Advice from someone who has worked inside Shopify, built on it and sold on it. Operator advice for the stage where the last playbook stops working. The calls that move the P&L, at a $5M brand or a Fortune 500.
I advise consumer brands, commerce software companies and Fortune 500 teams on the calls that move the P&L. I don't sell execution, so the advice has nothing riding on it.
I help consumer brands grow from seven to nine figures in annual revenue without giving away margin. Your team and your agencies keep the execution.
I work with commerce software companies, from seed and Y Combinator portfolios to nine-figure ARR, on the link between what the product does and the value its customers get. Positioning and packaging come first, and pricing follows from them.
I bring the startup playbook to Fortune 500 teams losing ground to challengers, while there's still ground to recover.
- Early Shopify employee who helped build and scale the Partner Program
- Raise and exit readiness: the unit economics, the reporting and the story, before anyone opens the data room
- Built Uptime and sold it to Tiny, a publicly traded acquirer on the TSX
- Retained by global CPG, athletic and FMCG leaders
- Built portfolios of consumer brands to mid nine figures in annual revenue
- Raise and exit readiness: the unit economics, the reporting and the story, before anyone opens the data room
- Early Shopify employee who helped build and scale the Partner Program
- Co-founded WIN Brands Group, the acquirer behind Homesick and Qalo
- Advised commerce SaaS from idea to $100M+ ARR
- Raise and exit readiness: the unit economics, the reporting and the story, before anyone opens the data room
- Built Uptime and sold it to Tiny, a publicly traded acquirer on the TSX
- Early Shopify employee who helped grow the Partner Program from dozens of partners to thousands
- Led commerce work for Fortune 500 brands including Nike, P&G and Coca-Cola
- Raise and exit readiness: the unit economics, the reporting and the story, before anyone opens the data room
- Phased, fixed-fee work under your MSA
- Operator on the challenger side: co-founded WIN Brands Group, built Uptime and sold it to Tiny
Featured in WWD · WSJ · CNBC · Time · CBS · Inc · Adweek
Three rings, three kinds of work. Pick the one that sounds like you.
You're here if the top line is growing, the margin isn't, and the next hire is already overdue.
How the consumer work runs →You're here if the founder is still the best salesperson in the building, and everyone knows it.
How the software work runs →You're here if a challenger took the shelf space last year and the internal answer keeps arriving a quarter late.
How the enterprise work runs →And a raise or an offer is nine months out, with numbers that aren't ready yet.
I'm Taylor Sicard. I was an early Shopify employee who helped build and scale the Partner Program, co-founded WIN Brands Group, and sold a software company to Tiny. Now I sit with founders on the calls that move the P&L: channel mix, retention, margin, retail, and the raise or the exit. Your team and your agencies keep the execution. I don't sell execution, so the advice has nothing riding on it.
yrs
Advisor Tenure
& beyond
Trajectories
$100M+
in Commerce SaaS
500
Engagements
- Early employee at Shopify
- Consumer brands & holding cos.
- Exits to publicly traded co.
- DTC, marketplace & retail expansion
- Multiple businesses scaled past nine figures
- M&A, when to scale, profit, buy or sell
- Y Combinator portfolio companies
- Consumer brand exits, IPO, public co. & private equity
- Payments, marketing tech & web infrastructure
- AI tooling for web & commerce
- Venture capital funds, early opportunity identification & portfolio scale-up support
- The world's largest beverage brand
- A global household-goods conglomerate
- A multinational CPG holding co.
- The defining athletic-apparel name
- A global technology platform
How does your store score?
Paste your store URL and in under a minute you get a scored teardown across conversion, SEO, AI search visibility, speed, and trust. The prioritized fix list reads the way an operator would talk you through it. I scored Fashion Nova (97), Kylie (92), and Kith (90) to calibrate it. See where you land.
Shopify & consumer
brand advisory.
Four rings on the mark, four kinds of work. Each card below is written in your voice, so pick the one that sounds like you. What I deliver changes from client to client, and the way I think through the problem stays the same.
I run a
consumer brand
Building consumer brands that grow annual revenue run rate from seven to nine figures, and stay profitable at every step. That covers brand architecture, DTC growth, retail expansion, and the operating systems that hold up through growth without giving away margin. Most of the work is deciding what not to do next: which channel to skip, which SKU to retire, which retail door to turn down this year. Growth that costs more than it returns is easy to buy, and expensive to unwind a year later.
You're here if the top line is growing, the margin isn't, and the next hire is already overdue.
