“Stop waiting for the cheese”: when to pivot, pause or push on — Interview with Lisa Brook

2025’s new reality for founders

If the UK’s current funding landscape proves anything, it’s that stamina now matters as much as story. In 2024. total equity investment in the UK dipped by 2.5% to £10.8 billion, the lowest since 2018¹. Founders who once expected to close in six months are now spending considerably longer, many taking well beyond that to complete a round, as investors tighten due diligence and deal cycles lengthen across 2024–25.

Lisa Brook has lived through both ends of the cycle. An engineer-turned-entrepreneur who helped launch GHD straighteners before founding and selling multiple companies, she now runs The Investors Panel, matching early-stage founders with aligned investors. Her vantage point across hundreds of pitches each year has given her a blunt perspective on what’s broken.

“Founders think the problem is money,” she says, “but it’s usually clarity. If you can’t explain what problem you solve and how you’ll scale, investors can’t say yes — even if they want to.”

From hair straighteners to high growth

Brook’s career began not in venture capital but in a Marconi workshop, one of the first female engineering apprentices in her cohort. After roles at IBM and in product development for the Guinness family, she co-founded a global import and export business in the hair and beauty sector that became one of the first distributors of GHD irons.

That experience, she says, taught her more about risk than any MBA could. She grew the business from a spare room to multi-million-pound turnover, then lost it overnight when GHD was sold and her handshake agreement evaporated.

“It was a huge lesson,” she recalls. “We’d built everything on trust. No shareholders’ agreement, no safety net. When they sold, we had twelve months’ notice to wind everything down.”

It’s why her first piece of advice for founders today is deceptively simple: get the paperwork right before the headlines hit.

The investor’s lens: what’s changed since 2020

At The Investors Panel, Brook and her co-founder, Jeff Jones and their team work with founders from seed to Series A, working across a range of sectors including edtech, healthtech, life sciences and cyber. She’s seen firsthand how the funding landscape has shifted.

“Five years ago, if you sent a decent deck, someone would look at it,” she says. “Now, it’s like applying for a job through an algorithm. If you don’t have a warm introduction, you don’t exist.”

This tracks with wider data: the British Business Bank’s Nations and Regions Tracker 2025 shows only 44 equity deals per 100 high-growth enterprises in London compared with 14 elsewhere a stark reminder of how access still clusters in established networks².

Brook’s solution is human, not technical. Her firm maintains direct relationships with more than hundreds of investors, updating profiles manually to reflect shifting appetite in sectors or specific business models. “It’s not about volume,” she says. “It’s about fit. If I send an investor something irrelevant, they’ll stop reading everything we send.”

The myth of speed: why raising now takes twice as long

Brook estimates that a well-prepared raise now takes nine to twelve months end-to-end. “Founders think it’s six weeks,” she says. “It’s not. Even when you’ve got term sheets, you can lose three months just getting everyone to sign.”

It's hard to map just how long rounds are taking to close, especially at the earlier stages, but her observation aligns with data that shows the time from launch to Series C has nearly doubled in the UK, since 2019 to 9.6 years³.

The practical implication for founders: plan for the long haul.

“Work out your burn rate properly,” Brook advises. “If you’ve got six months of runway left, you should have started fundraising three months ago.”

Communicate clearly, and avoid these red flags

The biggest issue Brook sees isn’t a lack of capital; it’s poor communication. “A lot of decks still don’t answer the basic question: what problem are you solving?” she says.

She points to three recurring red flags:

• Over-engineering the pitch. “Some founders bury investors in jargon. If they can’t explain it to me in 30 seconds, the investor won’t get it either.”
• Vague financials. “Numbers need to make sense. If you show revenue without explaining customer-acquisition costs or payback time, it’s smoke and mirrors.”
• No exit plan. “If you say, ‘I never want to exit,’ that’s fine — but don’t ask for investor money. They’re looking for a return within five years.”

This gap between presentation and reality is widening, she says, because the tools have improved faster than the understanding. She often sees founders relying on highly polished decks, but warns that presentation alone won’t carry a raise. If a founder can’t clearly explain their numbers, competition or pipeline when investors dig deeper, “a fancy deck won’t save you.”

