A trade with clients is not yet a company

The problem it solves

A venture that is working shows a sign that looks like a good one: everybody who calls asks for the founder. The reputation is theirs, the judgement is theirs, the price is settled by them in each conversation, and the money moves in and out of somewhere that is also theirs. While the volume stays manageable, none of that hurts.

It begins to hurt as the company grows. Every quote goes back to the founder because nobody else knows what is charged or what is included, and what is included has drifted without anyone writing it down. The client who came by referral came by referral to him, not to the company, and expects him in the room. The company's numbers and the household's share a history, so the question of whether the business makes money has no clean answer. And almost any work gets accepted, because saying no still feels like losing.

None of those is a problem of effort, though effort is what pays for them: the founder's calendar becomes the limit on what the company can take on, and every new client adds hours to the founder rather than capacity to the company. They are problems of structure: the business never came to exist as an entity separate from the person who started it, and until it does there is nothing to delegate, sell, expand or pass on.

What it covers

The program runs in spaced sessions and on the participant's own company, because the separation between a business and a person does not happen in a room. It happens in the decisions of the weeks in between, which is exactly what gets examined on returning. The program does not ask the founder to step aside; it asks the company to acquire, piece by piece, what currently exists only in the founder: an offer, an economy, a name and a criterion.

The first block builds the offer: what the company sells, with what scope, on what terms and against what pricing criterion, so that a quote can go out without the founder approving it. An offer that depends on the owner's judgement in every case is not an offer. It is a consultation. The test is a set of recent requests quoted from the written offer alone: every time the founder has to be asked, a gap appears, to be closed before the next session.

The second block separates the economy. The company comes to hold its own money, its own commitments and a defined way of paying the person who founded it, so the question of whether the business stands on its own can be answered. The third works on the name: how the company introduces itself, who is allowed to speak for it, and what happens to the referrals and the relationships that today belong to an individual. Those relationships get inventoried, and for each one the group decides who else starts to appear and when the company begins handling it without the founder.

The last block is the most uncomfortable and the one that changes the trajectory: what work the company stops accepting. A company that turns nothing down does not have a strategy, it has a full calendar. Each participant brings real engagements, accepted and declined, and runs them through the criterion as it takes shape; the ones that do not fit cleanly are argued in the group until the rule settles them, because a criterion that only works on the easy cases is no help in saying no.

Participants leave with an offer someone else can quote from, the economic separation settled down to the founder's pay, a plan for moving relationships across to the company, and an acceptance criterion tested against real engagements: decisions that used to be made in a conversation with the founder, now standing as company rules. Separating a company from its founder does not fit inside any single one of ALUD's engines: the offer is a matter for Growth, the money for Finance and the acceptance criterion for Strategy, and none holds while the others remain in one person's hands.

What participants learn

• Define the company's offer, with scope, terms and pricing criterion, so it does not need the founder's approval case by case.
• Separate the company's economy from the founder's, including how the company pays them.
• Move reputation and relationships from a personal name to the company's name.
• Write the criterion by which the company accepts or declines an engagement.
• Identify which decisions stop being conversations and become rules of the company.

Agenda

1. 01Venture and company: what exactly separates one from the other
2. 02The defined offer: scope, terms and price without asking the owner
3. 03Quoting without the founder: what has to be written first
4. 04The company's own economy and how the founder gets paid
5. 05What can be answered once the business holds its own money
6. 06The name: personal reputation, company reputation, and who speaks for it
7. 07Referrals and relationships that currently belong to a person
8. 08Choosing the work: the acceptance criterion and the cost of saying yes to everything

What the organization leaves with

• A written offer, with scope, terms and pricing criterion, usable by someone who is not the founder.
• A structure for separating company and founder economically, with the founder's compensation defined.
• A plan for moving relationships and referrals from the personal name to the company's.
• A written acceptance and refusal criterion, with the borderline cases already settled.