structure and processes
2. Identifying and evaluating strategic partnerships
3. Sounding board for Go to market strategy, product and team development

1. Hiring and staffing out your first engineering team
2. Agile product development processes
3. Engineering Leadership - Team building, strategic planning

1. Google Cloud Platform products
2. Understanding Cloud in general
3. MVP Development process

1. Executive group and 1:1 coaching
2. Building agile and effective teams
3. Effective storytelling and executive presence

1. Thinking like an engineer. Looking for a technical co-founder? Missing a tech background? Let me show you what the dark side is thinking.
2. Defining unknown unknowns. There was a ton of early learning that I wish we could have heard before we started down the wrong path. Some of those landmines are easy to avoid with the right guidance.
3. Creating repeatability. Building processes and procedures that scale without sacrificing agility.

1. Go To Market & Distribution strategy
2. Partnerships & Contracts
3. Fundraising & Sales Process

1. Partnership strategy, including how to identify, prioritize, and structure the right partnerships for your stage of growth.
2. Partner-led growth and go-to-market strategy, including how to use relationships, channels, and ecosystem opportunities to reach the right customers.
3. Product and business strategy, including how to clarify what you are building, who it serves, and what needs to be true before you scale.

1. Strategy - Planning, Growth & Innovation
2. People/Culture - Leadership, Team Building & People Operations
3. Storytelling/Branding - Thought Leadership & Messaging

1. Sales training (SPIN)
2. Capital raise strategies
3. Leveraging the corporate community to build relationships and develop customers

1. Identify your Value Positions so that you can communicate high value in your marketing and sales conversations.
2. Help increase your conversion rates in your sales process through higher value sales conversations.
3. Build a unique business development campaign to create predictable lead generation.

1. Enterprise sales strategy: selling and supporting large commercial enterprises.
2. Federal contracting: selling to the US Government.
3. International opportunities: expanding your potential market beyond the US.

1. Building a user centered design culture
2. Product Management and Agile best practices
3. Product Strategy

1. Go to market strategy: It’s all about communication a solution for the client.
2. Understanding marketing & advertising – especially decoding the myths about digital advertising and how to get the biggest bang for your buck.
3. Customer acquisition/Sales Development: how to get your first customer, your 10th, your 100th while building a successful sales team.

1. GTM Strategy: Build a go-to-market plan that fits your stage, your budget, and your actual customers, not a playbook borrowed from a company ten times your size.
2. Marketing Foundations: Set up the messaging, channels, and systems that let you see what's actually working before you scale spend.
3. Founding GTM Hires: Figure out who to hire first, what to look for at this stage, and how to avoid expensive mis-hires.

1. Right-Sized Compliance: Build the security and compliance program your customers and industry actually require, not the one a vendor wants to sell you.
2. Vendor & Tooling Triage: Match to the right auditor, pen tester, and tools at the right price, and know what to build in-house instead of buying.
3. Audit & Enterprise Sales Unblocking: Get through audits and security questionnaires so compliance closes deals instead of stalling them.

1. Executive Coaching: Leadership & Strategic Planning
2. Sales Strategy & Execution
3. CX (Customer Success & Support) Strategy
4. Outsourcing (When, Why & How -->  EoR and Managed Outsourcing)

1. Advisement on engineering culture, starting with hiring & retention
2. AI coding tool adoption (e.g. Claude) & training
3. Agile process, especially regarding increasing delivery speed and reliability

1. General start-up knowledge from hiring an employee to building a company culture
2. Business model strategy
3. Proposal development and/or pricing strategy for services businesses

1. Make introductions that are aligned with your areas of focus
2. Go to market and building customer relationships
3. Constructive feedback on areas of focus and strategy

1. Go to market strategies
2. Building high performing teams
3. General brainstorming and out-of-the box thinking

1. 1. Multiple Perspective Thinking: Helping you see how your and your business are seen by potential customers, employees, investors, and… by FUTURE YOU?!?
   2. Helping YOU to challenge your own ASSumptions– Do you KNOW it or THINK it or HOPE it? – Do you Differentiate POSSIBLE vs. PROBABLE?
   3. – Confidence is great – sometimes; is yours based on data/stats/testing or hunches/hopes & conversion rates YOU plugged in to hit YOUR revenue/growth goals?
   4. I Have Many *FUQs to Give! *[Frequently UNasked Questions] NOW is the time to discuss/debate uncomfortable topics (including potentially-bad FUTURE STUFF!) – so you can consider it objectively/calmly (with minimal emotional bias!) while it’s still just hypothetical!!