When to pivot, and when to walk away

Brook’s bluntest insights come from experience. After the GHD fallout, she rebuilt several businesses, some to exit, others to closure. She recalls the hardest decision: “Sitting alone in an office and admitting, this isn’t working.”

She often shares a parable from Who Moved My Cheese? — a mouse that starves because it keeps returning to the same spot to collect a meal long after the person who once fed it has moved out. “Founders do the same,” she says. “They keep thinking, it’ll get better so I’ll wait it out. Sometimes you have to stop digging.”

Yet Brook insists that failure isn’t fatal. “The hardest job is actually to turn around and sit there in the cold light of day in your office and think, I've got to close this.” Founders need to get better at communicating the lessons learned from past experiences, especially the negative ones.

“It’s not shameful to close a business,” she says. “The only failure is not learning anything from it.”

Quality over quantity: rebuilding investor confidence

Asked about the state of deal quality in 2025, Brook is candid. “Investors complain they’re drowning in bad decks. They’re not wrong.”

According to the British Business Bank, early-stage deal volumes were down in 2024, but average round sizes are up, proof that investors are doubling down on fewer, stronger opportunities¹.

Brook sees the same pattern: “Investors want proof, not potential. They’ll wait for traction before they even book a meeting.”

That shift has pushed founders to focus more on fundamentals. She cites one edtech client who recently closed a £1.1 million round after spending three years refining their model. “They survived because they updated investors every month — what changed, what improved. Momentum is everything.”

Still, Brook is no pessimist. “The money’s there,” she insists. “It’s just more discerning.” The recent activity she's been involved with shows investors haven’t disappeared, but may have recalibrated their activity.

The most recent data suggests Brook’s optimism may be well founded, showing a rebound in UK venture activity in Q3 2025 to $9 billion in the quarter, the highest since 2022⁴ and bucking the downward trend reported in Q1 and Q2 2025, and off the back of 2024. “If your numbers stack up and your story makes sense, you’ll still get funded,” Brook says. “Investors want to back conviction, not perfection.”

Actionable tips

Brook distils her experience into a few practical rules:

1. Clarity first. Define the problem you solve before you open Excel.
2. Build relationships early. “Investors invest in people they already know,” she says. Warm introductions aren’t optional, they’re strategy.
3. Know your burn. Map 18 months of runway; start fundraising when you hit nine at the latest.
4. Prepare your data room. “If an investor asks for information, you should respond within 24 hours, not two weeks.”
5. Accept that it takes time. Timelines have stretched sharply since 2020; plan accordingly.

“Founders think the problem is money, but it’s usually clarity.”

For Brook, every cycle — boom or bust — comes back to the same human constant: belief balanced by realism. “You need confidence to start a company,” she says. “But you need humility to know when to ask for help.”

In a market where capital concentration is rising and patience is thinning, her message feels refreshingly grounded. Founders can’t control macroeconomics but they can control preparation, communication and honesty.

“Don’t wait for the cheese to come back,” she says with a smile. “Move faster. Move smarter. Just make sure you know where you’re going.”

Key takeaways for founders

• Start building investor relationships months before you raise
• Keep pitch materials simple and consistent with your numbers
• Understand your burn rate and fundraising timeline
• Don’t treat failure as final — reuse what works, learn from what doesn’t
• Always prepare for due diligence before the first meeting

References

1. Small Business Equity Tracker 2025 | British Business Bank – https://www.british-business-bank.co.uk/about-research-and-publications/small-business-equity-tracker-2025
2. Nations and Regions Tracker 2025 | British Business Bank – https://www.british-business-bank.co.uk/about/research-and-publications/nations-and-regions-tracker-2025
3. Tech Nation Report 2025 | Tech Nation – https://report.technation.io/
4. UK Innovation Update Q3 2025 | Dealroom/HSBC – https://dealroom.co/reports/uk-innovation-update-q3-2025‍
5. The Entrepreneurs Survey 2025 | The Entrepreneurs Network – https://www.tenentrepreneurs.org/entrepreneurs-survey

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