Sarah Louragh

I've helped a startup founder raise up to $14M, I've also created pitch presentations and reviewed them to prepare founders present to their investors. This is where I can most be of help! (to note: I am not promoting investor introduction, rather investor management and preparation to pitch/talk to them)

When you launch a startup, you need to operate in a lean way, especially if you haven't raised any funds and are working through your and your friends/family savings. I can help you think through ways to extend your runway but also make sure you don't get burnt out in the process of doing so.

The most important resource you can rely on is your team: choosing the right profiles, expertise but also for you to setup the right culture to attract the best talent. I'd love to support you on this!

A very important metric to get right once you close customers is your retention rate: it's a lot more expensive to acquire brand new customers vs retaining the ones you have. Customer success should work to drive close to 90% retention of your closed accounts as well as 70% adoption: make sure as many people within a company use it, if it's B2B for instance. I can help you set up your team, goals and strategy.

Once you've established which product you'd like to sell, I can help you shape your commercial strategy both for B2B and B2C to win your first customers and setup a winning strategy to close contracts long term as well as ambitious goals for you to work against and measure your success/progress.

If you're looking to run initial user and market research to validate the need for your potential product, I can help you think through how to set it up and what success metrics you should be thinking about.

The biggest leadership learning I've taken away in my career, alongside driving results and having a winning team is how to do that with care and empathy. Something I can help you with.

If you're thinking about setting up your Ops foundation across finance, sales, marketing people and product - I can be of help. This includes setting up success metrics for each and keeping track of your progress. For marketplaces: this includes thinking through your supply and your demand sides.

This is part of an overall exercise of financial modelling, pricing is only one piece of it: How do you make money and how do you think about covering your costs and extending your runway to eventually break-even and become cash-flow positive. Something I can help you with.

If you have an idea, a website, a product and not sure who to sell it to: this is what I can help you think through. A lot of research and validation goes through this stage.

If you're thinking about building your B2B sales team, or you already have one and not sure what success could look like - happy to help you work through this.

This is very much linked to your Ops setup: how you can think about your tools and which ones to use to help you automate manual processes and focus on driving growth at scale.

This is such an important piece of your work: staying close to what the market is saying. This is important at every stage: before you launch your product, once it's launched and as your customers use it/ leave it. Happy to help you think through this.

Loom is a very easy tool to use to record videos; it's great to save time when communicating both internally and externally. I use it all the time, happy to show you it.

Typeform is a very easy tool to use to run surveys; this allows you to keep track of your market pulse. If you need help setting it up or knowing how to make the most of it, happy to show you it.

Hubspot is a very user friendly CRM that you can set up yourself. It was originally focused on email marketing but it now allows you to save all your client information and you can also create dashboards to keep track of your teams goals. Happy to show you the tool if you need help using it.

Using notion as a go to for startups, from employee onboarding to all-hand meetings, 121s but also for all things evolving around project management and priority tracking/delivery.

Salesforce isn't as flexible to setup as Hubspot as my experience is that you need to talk to a SFDC (Salesforce.com) rep to do the setup for you. It's a very commonly used CRM, happy to show you how to use it if you need to.