The raise stalled. The decisions didn’t.
You are making the hardest capital-allocation decisions of your career right now. The decisions that got you here weren’t wrong. They were right for a context that no longer exists. We underwrite your forward capital in 14 days. Most Diagnostics surface $22,500 to $30,000 of forward-reallocation potential, with CEO-accepted capture paths for every forward dollar. Guaranteed, or full refund.
“You were the first person who made it feel like a solvable problem, not a permanent condition.” Founder, venture-backed SaaS, 22 months post-raise
Roughly seven thousand founders are trapped between rounds right now.
Growth flatlined. Portfolio CFOs have pulled back. Growth-stage fractional CFOs will not touch a stalled cap table. The hardest forward calls of the company (product-line direction, pricing architecture, headcount shape, the path to the next round) are getting made on instinct, because the financial infrastructure to defend them to a board or a new lead is not there.
From the investor seat, the view is the same from the other side. Capital is deployed. Context has changed. The portfolio company is in what one board member called “narrative maintenance mode,” reporting the same KPIs quarter after quarter. The unit economics are not clean enough to defend a follow-on, pass a reference check from a new lead, or walk into a board meeting with a story that holds up under pressure.
The portfolio CFO reports. Decisive Finance underwrites forward.
Different mandate, different output, no overlap. A portfolio CFO is paid to tell investors what happened last quarter. Decisive Finance is paid to decide what the next dollar does, defend the call with math, prove it in market, and install the engine that keeps doing it. The report can be clean and the forward allocation still undefended. When the raise story needs defending, the founder does not need better reporting. They need every material forward decision underwritten, executed, and proven in market.
The Six Trap Diagnostic™
Nobody re-underwrites every commitment when growth is compounding. Not because they are lazy or unserious, because the human brain is built not to. The traps below are structural patterns in human cognition, not failures of the founder. No founder alone, however smart or diligent, can counteract all six while operating the business they created.
The money already spent feels like it is voting. It is not. The next dollar is the only one that matters.
Doing nothing feels neutral. It is never neutral. Every week of unchanged allocation is an active capital decision.
The right total can hide the wrong allocation. A clean aggregate number can mask a customer-funded cost sitting in the wrong bucket.
The first number set becomes the number the conversation orbits. The price launched two years ago is rarely the price today’s buyer responds to.
The pain of admitting a commitment is not paying off is roughly twice the pleasure of recovering the capital, the Kahneman coefficient at work. Most stalled companies sit under that coefficient without naming it.
Polished reporting can feel like evidence when it is actually theater. Defending numbers with a story that quietly stopped being true is the most expensive habit a stalled company carries.
Three promises. Find. Install. Run.
Tier 1 underwrites your forward capital in 14 days. Tier 2 installs the forward decision engine and proves it in market across 90 days. Tier 3 runs forward capital allocation on rhythm. Most founders start with Tier 1 and move into Tier 2.
Decision Diagnostic
14 days. Fixed fee.
A dollarized inventory of what your current capital is earning against today’s context and what it is not, with CEO-accepted reallocation paths for every forward dollar.
90-Day Decision Resolution
90 days. Installs the forward decision engine and proves it in market.
Five material decisions underwritten forward, two executed in market with measurement, a scenario forecast with a named path to profitability, Financial Rhythms™ installed as operating infrastructure.
Decision Partnership
Ongoing. Runs forward capital allocation on rhythm.
Weekly, monthly, quarterly cadence. Every new material decision hits the same loop. Realized Value certified quarterly against methodology, not opinion.
Roughly $105,000 first year against quarterly-certified value.
Typical first year runs $90,000 in base fees ($7,500 × 12) plus a success fee on Realized Value. If a Tier 2 engagement produces $300,000 of Realized Value across year one (roughly one well-executed pricing change plus one capacity reallocation), the success fee adds $15,000. If Realized Value is zero, the success fee is zero.
What “engine installed” means at Day 90.
Tier 2 is not a second pull on the trapped-value well. Tier 1 already did that. Tier 2 is paid to install the forward decision engine that underwrites new material calls into in-market-tested growth and compounds quarter over quarter. Three things have to be true on the Day 90 readout. If all three are not true, the engine is not installed. That is the test the guarantee measures against.
Five material decisions underwritten forward.
Each with a Three-Path Model, a Six Trap stack naming the patterns that quietly held capital in place, the forward reallocation path, and a CEO-accepted recommendation on file.
Two of those five executed in market with measurement.
Not modeled. Live. A pricing change with at least one cycle of data, a product-line restructure booked, a cost or headcount change implemented with documented impact, or a growth experiment running with named go and no-go triggers.
A scenario forecast with a named path to profitability.
Eighteen-month base, upside, downside. Weekly actuals-vs-prediction reconciliation running. Not a hope. A specific sequence of forward decisions with named assumptions, triggers, and next-cycle hypotheses.
Ten new artifacts. Fifteen cumulative.
Not advisory hours. A specified product with specified output. Tier 1 delivers five artifacts. Tier 2 adds ten more on top. Fifteen cumulative through Day 90.
Unit Economics Dashboard
Live CAC, LTV, payback, gross and contribution margin, by segment, cohort, channel.
