How I Work With Business Partners and Cofounders
Sunny Sabbini is a partnership advisor in the San Francisco Bay Area. I work with business partners and cofounders on the partnership itself, and the work produces one thing: an operating system the two of you can actually run on. Decisions that close. Roles that hold. Direction you still share. A partnership prepared for what's coming, and durable enough to hold when it arrives.
Most partnership work starts with a method. Mine starts with a read.
Before anything gets built, I want to know two things. Which part of the partnership stopped keeping pace with the business. And what the next stage of that business is going to ask of the two of you that the current setup was never built to carry. Partners usually arrive with a theory about the first. Almost no one arrives with a theory about the second, and it's often the one that decides how the engagement goes.
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 I'm Reading For
You come in describing a symptom. Decisions that get reopened. A role that was never quite assigned. A conversation the two of you keep almost having.
What I'm reading is the system underneath it.
There are four things in a partnership and they're fitted to each other: each of you and what you can actually carry, your roles as they are rather than as they're written, how the two of you decide together, and whatever has grown up around all of that. That fit is what makes a partnership fast. Two people who can settle a real question in a hallway are producing something a nine-person firm with a policy manual cannot produce.
It was also fitted to a smaller business.
The fit didn't break. The business moved. So I'm reading which of those four the business is now asking something new from, and how far the ask and the current fit have drifted apart.
And sometimes there's no friction yet at all. The partnership is working. What's changing is what's coming. A senior hire who'll need to know whose call something is. A transition, a succession, a sale, further out than today but closer than it feels. An equity conversation you've both been circling. A partner's capacity shifting. None of these wait for the partnership to feel ready.
That read is the work. Everything after it is downstream of getting it right.
If you've been nodding through this, take the 15-point self-check: Is Your Partnership Underbuilt? You'll leave with specific structural language for what's been driving the friction, and will tell you where to start.
Strategy · Systems · Soul
Partnership work happens in three dimensions at once, and the discipline is reading and working in all three together.
Strategy. What each of you is building toward, and whether those two pictures still line up. Partners change. Ambitions change. A partnership's stated direction often doesn't get updated to match, including the harder question of whether the business you're running is still the right vehicle for what's arriving.
Systems. The operating infrastructure that makes intent executable: decision rights, role clarity, operating rhythm, escalation and repair protocols, the leadership signal your team actually receives. Most of what wears partners down lives here. Agreements that were informal at the start and never updated. Decisions relitigated because no one knows whose call it was. Roles described on paper and not experienced as clear by anyone.
Soul. The capacity between you. How each of you handles the hardest calls, what accumulates from moments that never fully closed, and whether either of you can say the real objection while it still matters. This is what makes the structural work hold once the pressure returns.
These aren't three services I run in sequence. They're three things I'm reading at the same time, in every session, because in a partnership they were never separate for long. Strategic clarity changes what's structurally possible. Structure changes what each of you can develop into. Development changes what strategy and structure can carry.
Here's what that looks like in one problem.
A decision that keeps getting reopened. The obvious layer is systems: nobody ever settled whose call it is, so every instance becomes a negotiation. Underneath that is a strategy question, because you can't assign a decision without knowing what you're deciding toward, and two partners can agree on the quarter and disagree on the five years without either of them knowing it. And underneath that is a soul question: whether either of you can say the real objection out loud in the room where the call gets made, or whether it gets carried out of the room and shows up three weeks later as the decision reopening.
Settle the first and leave the other two, and it reopens. That's usually why it reopened the last time somebody tried to fix it.
Most practitioners bring one of these. I trained in all three: organizational design and participatory decision-making through Community at Work, under Sam Kaner; clinical training; and mediation. Clients tell me that combination is the reason they chose this over what else they found.
The Read Comes First
The deeper engagements start with the read, not with the two of you in a room working it out live. Each partner works through a structured process on their own first, independently, before we're ever in the same conversation.
There's a reason for the sequence. Partners who've been circling the same friction for a while have usually stopped being able to hear each other on it. Answering independently means each of you gets to say the thing plainly, once, without managing the other person's reaction while you're saying it. I'm not discovering your partnership. By the time we work together, I already know where your two accounts agree, where they diverge, and which divergence actually matters.
