How to Run a CPG Fundraise in 90 Days: The 8-Step Process That's Worked Across 44 Rounds

A few years ago I was sitting on the couch with my oldest son Josh on a Sunday afternoon. Football was on. During a commercial, he asked me how many fundraising rounds I'd led in my career.

I told him I needed a few minutes.

Forty-five minutes later, I had my answer.

Forty-four rounds. Over three decades. $212 million raised. Friends and family. Angels. Private equity. Goldman Sachs. And eventually, the Coca-Cola Company. At Suja alone, I ran eleven rounds in seven years — in some of those years, twice. And I'll tell you honestly: I never once enjoyed it. I still don't. But I got good at it. Not because I'm a natural fundraiser, but because I learned, through a lot of painful repetition, that fundraising is a process. Not an event. Not a relationship. Not luck.

A process.

And most CPG founders treat it like an improv performance.

The Mistake Most Founders Make Before They Even Start

Here's the most common fundraising mistake I see: founders start raising money when they need it.

Think about what that does to you. The moment you're inside a funding crisis — cash falling, burn rate climbing, $100,000 in the bank when you need $3 million — every investor call you take smells like desperation. Investors have been doing this long enough to recognize the scent.

Enthusiasm attracts. Desperation repels.

The times I've successfully sold or financed a company, I've done it from a position of strength. The times I've struggled, I was running the process under duress. I know exactly what that feels like. July 3, 2018, 5:00 p.m. — my phone rang. Scott Uzzell of Coca-Cola's VEB group called to tell me they were not going to acquire the rest of Suja. My house was full of family getting ready for the Fourth of July. I walked downstairs after the call and cried in front of my sons.

We had $40 million in secured debt coming due in October. We'd had weeks with less than $100,000 in the bank. Gross margins were below 32%. We were growing fast on the top line and bleeding internally. Big moments are rarely about celebration. They're about exposure.

That's what happens when you don't run a disciplined fundraising process.

Start Here: The Mindset Shift That Changes Everything

Before I walk you through the actual steps, I need you to understand one thing.

Fundraising is not proof that you're winning. It's table stakes to stay in the game.

That's not cynical. It's liberating, actually. It means you're not trying to impress investors. You're trying to execute a process that determines whether the right people invest at the right terms in enough time to keep you moving.

Capital amplifies whatever foundation you've built. If the foundation is weak, capital accelerates the deterioration. If the foundation is strong, capital accelerates the growth. Before you raise, know which one you have.

The 8-Step Process

I've compressed forty-four rounds into eight steps. Most of my raises took three to four months when I ran them with discipline. Some took longer — usually when I cut corners on one of these steps. Here they are.

Step 1: Raise for 18 Months of Runway

This sounds obvious. It isn't, in practice.

My career average for runway at raise is closer to twelve to fifteen months. When I tell you to raise for eighteen, I mean it. Here's why: by the time you factor in three to four months to close the round plus the time it takes to actually deploy the capital and see results, a twelve-month runway becomes eight months in the blink of an eye.

Start your next raise when you have four months of cash left. Not when you're panicking. Not when a board member says something about cash position. Four months out, on purpose, as a discipline.

And on dilution: target fifteen to twenty percent per round. Your goal is to walk out of every exit with fifty percent or more of what you owned at the start. Most founders give away too much too early. Every round should feel like a fair trade, not a survival bargain.

Step 2: Assess Investor Fit Before You Start Calling

Desire doesn't equal capacity. And capacity doesn't equal fit.

I learned this the hard way. One of my businesses had an early investor who wanted to be involved — really involved. He had the money. He didn't have the stomach for the volatility. When the first rough patch hit, his anxiety infected the room. That's on me. I didn't assess fit before I took his money.

Ask yourself three questions before any investor conversation:

Can they emotionally and financially afford to lose this investment if things go wrong?
Do they have the patience to think in five-year horizons, not quarters?
Will this person add value beyond the check — introductions, access, domain knowledge?

If all three answers are yes, they're worth pursuing. If one is a soft no, think carefully. If two are no, walk away no matter how much they want to invest.

This applies even more sharply with friends and family. I've paid loved ones back out of my own pocket after a failed business. It cost me money and nearly cost me a relationship. The relationship mattered more. Never take money from someone who can't emotionally and financially afford to lose it.

Step 3: Soft-Circle 25% Before You Launch the Raise

This is the step most founders skip. It's also the step that most often determines whether a raise succeeds or stalls.

Before you send your first pitch deck, before you schedule your first investor meeting, before you announce anything... you need twenty-five percent of your target already soft-committed.

Here's what I mean by soft-committed: someone who has looked you in the eye, reviewed the materials, and said, "I'm in, pending final documents." Not "I'm interested." Not "Let's stay in touch." In.

Why does this matter? Because institutional investors — and savvy angels — are fundamentally following social proof. When you tell someone early in a raise, "I've already got forty percent of the round committed," they lean forward. When you say, "We just launched and we're still building momentum," they lean back.

Investors don't want to feel pressured. They want to feel like they discovered something. Your job in the early stages is to create that discovery feeling, not the desperation feeling. Soft-circling twenty-five percent before you launch gives you the credibility to tell a story of momentum from day one.

Step 4: Build a Clean Deck and Disciplined Financial Model

Under twenty-five slides. That's the rule.

I've sat through 60-slide decks from founders who thought more information signaled more credibility. It doesn't. It signals you don't know what matters. Investors are deciding three things in the first ten minutes: Do I believe in this category? Do I believe in this team? Can this business generate a return? Your deck should answer those three questions and nothing else.

Lead with the deck. Not the model.