1.  Product and UX design 
2. Brand and customer experience strategy 
3. Customer discovery & GTM fit

1. Leadership Pipeline Building: Identify and develop the right people early, before org structure becomes a bottleneck to growth.
2. Talent Strategy on a Budget: Design lean, scalable HR and people practices that don't require a full HR department to execute.
3. Founder & Team Coaching: Strengthen leadership effectiveness and team dynamics during the high-pressure stretch from idea to scale.

1. Thinking through what you want to do, why you want to do it, and how to make it happen.
2. Building scalable processes and systems.
3. Identifying goals that move the needle and developing specific action plans to achieve those goals.

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1. Corporate Formation, fundraising, and financing
2. Contracting with contractors, suppliers, and customers
3. Identifying and protecting all aspects of Intellectual Property, including patents, trademarks, copyrights, and trade secrets

1) Solving  puzzles.  I see the board a little differently and love the questions that don't have obvious answers.
2)  Execution.  I've gotten business cases funded, signed competitors up for commercial partnerships, and led internal teams to get [bleep] done.
3) Keeping the faith.  I am wildly optimistic, passionate about building things and always ready with a big grin and a really bad dad joke.

1. Growth Marketing Strategy (How to launch and grow)
2. Positioning (Crafting the right messaging, value, and thought leadership)
3. Team Building (Hiring marketing resources for growth)

1. Market Fit and Sales Strategy for early-stage SaaS
2. Pros and Cons of Bootstrapping
3. Pitch Deck Feedback

1. Sharpen your ICP.
2. Focus your messaging.
3. Build an efficient demand engine.
4. Use AI to drive smarter research, personalization, outreach, and pipeline generation.

1. Operations: An operator's eye for efficiency & scalability.
2. Leadership support: Certified ATD Coach & change management.
3. Strategic Partnerships: Design partnerships to drive revenue and competitive advantage.

1. Marketing content & communications including blogging, whitepapers, emails, earned media (press), you name it
2. Category definition, creation, and thought leadership
3. social media, influencer, and advocate (customer/partner) marketing

1. Positioning and GTM Strategy: Clarify your ideal customer, sharpen your positioning, and translate the product vision into a focused GTM plan.
2. Operationalizing Growth: Build the systems, priorities, and cross-functional rhythms that turn early traction into repeatable execution.
3. Founder and Acquisition Perspective: Navigate founder challenges, organizational growth, strategic partnerships, and the realities of preparing for and integrating after an acquisition.

1. 360 degree contracting strategy
2. Reframing complex businesses into elevator pitches by asking questions and challenging assumptions
3. Adapting neurodivergence into superpowers

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1. 0 to 1. What to build, how to build it and where to find your earliest customers.
2. Co-founder relationship. People say it is harder than a marriage, but there are some ways that can help out a lot along the way.
3. Technical hiring. How to figure out if that engineer will actually help your business.

1. Understand your strengths. I’ll work with you to identify your unique strengths and how to leverage those to excel in sales.
2. Build scalable foundations that do the work for you. Time is your most precious resource as a founder. I’ll help you document (or build) a repeatable process for managing deals and forecasting revenue to ensure you are not wasting time or effort in the sales process.
3. Confidently predict your revenue. Nothing feels worse than a deal going dark, especially when it blindsides you. I'll show you how to know when to walk away and when you can bank on winning it.

1. Product Launches
2. Messaging & Positioning
3. Customer Experience Audits

1. 1. Understand how to build cybersecurity into your product offering.
   2. Help prepare your company for acquisition.
   3. Build a productive and collaborative relationship with law enforcement and understand how the US government (at large) works.

