Growth gets you the meeting. What happens next gets you the term sheet.
Founders spend most of their prep time on the growth story: the top-line chart, the market size, the trajectory. Investors read that chart in about ten seconds. What they spend the rest of the meeting on is everything underneath it: gross margin trend, the gap between revenue and cash, how fast the burn rate is moving relative to the plan. That's where they're testing whether the business understands itself.
A finance function built for scrutiny shows its working. It states the numbers and explains the movement behind them: why margin dipped in a specific quarter, what drove a cash gap, what's already been done about it. Investors have seen enough decks to spot the difference between a forecast that's been stress-tested and one that's been polished. The second kind gets found out in diligence, at the worst possible moment to find out.
The real signal is whether the founder can defend the model, unscripted.
The sharpest investors probe the numbers: asking a founder to justify an assumption on the spot, off the deck. A founder who can answer that without reaching for their finance lead has a function that's actually theirs. One who can't has a set of numbers built by someone else, for someone else's benefit.
This is what Deal exists to prepare: a finance function and a set of numbers built to withstand the room, not just impress it, ready before the first investor conversation, not assembled in the two weeks before it.
Getting started is simple