Most founders invert this. They lead with the model, thinking the spreadsheet builds credibility. What it actually does is invite the investor to poke at your assumptions before you've established why the business matters. Lead with the deck. Build emotional conviction first. Then give them the model to confirm it.

On the model itself: bottom-up, five-year horizon. Not top-down ("we think we can capture one percent of a billion-dollar market"). That math tells me nothing. Build it from the unit level — cost to produce, cost to sell, gross margin per case, velocity per store, number of doors over time. Chaos in your raise signals chaos in your business. A sloppy model is the clearest signal of a sloppy operator.

Step 5: Choose the Right Entity and Security Structure

Most CPG founders treat legal structure as an afterthought. It isn't.

Set up a C-Corp early. It qualifies for QSBS — Qualified Small Business Stock — which can provide significant capital gains tax advantages for early investors. If you want strategic angels who've been through a few deals, this matters to them. C-Corp structure signals that you've thought about the path forward, not just the path to launch.

On the type of security: understand the difference between common stock, preferred stock, convertible notes, and SAFEs. In most early-stage situations, pre-money SAFEs offer the cleanest path forward. They're simple, fast, and don't require a negotiated valuation. The complexity you avoid at Stage 1 compresses the timeline to close and reduces legal fees.

I've seen founders waste weeks arguing over preferred stock terms at a $2 million valuation. That time had a real cost measured in momentum and management distraction. Keep it simple early. There's plenty of time for complexity later.

Step 6: Set Valuation with Realism, Not Ego

Here's the number most founders get wrong because they're protecting their ego instead of protecting their raise.

Pre-revenue or true pre-launch: $1 million to $5 million pre-money. Early retail — first two to three accounts, some demonstrated velocity — $4 million to $10 million. Emerging CPG brands with $3 to $20 million in revenue and strong growth typically trade at three to four times trailing twelve-month revenue.

Those are the benchmarks. And I mean benchmarks — they're not ceilings or floors, they're starting points for realistic conversations.

When founders overshoot on valuation, they win a battle and lose the war. Yes, you might get a higher price in a given round. But you've now set an expectation you have to clear at the next raise, and if you don't, you're looking at a down round. Down rounds destroy morale, trigger anti-dilution provisions, and signal to future investors that something went wrong.

"Overreaching on valuation invites a down round." I've watched it happen to smart founders I respect. Raise what the business is worth, not what you wish it was worth.

Step 7: Execute Disciplined Outreach — "Clustering"

You've done the prep. Now you run the process.

Build your investor funnel from three sources: your school network, your work network, and your industry network. Start with people who know you before you go to strangers. Warm introductions close at a dramatically higher rate than cold outreach — and a warm no from a trusted source is still valuable because it often comes with a redirect.

Here's the tactic I use that most founders don't: clustering. When someone commits, immediately ask them for three introductions to other potential investors. Every new yes becomes a branch on a tree. This is how raises build momentum — not by cold-emailing a hundred VCs, but by letting each closed investor become a missionary for the next one.

One non-negotiable: every serious investor must try the product before they close. This sounds obvious. You'd be amazed how often it doesn't happen. CPG is different from software. Your product is the argument. Put it in their hands and in their mouths. I've seen rounds close faster after one tasting than after three months of meetings.

Step 8: Close Cleanly with a Real Data Room

Most early-stage CPG companies skip the data room. That's exactly why doing it well is a real differentiator.

A clean data room says: I run a tight company. I am organized. I take this seriously.

What goes in: corporate documents (certificates of incorporation, any prior financials, cap table, existing investor agreements), product information (formulas if protectable, certifications, co-man agreements), commercial information (purchase orders, retail agreements, distribution relationships, velocity data), and your five-year model with assumptions clearly stated.

When an investor goes into a data room and everything is missing or disorganized, they imagine what your ops look like. When it's clean, they relax. Trust is built in the moments before the ask, not during it.

Set a close date and stick to it. Momentum matters in a raise. Open rounds that drag on for six or eight months signal something is wrong. Set a sixty-day window. Tell people explicitly: "We're planning to close the round by [date]. If you're in, this is the window."

Chaos in your raise signals chaos in your business. Run a tight raise. It tells the story of a tight operator.

What Institutional Investors Expect Today

This isn't 2015. The days of funding a pure story without fundamentals are largely behind us.

If you're going after institutional capital, here's the real bar today: $3 to $5 million or more in trailing twelve-month net revenue. Gross margins above 40 percent with a credible path to 50 percent. Shelf velocity above the category median. A category with meaningful size and visible growth. A path to break-even that doesn't require another ten rounds of dilution. And a team with at least one person who has prior CPG success.

That last one... "a team with prior CPG success." This is the one most first-time founders overlook. Your team is one of the top three things every institutional investor is evaluating. Show me your team, and I'll show you what your company is about.

If you don't have CPG operational experience on your team, that's not fatal — but it needs to be addressed. Get an advisor, a fractional executive, a co-founder with relevant experience. The absence of it is a fundraising obstacle. The presence of it removes one of the most common objections you'll face.

The Real Point

Gross margins create freedom. Runway creates leverage. Lead investors create momentum.

If you only take one thing from this post, let it be this: fundraising isn't something that happens to you. It's something you run. With preparation, timing, and discipline.

I've raised money forty-four times. I've failed at it when I ran it reactively. I've succeeded at it when I ran it like an operator. The process is the same whether you're raising $500,000 or $50 million. The discipline is what separates the founders who close the round from the ones who run out of cash still waiting for a yes.

Dream boldly. Plan soberly. And start your next raise before you need it.

The CPG fundraising process is one of the core modules inside the MBA for CPG Program — covering deck construction, data room prep, valuation frameworks, and how to close a round without losing your mind. If you're in the middle of a raise right now, the 90-Day Breakthrough is where we work through it together, one-on-one.