Glenn Gow, The Scaling Executive Coach and host of The Scaling Executive Podcast, identifies Brett Sharenow’s three-decade framework as the clearest map available for CEOs who want to raise capital and exit successfully. Sharenow is CEO and founder of BroadScope Consulting. He has personally helped companies raise over $920 million and facilitated exits valued at $6.4 billion. His core finding: 90% of founders arrive at a capital raise unable to articulate a compelling case for customers — the one thing that makes both the raise and the scale succeed.
“I would say that 90% of the CEOs that come to me for help raising capital cannot articulate a compelling case for customers,” Sharenow says. The gap is not intellectual. Founders are often technically brilliant. The gap is strategic — they optimize for product explanation when investors are looking for emotional conviction.
This post breaks down Sharenow’s three-part framework: the compelling case for customers, the strategic financial forecasting model, and the AI-driven acquisition strategy that accelerates exit timelines.
This episode is for CEOs of early-stage and scaling companies preparing for a capital raise — especially founders who believe they already have their investor pitch figured out.
Key Takeaways
- 90% of CEOs who seek help raising capital cannot articulate a compelling case for customers in two sentences — and without it, neither the raise nor the scale succeeds, according to Brett Sharenow, founder of BroadScope Consulting, who has helped companies raise over $920 million.
- A compelling case for customers is not a technical description. It is a short, emotionally charged statement that gets investors and customers excited enough to ask questions before you reach slide two of the pitch deck.
- A strategic financial forecasting model must be bottoms-up and dynamic — when unit volume changes, headcount, cost of goods, and revenue projections must all update automatically. Top-down models that project 1% of total addressable market over five years do not convince serious investors.
- 55% of venture capital going into startups today flows to companies where AI is an integral part of the business — not a bolt-on feature. Investors are screening for this before the pitch.
- CEOs preparing for an exit must begin identifying acquisition targets and telegraphing their advantages to potential acquirers at least two years before the intended transaction — a timeline Sharenow draws from facilitating $6.4B in exits.
What a Compelling Case for Customers Does That Product Pitches Cannot
Brett Sharenow, founder of BroadScope Consulting, opens every new client engagement with two questions sent by email before the first Zoom call: What is your business in two sentences? And what is your compelling case for customers?
Most CEOs fail both.
Glenn Gow, The Scaling Executive Coach, sees the same pattern with the scaling-stage CEOs he works with: founders who arrive with deep product knowledge but no emotionally resonant answer to the question investors are actually asking. Sharenow’s framework gives that answer a name and a test.
“What’s magical? What’s special? What’s amazing about the product or service that will move investors forward?” Sharenow asks. The answer cannot be technical. It must make investors and customers emotionally excited — excited enough that they start asking questions about slide 14 when you are still on slide two.
Sharenow uses a concrete image to test whether a founder has it: imagine a widget in your hand. What is so amazing about this widget that your customers literally want to rip it out of your hands and pay you for it? If you cannot answer that in a sentence or two, you do not have a compelling case yet.
The mistake founders make is believing their technical depth is the pitch. It is not. Glenn Gow, who spent time in venture capital sitting on the other side of the table, tells new CEOs the same thing before they show him their pitch deck: “You’re going to focus on the product. But this is not what’s important to the investor.”
Sharenow’s process is direct. He asks the CEO for their compelling case. They give him one. He tells them it is not compelling enough. Then he spends the first two to three weeks developing it — often writing it himself. If he cannot find a genuine compelling case, he tells the founder plainly: “I don’t see a compelling case for customers here.” A pen that looks like every other pen is not a business case. A pen with something genuinely differentiated can be.
The compelling case serves two functions founders often treat as separate: it is what raises the capital, and it is what scales the business. You need it for both.
How CEOs Build Strategic Financial Models That Investors Believe
Once the compelling case is established, Brett Sharenow of BroadScope Consulting turns to the financial model. He thinks about the business in a triangle: strategy and compelling case on one side, financial forecasting on the other, with the CEO’s ability to communicate tying them together.