- Brand architecture & positioning
- DTC growth & CAC discipline
- Retail & wholesale strategy
- M&A strategy · when to scale, profit, buy or sell
- Operator coaching
I build commerce
software
From seed and incubators (incl. Y Combinator portfolios) to nine-figure ARR. The work is positioning, pricing architecture, and the GTM shifts most founders get wrong. It usually comes down to what to charge, who to sell to next, and which channel eats more than it brings in. The pricing that won the first hundred customers is usually what stalls the next thousand, and a discount rarely fixes it.
You're here if the founder is still the best salesperson in the building, and everyone knows it.
- Pricing & packaging
- Founder-led → team-led GTM
- Payments, marketing & AI tooling
- Shopify ecosystem strategy
- Partnership & channel strategy
- Building boards of industry experts
I'm on an
enterprise team
For Fortune 500s losing ground to challengers. I bring the startup playbook, adapted to enterprise constraints and put to work while there's still ground to recover. Retained by global CPG, athletic, and FMCG leaders. The bottleneck is usually the distance between an idea and the shelf, plus the number of people inside who can say no along the way. Shortening that path tends to be worth more than another round of new ideas.
You're here if a challenger took the shelf space last year and the internal answer keeps arriving a quarter late.
- Innovation programs & sprints
- Digital-first acquisition
- Brand portfolio strategy
- Acquisition strategy · acquiring rapidly scaling category leaders
- Board-level advisory
I'm raising
or selling
Raising is the likelier outcome, and a round and a sale get priced off the same numbers anyway. Bankers and lawyers run the process. My work happens before it, on the unit economics, the reporting, and the story that has to hold up once someone serious opens the data room.
You're here if a raise or an offer is nine months out and the numbers aren't ready.
- Raise readiness · pre-seed through growth
- Contribution margin & retention cleanup
- Diligence prep · find the flags before they do
- Investor and acquirer narrative
- Inbound offers · real bid or free research
- Sell-side prep & buy-side screens
Where is your brand actually stuck?
Most DTC brands stall at $1M, $5M, or $20M by running the right playbook for the wrong stage. Answer twelve quick questions and I will place you at your inflection point, benchmark your numbers against your category, and show you the moves that fit your stage.
Advised a leading streetwear brand on a Nike / Jordan Brand collaboration release. Hardened bot protection and queue mechanics: tens of thousands of orders cleared in under 180 seconds, one transaction per customer, and bot orders blocked at the door.
Four-year engagement with a bootstrapped SaaS company driving 75% CAGR. Worked alongside the founding team and execs on agency partnerships, product development, product-led growth, strategic hiring, and a beta-feature feedback loop with key accounts.
Sourced and closed a category-defining DTC acquisition for an S&P 500 consumer-goods portfolio: a fast-growing brand with white-space gaps the parent could fill. Several-hundred-million transaction at a double-digit EBITDA multiple. Within months of close: 18% profitability lift and expansion across thousands of retail shelves and marketplaces including Amazon.
A three-person team holding $8M in annual revenue with no clear path to scale. Brought in strategic agency partners for creative and paid media, then opened marketplaces and retail, all without growing headcount and while holding a 40% EBITDA contribution through the entire ramp.
From concept to prototype to app-store submission, then first install through to adoption by many of Shopify's most notable logos. Exited to Tiny, a publicly traded acquirer of category-defining internet businesses.
Migrated a multi-brand portfolio off legacy enterprise platforms and onto Shopify, consolidating disparate systems along the way. Operating overhead came down sharply, and ongoing updates and maintenance now ship on a far faster cadence.
Founder · Investor · Mentor
The operator behind
the operators.
I joined Shopify early to help build and scale the Partner Program. That work gave me a vantage point most people in this space don't have: the infrastructure from the inside, the builders selling into it, and the merchants growing on top of it. From there I co-founded WIN Brands Group and built Uptime from scratch, then sold it to Tiny. I also advised consumer SaaS companies from six-figure ARR to nine figures, and did that work from inside the operating room.
The thread through all of it is pattern recognition. Consumer commerce has a relatively small set of real problems, and most of them repeat. I've seen them at $5M and at $500M, inside Shopify's offices and inside the brands built on top of it. The work I do now comes from that full view: I've been the founder, the operator, the merchant, and the builder, usually all four in the same year.
Full profile →No long pitches.
No fixed templates.
No two engagements look alike. I take on the people and brands I want to work with, where the chemistry's right and the problem is worth solving.
