Why your crowdfunding raise needs a single person running it

A Reg CF or Reg A+ raise needs many people doing the work and exactly one person directing it. I call that person the Raise Owner. The Raise Owner does not need to work the most hours. They need to be able to drop everything and give the raise their full attention the moment it asks for it, because dozens of details have to come together fast to launch, and keep coming together fast until the raise closes. When nobody holds that role, or when several people share it, the raise stalls while the costs keep running.

Some people call this role the campaign quarterback. I prefer Raise Owner, because the job is not calling plays from a script. It is owning the outcome, and every decision the outcome depends on.

Who works on a raise

More people than most founders expect. A typical raise involves:

• Securities counsel, who drafts the offering documents and reviews what the company says.
• The platform, the funding portal or broker-dealer that hosts the offering.
• A CPA, for the financial statements and any review or audit.
• Marketing, which is itself several people: strategy, copywriting, video, design, social media, and paid media.
• The company's own team, who supply facts, approvals, product updates, and often the faces in the video.

All of them are necessary. The roster, and what to ask each one, is in team-behind-a-raise. This post is about the one role that roster does not fill on its own.

What the Raise Owner actually does

The Raise Owner is the person every contributor goes to when they need a decision to keep working. Messaging direction, a change to the landing page, whether a claim is approved, which version of the video runs, who answers an investor's question and how. They make the call or get it made, today.

Before launch, the Raise Owner brings six things together into one plan and keeps them consistent with each other:

1. The raise terms. Valuation, minimums, perks, and the exemption.
2. The marketing messaging. The story, the claims, and what counsel has cleared.
3. The action calendar. What happens when, marketing included, from testing-the-waters through launch day and the close.
4. The technical details. Pages, tracking, forms, email, and the handoff to the platform.
5. The legal details. Filings, disclaimers, and review of every public piece.
6. The accounting details. Financial statements, the review or audit, and anything the filings need from them.

Each of those has its own owner doing the work. The Raise Owner is the one who knows where all six stand and notices when a change in one breaks another.

Attention, not hours

The hours on a raise are large, and they mostly belong to the people producing things: copy, video, ads, decks, pages, documents. Added up, that work is more than a full-time job, and it should be spread across several people. If one person tries to produce it all, expect everything to take much longer.

The Raise Owner's job is measured differently. It is measured in speed to response. Every contributor on the raise needs answers in minutes, not days. A copywriter waiting on a messaging decision cannot write. A video editor waiting on approval of a cut cannot finish. An ad buyer waiting on cleared creative cannot spend.

So the test for a Raise Owner is not "do they have twenty hours a week?" It is "can they drop what they are doing right now?" If the raise needs a founder interview shot this afternoon, or a decision on messaging direction before the agency's end of day, the Raise Owner has to be able to make that happen.

What happens without one

I have seen both ways this goes wrong.

The bottleneck. On one raise I worked on, the CEO decided to own the raise himself. He was running a company that was doing real things, which is exactly why he was so busy. Simple questions took days, sometimes weeks, to answer. The most expensive of them was which messaging the company was comfortable using. That one open question blocked ad production, video production, the investor support scripts, and everything else that depended on knowing what we could say. If he had installed someone with the availability to make those calls, he would not have been the bottleneck, and the work could have moved.

The committee. On another raise, the company decided that four executives would own it together. In practice that meant a stream of uncoordinated and sometimes contradictory directions. Work was done, redone, and redone again. The raise terms, the ads, and the offering landing page were all designed by committee, and it showed: the result was a weak example of marketing, and everyone on the team, inside the company and out, ended up frustrated with each other.

One owner is not a preference about org charts. It is the only arrangement where decisions get made quickly and stay made.

Why speed matters during the raise, too

Launch is not the finish line for the Raise Owner. The raise keeps generating decisions that cannot wait.

Following what works. When a message starts to click in advertising, you need more of it, quickly: new ads, new cuts, new angles on the same idea. The window where a message is working is short, and a week spent waiting for approval can miss it.

Cutting what does not. The same speed applies in reverse. Ads that are not converting, and work that is not paying off, should stop before they burn more ad dollars and billable hours.