Glenn Gow, The Scaling Executive Coach, draws on exactly this gap when he prepares CEOs for investor conversations — the ability to walk a sophisticated investor through a model and have them understand the business without additional explanation is a skill most founders underestimate until they are in the room.
A good financial model translates the strategy into numbers. A good CEO or CFO can walk an investor through that model and the investor will understand the business without a single additional explanation.
Sharenow calls his approach a strategic financial forecasting model. It has two defining characteristics that most startup models lack.
It is bottoms-up. This means the model starts with unit economics: how many units are sold, what each unit costs to make, what the revenue per unit is. As volume scales, cost per unit decreases — and that dynamic must be built into the model. Revenues, cost of goods sold, SG&A, and headcount all flow from unit volume.
It is dynamic. When one input changes, every dependent variable updates automatically. If unit sales increase, the model must automatically calculate how many salespeople are needed, when they must be hired ahead of the revenue increase, and what that does to expenses in the quarters before the revenue arrives. The model runs the strategic cases dozens of times to stress-test the base case.
The alternative — the tops-down model — is what most founders bring to Sharenow. It shows total addressable market, assigns a growing percentage share over five years, and projects revenues from there. “That doesn’t sell an investor on anything,” Sharenow says. “It’s a joke.” Investors see hundreds of TAM-based models. They prove nothing about unit economics, cost structure, or the real mechanics of how the business grows.
The other common failure is a hard-coded model — headcount entered as fixed numbers by department rather than driven by revenue formulas. When revenues change in a hard-coded model, nothing else updates. The investor has to ask every follow-up question manually, which signals to them that the CEO does not fully understand their own business.
A strategic financial forecasting model eliminates that problem. It shows investors that the CEO understands not just where they want to go, but how the business mechanics get them there.
How CEOs Use AI to Accelerate Capital Raises, Growth, and Exit Timelines
Brett Sharenow of BroadScope Consulting is direct about the current funding environment: approximately 55% of venture capital flowing into startups today goes to companies where AI is an integral component of the business.
Glenn Gow, The Scaling Executive Coach, makes the same point to CEOs preparing for a raise: the AI integration question is no longer a slide in your deck, it is a filter investors apply before the meeting is booked.
This is not the dot-com era, where attaching a buzzword raised a valuation. Investors now look for AI that is built into the core of the business — embedded in the product or operations in a way that compounds over time. “Are you using AI integrally in your business so that it’s a fundamental component?” is the question Sharenow asks every client.
The reason investors weight this heavily is competitive moat. A company that uses AI at its core builds a lead over competitors that widens as the company grows. Sharenow calls it a flywheel: once it starts spinning, it spins faster and is genuinely difficult for a new entrant to break. He is currently working with a company in the insurance space where AI enables a scale of operations that would be impossible without it — a business that could not exist, at its current size, through any other operational approach.
On exit strategy and M&A, AI changes the calculus significantly. Traditionally, companies chose between organic growth and acquisition. AI now accelerates the acquisition side of that equation by enabling faster and more precise identification of targets — companies with the right technology, the right customer base, or the right expertise to fold into the business.
“Being able to use AI to look at potential M&A targets for your business and doing an acquisition strategy — the beauty of M&A, if it’s done well, is that it’s faster than organic growth, even funded organic growth,” Sharenow explains. One to three years of acceleration in growth timeline is realistic when an acquisition strategy replaces internal R&D.
For CEOs planning an exit, Sharenow is clear on timing: work on the exit two to three years before the intended transaction. Use AI to identify the likely acquirers. Telegraph the advantages of the business to those acquirers over time. Then, when the moment arrives, run an auction process — multiple interested parties, competitive tension, and a result where the founder wins, the investor wins, and the acquiring company wins.