1. Data analysis, modeling, and debugging
2. Data warehousing and architecture
3. Building a data analytics team

1. Financial management and planning.
2. Forecasting and projecting revenue and expenses in an unpredictable phase.
3. Due diligence management.

1. Customer discovery and development.
2. Building a repeatable, scalable sales model.
3. Generative AI and Machine Learning Development

1. Test your go-to-market strategy and/or start-up business plan. Do you have one?
2. Share with you the 'secret’ to achieving a consistently high sales win-rate.
3. Share wisdom that comes from 20 yrs advising privately-held business owners and start-up founders on how to grow the business AND avoid the common pitfalls that lead to failure.

1. Diagnose sales roadblocks to identify the hidden inflection points where your current strategy is failing, so you can pivot toward growth. 
2. Build scalable systems that transition away from "cookie-cutter" strategies by designing management processes that block inertia and drive efficiency. 
3. Create exit readiness via executive coaching and rigorous accountability needed to align your business for a high-value transition.

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1. Launch with clarity – Develop and execute your GTM strategy, from positioning to pipeline to retention.
2. Scale smarter – Build product and customer success systems that don’t break as you grow.
3. Get Unstuck – Break down messy team, product, or execution challenges into clear next steps

1. Find Your Story: Uncover the message at the heart of your company and communicate it clearly.
2. Find Your Voice: Develop the confidence and presence to lead from any stage or boardroom.
3. Find Your Audience: Connect with investors, customers, and partners through the right message.

1. Find early-stage market fit
2. Develop sales & marketing channels
3. Make sure you stick to your passion

1. Hire the Right People, Then Get Out of Their Way: Picking your next product and engineering hire, and building the environment that lets them do their best work.
2. Automation & AI That Earns Its Keep: Identify where automation and AI replace manual work and headcount, not where it just sounds impressive.
3. Ship What Matters: Prioritize the features and tradeoffs that close deals and extend runway, not the ones that feel productive.

1. System architecture review/advising
2. Software development best practices
3. Strategic planning/chartering

1. Choosing and leading your founding team
2. Sounding board for Go to market strategy, product, and team development
3. Experience as an underrepresented female founder

1. GTM: Business model creation, "Why this" and how to gain early customers.
2. Storytelling: The art of pitching for sales and funding.
3. Operations: How to build for scale without sacrificing speed.

1. Analyze the customer and competitive landscape to build a product more likely to get PMF
2. Challenge the founders to consider what moats really exist and how to deepen them
3. Help design and improve a sustainable product and engineering delivery process

1. Technical questions
2. Team building and leadership
3. General business strategy

1. Market Expansion: When to move into a different segment or simply expand product lines in an existing one.
2. Early stage planning: Customer discovery, compelling reasons to act, when to prototype.
3. Financial and Risk Management: Protecting the business (risk + continuity), attracting and retaining top talent, aligning business & personal financial strategy.

1. I was a software founder (N2 Broadband) myself; after several near-death experiences we eventually “made it” and sold for a nice $$ exit after raising a bunch of VC money. Been there, done that, and can relate to the psychological demands on founders (that’s the hard part, IMHO).
2. I’m a generalist corporate lawyer for a few local early-stage investors and several SaaS startups at ATV and around Atlanta, with a particular expertise in startup financing.
3. I’ve been around the ATL tech community for a long time, seen a lot of ups and downs, raised money, and done some angel investing myself. I enjoy passing on some of what I’ve learned and helping early-stage entrepreneurs. It takes a village!

1. Growth Strategy & Positioning - Finding the right message, market, and model
2. Paid Media & Demand Gen - Launching ad programs that scale
3. Marketing Infrastructure -Building systems to measure and optimize growth

1. Applied AI: When, where, and how to build agentic workflows for product and operations.
2. Data & Analytics: Architect and build data infrastructure that fits your business both now and in the future.
3. Operations / GTM: Weave analytical and intuition driven approaches to running a business, e.g. pricing & packaging, product development.

1. Legal counsel utilization, management, and organizational legal health.
2. Employee life-cycle issues, including engagement, recognition, performance management, hiring, promotion, and termination.
3. Leadership development and difficult conversations.