Investor questions. Investors ask questions in comments, by email, and on calls, and they expect answers while they are still deciding. Many answers need a compliant, approved response. See moderating-comments-during-a-raise.

Everything else. A material change that needs an amendment, a rejected ad, a press opportunity, a rolling close decision, a momentum dip that calls for a new push. Each of these needs someone who can decide today.

The cost of a slow raise

The risk is simple. While a raise is open, it costs money every day: ad spend, payroll, and professional service fees for counsel, accounting, marketing, and the platform. A raise that moves slowly keeps paying those costs without bringing in capital, or brings in just enough to cover them and leaves nothing in the war chest for what the money was supposed to fund. The Raise Owner's speed is what keeps the spend working.

"We already have that covered"

When I raise this with companies, I usually hear one of four answers. Each one sounds reasonable, and each one has a gap.

"The CEO has it under control"

The CEO has to run the company. If the company does nothing but raise capital, the CEO probably does have the time. But a company whose only activity is fundraising is unlikely to have a story crowdfunding investors want to back. The CEOs of companies doing exciting things, the companies that make great crowdfunding opportunities, are busy. Too busy to answer every question on a raise in minutes. The CEO should be available for the things only the CEO can do, like the founder interview and the final call on the story, and someone else should own the rest.

"Someone on our team has it under control"

This works in one circumstance: that person's only job is the raise. Most companies running a crowdfunding raise are startups, and almost everyone at a startup has more than one job. Give the raise to someone who also runs operations or product, and you have the CEO's problem again, one level down.

Even when the raise truly is their only responsibility, there is a second problem. An employee who has never run a raise does not yet know what a raise needs, in what order, or what good looks like. You are paying them to learn on your raise.

"The platform handles it"

Platforms can look equipped to lead, because many of them bring their own legal, marketing, and other services. It falls apart at the edges. A platform does not get involved in your internal operations. Your financial statements and audit, for example, are still on you. And as a registered intermediary, a platform cannot make decisions for you on things like what your messaging says. You still need a decision maker inside the company in the loop. More on the platform's role in funding-platform-ad-services-mistake.

"Our marketing agency handles it"

A marketing agency does not go deeper than marketing. Even an agency that is excellent at its part will get blocked by the stakeholders and moving pieces outside its scope: counsel's review, the accountant's timeline, the platform's requirements, the company's own approvals. The agency can run the marketing. It cannot run the raise.

How to choose a Raise Owner

The Raise Owner can be someone inside the company or someone outside it. What matters is that they have:

• Wide-open availability, so they can respond in minutes and drop other work when the raise needs it.
• Authority to decide, or a direct line to the person who does, with an agreement that answers come back the same day.
• A view across every workstream: legal, accounting, the platform, marketing, and the company's own team, not just one of them.
• Experience with raises, or enough support from people who have it that they are not learning every step for the first time.

Name the Raise Owner before the work starts, tell every contributor who it is, and route every decision through them. Then let everyone else do the hours.

FAQ

What is a Raise Owner in equity crowdfunding?

The Raise Owner is the one person who directs a crowdfunding raise from planning through the close. Many people do the work; the Raise Owner makes or gets the decisions they need, quickly, and keeps the terms, messaging, calendar, and the legal, technical, and accounting details consistent with each other.

Can the CEO be the Raise Owner?

Only if the CEO can drop everything and respond in minutes whenever the raise needs it. Most CEOs of companies worth investing in cannot, because they are running the company. They are better off naming a Raise Owner and staying available for founder-only work like interviews and the final call on the story.

Does the funding portal manage the raise for you?

Not entirely. A portal hosts the offering and may offer services, but it does not run your internal operations, such as your audit, and as a registered intermediary it cannot make decisions for you, such as what your messaging says. The company still needs its own decision maker.

How much time does running a crowdfunding raise take?

The production work (copy, video, ads, pages, documents) adds up to more than a full-time job and should be spread across several people. The Raise Owner's role is measured less in hours than in availability: being able to answer in minutes and drop other work when the raise needs it.

Why does speed matter so much in a crowdfunding raise?

Because a raise costs money every day it is open: ad spend, payroll, and professional fees. Slow decisions stall the people doing the work, miss the short windows when a message is working, and keep money flowing into ads that are not. The result can be a raise that covers its costs and little else.