Scoping call
A direct conversation, thirty minutes, no deck and no pitch. We talk about where you are, where you're trying to go, and whether there's a real fit. The call is free, and either of us can stop here. If there is a fit, the next step is The Read.
The Read
An optional first step if you want to test the fit before a longer engagement. Two weeks, a fixed fee from $5,000, and you get a written read across six lenses on what the binding constraint is and what I would do about it first. Sign a tier within 30 days and the fee is credited against your first invoices. You own the document either way.
Pick a tier
Three retainers, one seat. Consulting is a call every two weeks from $6,000 a month. Advisory is a weekly call plus Slack and shared models from $10,000. Partner is two calls a week, a place in your leadership meetings, and my hands on the work from $20,000. No hours tracked at any tier. The full breakdown is on the engagements page.
Graduate
Engagements end when the ROI for either side stops compounding: the client's growth plateaus, the guidance isn't being put to work, or the team has internalized the patterns. The goal is finished work, not standing meetings. Sixty days' notice either side once the minimum term has run, and stepping down a tier is always an option before stopping.
"The thinking partner I didn't know I was missing · until nothing was the same after working together."
After reviewing the customer data, we overhauled the product line and, in parallel, upgraded the agency partnerships for development, creative, and paid media. We also improved the hardware and stood up a premium subscription option alongside it.
The combined effect was more predictable revenue, less dependent on the seasonal cycle. Total revenue grew 467% and EBITDA grew 280% across eighteen months, and subscription became a $6M ARR line of its own.
Operators and founders,
on the writing.
"Some of the best written and thought through content on the Shopify ecosystem. Thanks for sharing them."
"Taylor you are dropping insane amounts of value on the timeline for free lately."
"Crazy that you give this content out for free. Thanks."
"I've been binge-reading your blog a ton lately. It's been super helpful for my company's strategy."
Operator-level
thinking.
Platform transitions, ecosystem strategy, and time-sensitive intelligence for Shopify merchants and SaaS founders. On the creative side, The Handoff pairs live consumer ads with the pages they click through to and rates the gap.
What Breaks Between an Ad and Its Page
243 consumer ads captured beside the exact pages they click through to. Only 55 of 216 rated handoffs keep the promise intact. The six ways the other 161 fail, ranked, with the counts and the fixes.
Shopify Bot Protection Is Blocking Real Buyers
Real shoppers on consumer VPNs and in Meta in-app browsers are hitting blank rate-limited pages. Shopify confirmed a misclassification in August 2026. How to check, and how to size it.
Salesforce Commerce Cloud vs BigCommerce: TCO
A percentage of GMV against a flat fee, modelled over three years at four revenue bands. The gap runs to roughly ten to one, and it widens as you grow.
Who is Taylor Sicard?
Taylor Sicard is a Shopify ecosystem advisor, DTC operator, and SaaS founder with more than 15 years in consumer commerce. He was an early Shopify employee who helped build and scale the Partner Program, co-founded a consumer brand group that grew into the mid nine figures, and founded a software company he later sold to a publicly traded acquirer. He now advises consumer brands and Shopify ecosystem SaaS companies.
What does Taylor Sicard Consulting do?
The practice works across four areas: consumer commerce (DTC strategy, growth, retail, and M&A), consumer SaaS (pricing, go-to-market, and fundraising in the Shopify ecosystem), enterprise innovation for Fortune 500 consumer goods companies, and press and speaking. All four draw on the same operator judgment, from someone who has scaled brands and software directly.
Who does Taylor Sicard work with?
Consumer brands from roughly $5M in revenue up to enterprise, SaaS and app companies in the Shopify ecosystem from six figure ARR and up, and Fortune 500 consumer goods leaders. Engagements are selective, taken where the fit is right and the problem is worth the work.
How do engagements work?
It starts with a free 30 minute scope call, no deck. If there is a fit, you can start with The Read to test it: two weeks, a fixed fee, and a written read of the business, credited back if you sign a tier within 30 days. Or you can go straight to one of three monthly retainers (Consulting, Advisory, or Partner), priced from $6,000 to $25,000 a month depending on how close you need me. All three are published at taylorsicard.com/engagements.
How do I get in touch?
Start a conversation at taylorsicard.com/inquiry or email hello@taylorsicard.com. For press and speaking, use the speaking inquiry form. Taylor is based in Ottawa and works with clients worldwide.
Ready to
get to work?
Engagements begin with a 30-minute scoping call about where you are, where you're going, and whether there's a fit. There is no pitch and no deck.