So the time we spend together is about what to build and in what order. Not about establishing what's true.
This is also the part that can't be bought separately. A course sells you a system. A coach works one of you. An offsite produces one good conversation. Each of those can work, and none of them can start with a read, because none of them is built to make one.
How the Work Moves
Five kinds of change, and the order is decided by what the read finds.
Reveal. What's actually running. Not what's written down, and not what either of you would say if asked. What each of you carries, what your roles really are, how decisions actually get made, and what has grown up around all of it.
Repair. The unwritten things that would override anything you write down. Usually something that got absorbed once and became a rule neither of you agreed to and both of you now maintain. A written rule that contradicts an unwritten one loses, quietly, without an argument.
Redesign. Deciding what should run instead, now that you can see what's running.
Rebuild. Building the agreements and running them live against real decisions, so you leave with things you've tested rather than things that sounded right in a room.
Rise. Keeping it current, because conditions keep changing and a fit that's right this year fits less well next year.
You lead the first one with me. By the last one you're leading it without me. That's deliberate.
What I Ask of You
Two things, and they're the same two for every partnership I take.
Both of you committed to the partnership as the thing we're working on. Not one of you building a case.
And both of you willing to look at your own contribution to the pattern. Not as fault. As authorship. You built this together, which is also why you can rebuild it.
Partners who arrive wanting a ruling on who's right aren't a fit for this work, and I'll say so early rather than let us find out three months in. I'm content for that to filter some people out.
One thing worth saying plainly, because it's the question most people are carrying and not asking. I'm not going to tell your partner they're the problem. I don't work that way, and in a partnership it's rarely true. What produced the pattern is the system the two of you are inside, and you're both inside it.
That's also why what gets built tends to hold. The structure works because the two of you become able to run it, and then to change it when it needs changing. That part isn't something I can install.
What I Don't Do
I don't draft legal instruments. When the work produces a change to the partnership agreement, the equity structure, or anything else that has to be executed, your attorney drafts it. I do the work that gets you to that point, and hand it off cleanly.
I don't work with partnerships where one partner is trying to use the process to win against the other. That's a different kind of work, closer to mediation or litigation support, and there are people who do it well. It isn't this.
If what's straining is showing up first as recurring tension, hard conversations that keep going badly, or trust that's worn thin, Conflict2Collaboration.com is the better starting point. Same practitioner. Different door.
Partnership Evolution
Most structural work is built and left. Someone designs the thing, hands it over, and the partnership is on its own with it.
That holds until the next threshold. A partner steps back. You hire above yourselves for the first time. Someone wants out, or wants further in. The structure that fit a nine-person firm doesn't fit an eighteen-person firm, and the version of the two of you that built it isn't automatically the version that has to run it under the next set of conditions.
So the build doesn't have to be where the work ends.
This is what I mean by Partnership Evolution. Most partnership work either repairs the relationship or restructures the org. Partnership Evolution develops the partnership itself, across strategy, systems, and soul, so it keeps growing as capable as the business demands. It isn't a fourth thing alongside resilience, exit-readiness, and preparedness. It's what keeps producing those three as the business keeps changing, instead of leaving you to rebuild them from nothing at the next threshold.
Which is worth being plain about. You can get genuinely well fitted, and you can't stay there without doing something, because the thing you're fitted to keeps moving. That isn't a reason to build less carefully. It's the reason the capacity to keep re-fitting is worth more than any particular version of the structure.
For partnerships that want it, the working relationship continues as the partnership keeps changing.
Where to Start
Start with the Partnership Capacity Check. Ten minutes, self-guided, no score. It puts what's changed in the business next to what hasn't changed in the partnership, so the gap is something you can date. Most people take it alone first.
The Partnership Design Lab is a half-day with a small cohort of partnerships. You leave with a plan built from standard versions and one move you can make that week. The point is momentum. The fee credits toward the Read.
The Partnership Evolution Read is my interpreted read across all three dimensions. You get what's actually binding first, what can wait, and the order to take the rest. Everything beyond this point starts here.
A partnership built for what's next.
Proof and Practitioner
