Two founders, eighteen months of unresolved decision authority, and a deal in the pipeline blocked by internal stasis. Decision-rights memo, weekly cadence install, fifteen decisions made in the next six weeks.
The situation
A two-founder beauty business in South East Asia reached us with a deal in their pipeline that had been “ninety percent done” for four months. The cause was not the counterparty. It was internal. The two founders had built the business together for five years on an unwritten agreement about who decided what. When the deal landed, the unwritten agreement could not carry the weight of the decision. Every conversation about the term sheet became a negotiation about who had the right to negotiate it.
The dispute looked like personality friction. Underneath, it was three unwritten decisions that should have been on a single page eighteen months earlier.
The work
The Decision Rights Memo engagement. Two ninety-minute sessions per founder, separately. One two-hour joint session to surface and test the lines. The deliverable was a signed one-page memo covering eight categories of decision: strategy, capital, hiring, pricing, standards, partnerships, communications, capital structure. Each category named one owner. Each had a threshold above which joint sign-off applied.
Alongside the memo, we installed the weekly cadence. The five-number scoreboard, the 45-minute meeting, the decision slot.
The outcome
The deal closed within six weeks of the memo being signed. Fifteen decisions that had been queued got made in the same window. The founders described the difference as “we are arguing about the same things, but the arguments end.”
What we worked
Decision Rights Memo (fixed engagement), Operating System Install, then Founder Advisory Retainer.
The pattern this engagement surfaced
Co-founder disputes almost never read as decision-rights problems from the inside. They read as personality friction, value misalignment, or trust erosion. The structural cause is usually that the team has never written down three or four basic decision-ownership questions. The memo is the cheapest piece of structural work I install. It is also the one that consistently has the largest downstream impact on the founder relationship.
The first conversation about a similar engagement starts with a Discovery Exchange.