I'm an entrepreneur.
Guiding Founders - from Idea to Sustainable Growth
Your Story
Every startup begins as a story about how you, the entrepreneur, will change the world for the better with your idea. How well you craft and present your story is a significant part of your early success.
As your company's story becomes reality, your continued success depends on how fast you grow and how well you respond to what your customers and the market tell you.
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New Tools, New Challenges
Entrepreneurs today face a unique set of advantages and challenges. A slew of easy-to-use business and software tools combined with inexpensive product development options have enabled resourceful entrepreneurs to get a new product or service to market faster than ever. This has resulted in a flood of new opportunities for investors and has set their expectations higher than before. Now, they expect real customer traction and an established growth curve before they invest. Accessing early-stage funding has never been more challenging.
Sage offers entrepreneurs at all stages the chance to perfect their story and hone their strategy and presentation skills to optimize their chances of attracting customers, investors, partners, and employees. Our combined entrepreneurial, investing, and enterprise experience and networks offer founders a clear advantage over competitors.
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The Venture Growth Process
Sage Partners guide founders to traverse the route to profitable, sustainable growth. Our team of accomplished entrepreneurs and operators step in to augment the dynamic demands of the growing startup.
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Our process typically begins with the Sage Accelerator – a complementary session where you pitch your business in a “safe environment” to a team of Partners. You’ll receive actionable feedback, insights, and ideas. We "score" you - and you likewise assess your startup - using our proprietary Sage Startup Success Scorecard™. This provides a framework to easily identify areas of strength and improvement. If we mutually agree that working with Sage can add tangible value to your company, we can be engaged to assist with a specific need – such as recrafting the investor deck, updating financials, tuning the business model, or otherwise helping you to tell a better story. We call this a "Deep Dive" session. Once you've had a chance to digest and implement, we mutually assess if a long-term collaborative partnership will help you to achieve your goals. We typically work on long-term engagements to help accelerate growth, assist with fundraising rounds, and ultimately guide to a successful exit. Here's a full list of our Venture Development Services.
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Sage Partners is not an investment firm - although many partners are active individual angel investors and L.P.s. Our value is cemented in the time we invest with our clients and from our active network of funders - at last count, approaching 200 professional investors/firms (from seed to Series D) - where we have personal connections.
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Venture Advisory Services
For young companies not yet ready to take advantage of the depth and breadth of a Venture Growth engagement, individual Partners often serve as Advisors to startups. This nurturing role helps entrepreneurs to address the wide range of challenges that are not unique to startups or our Partners but are often first-time events for the founding team.
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We Win Together
In all cases, our compensation is aligned with your success. At Sage Partners, we don’t have junior staff to feed billable hours. We are a team of accomplished senior executives. We take on projects where we feel we can add tangible value and work alongside management to get the job done. When you win – we win.
Here are a few case studies that help illustrate what we can do. If you are interested in learning more, please contact us.
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Helping Entrepreneurs Experience the Thrill of Acceleration
Defining Successful Outcomes
At Sage, we work with venture founders and their teams to define successful outcomes and the path to achieve them. Measuring success is critical (sales, user adoption, client pipeline, profitability, funding, valuation), and sequencing the key milestones is key to putting the venture on the right track. Think of milestones as dominoes; hitting one milestone sets up the next on the path to meeting your goals.
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We Work to Improve the Odds
Our objective is to help ventures improve the odds of achieving success. To accomplish this goal, addressing the factors that will have the greatest impact is important. Our approach is straightforward but market-tested: Focus on the customer. Simplify the solution. Articulate the core proposition. Avoid head-to-head battles. Strengthen the team.
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Accelerating Development
We look to accelerate development and shorten all timeframes. In today’s continuously evolving market, speed matters. The creation process is continuous, and the team must always design, launch, learn, iterate, and evaluate (repeat). The team must set key deliverables and drive to meet them. We work with you to align every part of the plan and team around one calendar. Celebrate wins, make them a habit, and build muscle.
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Maximizing Value for Both Founders and Investors
Our aim is to maximize the value of the venture for both Founders and Investors. We help the team focus on optimizing time and resources and spending cash as though it is your own. Spend as little time fundraising as possible, but raise a bit more than you need. And, most importantly, deliver on your plan, which will generate funds for continued growth.
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