Five questions before any engagement
Most engagements that fail were always going to fail. The signals were there before contracts were signed.
Before I take on any engagement, I ask the same five questions. They aren't designed to qualify the business; they're designed to qualify the work, and whether it's the kind of work that will actually stick.
- Are you ready for the system to lead, or just to tolerate it? Tolerating process while overriding it on instinct is worse than no process at all. It builds the friction without the freedom.
- Do you want an operator, or someone to execute your decisions faster? The first is a colleague. The second is a bottleneck in different clothes.
- What have you tried to delegate that came back to you, and why? Every founder has a list. Reading it tells me where the system is missing, and which instincts the work is going to have to design around.
- When the data disagrees with your instinct, what wins? This is the cleanest test of whether governance will land. If the answer is always instinct, the data layer never gets built.
- What does my exit from this engagement look like? The honest answer reveals whether you're buying capability or buying capacity. Capability has a handover. Capacity doesn't.
When the answers line up, the work is clean. When they don't, the engagement spends its first six months relitigating the questions instead of doing the work.
The questions are the work, before the work begins.
From team to institution
Weber, Huntington and Fukuyama on the moment a founder-led business stops being a growth problem and becomes an authority problem.
The best thing an operator can do for a founder is give them their job back
The founder isn't holding on because they're controlling. They're holding on because the system that would make it safe to let go doesn't exist yet.