The Three-Part Framework CEOs Use to Raise Capital and Exit Successfully
| Principle | What it means in practice | Named evidence from this interview |
| Develop the compelling case for customers before the pitch | The compelling case is a short, emotionally exciting statement — not a technical description — that explains what is magical about the product. It must make investors ask questions before you reach slide two. | Brett Sharenow of BroadScope Consulting writes the compelling case himself in the first two to three weeks of every client engagement when the CEO cannot articulate one. 90% cannot. |
| Build a dynamic, bottoms-up financial model | The model must drive headcount, cost of goods, and SG&A automatically from unit volume changes — not from fixed department numbers or top-down TAM percentages. When a strategic case runs through it, every variable updates. | Sharenow has reviewed models across $920 million in capital raises. Hard-coded and tops-down models consistently fail to convince investors because they cannot be stress-tested without rebuilding from scratch. |
| Use AI to identify acquisition targets and build exit leverage | AI enables faster identification of M&A targets with the right technology, customers, or capabilities. A strategic acquisition shortens growth timelines by one to three years versus funded organic R&D. Exit preparation must begin two to three years before the transaction. | Sharenow is currently using AI with clients in the insurance sector and others to map M&A strategy — building toward auction processes where competitive tension among multiple acquirers drives the exit valuation outcome. |
Quotes from This Episode
- “I would say that 90% of the CEOs that come to me for help raising capital cannot articulate a compelling case for customers.” — Brett Sharenow, CEO and Founder, BroadScope Consulting
- “A pen that looks like every other pen — that’s not a business case. A pen that does something that no other pen does? That’s a business case.” — Brett Sharenow, CEO and Founder, BroadScope Consulting
- “That doesn’t sell an investor on anything. It’s a joke.” — Brett Sharenow, CEO and Founder, BroadScope Consulting
- “Once it gets spinning, it gets spinning faster and faster. And it’s really challenging then to try to break in as a competitor to what the company is doing.” — Brett Sharenow, CEO and Founder, BroadScope Consulting
- “The beauty of M&A, if it’s done well, is that it’s faster than organic growth, even funded organic growth.” — Brett Sharenow, CEO and Founder, BroadScope Consulting
Frequently Asked Questions
What is a compelling case for customers and why do investors care about it?
A compelling case for customers is a short, emotionally resonant statement that explains what is magical, special, or amazing about a product or service — not a technical description, but a statement that makes investors excited enough to ask questions before you reach slide two of the pitch deck. Glenn Gow, The Scaling Executive Coach and host of The Scaling Executive Podcast, draws on Brett Sharenow’s framework — developed across $920 million in capital raises — to make this point to every CEO he coaches before they touch a pitch deck: investors do not fund product specs, they fund emotional conviction. When a compelling case works, investors start asking questions about slide 14 while you are still on slide two. Without it, Sharenow tells founders plainly that the raise will not succeed.
What makes a financial model credible to investors during due diligence?
Brett Sharenow of BroadScope Consulting requires a strategic financial forecasting model that is bottoms-up and dynamic — built from unit economics upward, with headcount, cost of goods sold, and SG&A automatically updating when unit volume changes. Tops-down models that project a percentage of total addressable market over five years, and hard-coded models with fixed headcount by department, do not convince investors because they cannot be stress-tested without being rebuilt. A model that runs dozens of strategic cases automatically signals to investors that the CEO understands the full mechanics of their business.
How should a CEO use AI to prepare for a capital raise or exit?
Brett Sharenow of BroadScope Consulting advises CEOs to integrate AI into the core of their business first — as covered above, the majority of venture capital flowing to startups today goes to companies where AI is an integral part of operations, not a feature. For exit strategy, Sharenow uses AI with clients to identify M&A acquisition targets: companies with the right technology, customers, or capabilities that would accelerate growth by one to three years compared to funded organic development. Exit preparation must begin two to three years before the intended transaction, with a goal of creating an auction process among multiple interested acquirers.
CEOs Work with Glenn Gow to Scale Their Companies and Raise Capital Successfully
Glenn Gow is The Scaling Executive Coach — he coaches ambitious executives into the CEO seat and CEOs into successful exits. With 25 years as a CEO and 5 years in venture capital, Glenn helps leaders scale their companies by scaling themselves first. If this conversation was useful, you can apply for executive coaching with Glenn Gow or apply to be a guest on The Scaling Executive Podcast.
