In a recent LinkedIn post, Sara Simmonds shares valuable insights drawn from her extensive experience as a buyer, aiming to demystify the decision-making process for founders seeking investment and partnerships. Simmonds, who previously controlled over $100 million in purchasing decisions at prominent retail companies like River Island and Harvey Nichols, asserts that many brilliant founders are overlooked not due to the quality of their products, but because they fail to anticipate a crucial question every buyer implicitly asks.
Simmonds highlights the disconnect she observed between the innovative potential of founders and their ability to navigate the buyer’s perspective.
“The most brilliant founders, award winners, sustainability leaders, category innovators, were being filtered out. Not because their products were not good enough. But because they could not answer the one question every buyer silently asks before they say yes.”
This observation, Simmonds explains, was a significant catalyst for her career transition. After years of witnessing this pattern, she decided to leverage her insider knowledge to support founders.
From Buyer to Bridge-Builder: A System for Founder Success
Sara Simmonds transitioned from her role as a high-level buyer to developing a system designed to provide founders with the strategic intelligence that resides on the buyer’s side of the table. She emphasizes that this intelligence is not merely about product merit but about understanding the buyer’s specific needs, concerns, and decision-making frameworks.
Simmonds points out the tangible results this intelligence can yield, citing specific examples of founders who have achieved significant growth and success after implementing her insights. She states:
“I left my buying career and built a system to give founders the intelligence that lives on the other side of the table.”
The effectiveness of this approach is further underscored by the success stories she shares, illustrating the impact of this buyer-centric intelligence on real-world business outcomes. As Simmonds notes, the goal is to equip founders with the specific knowledge that can unlock significant opportunities.
Empowering Founders with Buyer Intelligence
Simmonds’s initiative aims to bridge the information gap that often hinders promising ventures. She believes that by providing founders with a clear understanding of the buyer’s mindset, they can significantly improve their pitches and increase their chances of securing crucial deals and investments.
She further elaborates on the practical application of this intelligence:
“The same intelligence that took Marissa from invisible to a $200K sold out launch. The same intelligence that helped Laura grow profit by 30% in 30 days.”
Through her weekly newsletter, Simmonds offers a direct channel for founders to access this valuable, actionable intelligence. She makes it clear that this is a deliberate effort to democratize the kind of insights that were once exclusive to those making multi-million dollar purchasing decisions. This strategic sharing of knowledge is designed to level the playing field, enabling more innovative founders to gain the traction they deserve.
📝 About This Content
This article is based on insights shared by Sara Simmonds on LinkedIn.
📅 Originally posted on March 16, 2026 | View original post on LinkedIn →