For Advisors
You're often the first person outside the partnership who sees the pattern clearly.
The CPA looking at two partners who can't agree on a number. The attorney drafting an amendment neither of them is happy with. The coach whose client keeps circling something that isn't really about leadership.
Here's what to do with that.
Sunny Sabbini is a partnership advisor in the San Francisco Bay Area working with
business partners and cofounders whose partnership has outgrown how it was set up.
What You're Looking For
You don't need a diagnosis. You need to recognize a pattern.
The same decision keeps getting reopened, weeks or months apart, because nobody ever settled who has the final call. That's a missing decision rights framework.
The team has quietly learned which partner to ask, and adjusted around it, without either partner noticing. That's a leadership signal the two of them aren't sending coherently.
One partner is visibly carrying more than the other in a way that's never been named out loud.
Something is arriving — a senior hire, an equity conversation, a transition, a sale — and the partnership has no structure built for it.
You don't have to name any of it precisely. If something structural is missing and both partners are still building, that's the signal. The read is her job.
Built for Now, or Built for What’s Next?
The Partnership Capacity Check looks at ten situations growing businesses bring to their partners, and asks one thing of each: can the way you work together now carry it?
Depending on What You Do
If you're an attorney. The gap is usually between the operating agreement and how the business actually runs. You draft what has to be executed. This is the layer underneath, where the decisions get made that your documents end up recording. It isn't mediation and it isn't for partnerships already in dispute.
If you're a therapist or clinician. This doesn't compete with what you do, and it isn't therapy. The unit is the partnership as a working system: decision rights, roles, operating rhythm. If you're working with one founder individually and the friction keeps turning out to be about the business structure they're inside, that's the referral. It runs alongside your work rather than replacing it.
If you're a CPA, fractional CFO, or exit planner. How a partnership is governed shows up in what the business is worth and in whether a transition goes cleanly. Partners who can't close a decision now are partners who won't close one under deal pressure.
If you're a coach or an EOS implementer. You've probably hit the ceiling where the org chart is right and it still doesn't run. That ceiling is usually between the two owners rather than inside the org.
Who Not to Send
Not partnerships in active legal dispute. Not where one partner is unwilling to look at their own part, or is using the process to try to win against the other. Not where one partner privately wants out and hasn't said so.
And if what you're seeing is driving rather than resulting — trust that's eroded, conversations that keep going badly, friction that's the cause rather than the symptom — Conflict2Collaboration.com is the better fit. Same practitioner. Different door.
Sending someone to the wrong door isn't a failure on your part. It just means routing them to the other one.
What Happens When You Send Someone
No surprise sales call.
Whoever you send starts where anyone else starts: the Partnership Capacity Check. Free, ten minutes, no score. It puts what's changed in their business next to what hasn't changed in their partnership, and gives them something specific to say to each other.
Nobody has to go through you to begin. You can simply point them at the site.
If you'd rather make a direct introduction, that's welcome. An email works, and you'll hear back personally.
The Sixty-Second Version
"There's a specific situation I run into fairly often.
A partnership that works, inside a business that's grown past what the partnership was set up for. The same decisions keep reopening. Roles drifted a while back and nobody said so. Each partner is carrying a slightly different picture of who owns what.
It usually doesn't get solved by a better conversation, because what's missing is structural. The agreements two people run a business on — who decides what, what happens under real pressure, how something gets repaired when it goes sideways — mostly never got built, or got built for a smaller company.
There's someone who does exactly that work. Sunny Sabbini, ASCENT Partnership. It won't work if there's an active legal dispute, or if one partner isn't willing to look at their own part. Past that, it's the right call.
Happy to make the introduction."
Why the change matters more than it looks. This sentence gets repeated by the partner who's motivated to the partner who isn't. Anything with a person as the subject arrives as a verdict on the listener. Every sentence above has the partnership or the situation as its subject, which is what lets the reluctant partner hear it as a description rather than an accusation.
If You'd Rather Talk First
No pitch. A conversation about what you're seeing and whether it's a fit.