Product Line P&Ls
Contribution margin per product with full cost allocation and the cross-subsidy map nobody had.
Forward Capital Register
Every cost above $5,000 per month carries an explicit forward-underwriting status, an owner, and a standing review cadence.
Three-Path Models
Keep / Kill / Restructure on every material decision, with the cognitive stack that quietly held the capital in place and the forward reallocation path.
Scenario Forecast
Eighteen-month base, upside, downside, with named assumptions and weekly actuals-vs-prediction reconciliation.
Pricing Architecture Revisit
Forward repricing of existing offerings in existing channels. Not net-new products or channels.
Growth Experiment Register
The two in-market decisions with measurement protocol, go and no-go triggers.
Bridge / Pivot / Raise Model
Three financing paths including the capital plan the next round will be underwritten from.
Board Decision Package
Fully populated board deck the founder can walk through without hedging, plus a reusable template.
Final Readout and Decision Playbook
Ninety-day capstone and the forward playbook the CEO can execute without us.
What’s out of scope
What that does for the raise.
By the end of 90 days the company has clean unit economics per revenue stream, a defended pricing architecture, a three-scenario forecast with a named path to profitability, two live experiments with measurement in market, a board package the founder can walk through without hedging, and a capital plan with explicit triggers. The raise story stops being last quarter’s narrative retold. It becomes current-quarter reality, with math behind every forward call and an engine that keeps making the next one.
Three mechanisms across funded tech.
The Decisive Finance mechanism works because the Six Trap Diagnostic™ reads the same way across funded tech contexts. These three engagements spanned SaaS, POS with hardware, and pre-seed AI. Stalled-tech Series A/B case studies are being built now through the Founding Cohort.
$600,000 per year of engineering was customer-funded development hidden in the departmental P&L, deployed against a context that assumed it was all forward product investment. Product Line P&L broke the cross-subsidy. The forward reallocation restructured the work to paid services at 2.5x margin.
Hardware ops running on a 2022 strategic decision nobody had re-underwritten against the current context. Founder anchored to the legacy model. The forward reallocation made the emotion explicit and restructured to SaaS-led with partnered hardware. Zero cash crunches.
Three revenue streams commingled. Pricing anchored to the wrong buyer. No scenario model for investors. Separated Enterprise / API / SMB economics forward, killed the money-losing $99 tier, sequenced API launch post-raise.
Be one of the first three stalled post-Series A/B engagements in the record.
Decisive Finance is opening the first three Resolutions as the Founding Cohort. Same architecture, same guarantee, two differences below. Closes at three signed Resolution engagements or June 30, 2026, whichever comes first. Diagnostic runs at standard price.
The 90-Day Decision Resolution at $18,000 flat, versus $22,500 to $36,000 standard.
In exchange for the concession, the CEO grants written permission to publish the trap stack, Three-Path outputs, and financial outcomes as a case study after Day 90. Named or anonymized at CEO discretion.
By Day 21, the engagement must have a credible draft Pricing Architecture Revisit and Growth Experiment Register on track to produce at least one in-market decision by Day 60. Otherwise it runs at standard pricing.
Who this is for, and who it is not.
The Diagnostic and Resolution math is built for a specific cohort. If you are inside the band, the work fits. If you are outside, we will say so on the first call and you keep your time.
Fits
- Venture-backed tech, $1M to $8M ARR.
- Eighteen or more months since the last raise.
- Burn multiple above 3x. Growth has flattened.
- A founder making the hardest forward-capital calls of their career without the infrastructure to defend them.
Not a fit
- Under $1M ARR. Not enough cost structure for the math to work.
- Raised in the last six months. Forward context has not shifted enough yet.
- Already in active turnaround with another firm in the chair.
- Bookkeeping so broken the work becomes archaeology, not analysis.
The methodology is called decision-first finance.
We reorganize the finance function around the next five material forward decisions the company has to make, not the last five months of variance. Reporting is a byproduct of decision-first work, not its product. The close still closes. The board deck still ships. The center of gravity moves to the forward decision queue. We don’t audit the past. We underwrite forward.
The forward-capital-allocation engine that installs in 90 days.
GPs, LPs, and independent directors bring us into portfolio companies where the stall pattern is live but a CEO change is the wrong first move. A Decision Diagnostic is 14 days, fixed fee, guaranteed. It is designed to install 90 days of operating space before anyone has to make a bigger call. After the first call you get a one-paragraph write-up so you stay in the loop without being in the room.
Read the guarantee, then book the call.
The promise is the quote at the top of this page. The decisions behind the stalled round were right for a context that no longer exists. Nobody had the bandwidth, the framework, or the neutrality to install the forward discipline the company needs now. Decisive Finance does.
For founders
One 30-minute call. No pitch. If the fit is there, we book a 60-minute working session to run the Diagnostic. If it is not, both sides know inside the first call and we end clean.
Book the callFor investors
If you are watching a portfolio company make hard forward calls without the infrastructure to defend them to you, this is what we install. Forward this page, or introduce directly. After the first call we send a one-paragraph fit/not-fit note so you stay in the loop.
Read the guarantee