The Local Partner

What this pack runs.

A local partner is a company that already has the ground you need: the supply chains, the sites, the permissions, and the people. It is paid with a share of the venture and a share of its decisions, and that share is priced twice. On the way in it is priced against what the partner brings, at a moment when the venture is worth nothing and half of nothing is easy to give. On the way back, when the venture has worked and you want all of it, the same share is priced against what the venture has become. Almost every room prices the first and none prices the second, and the second is the larger number. By the time the way back reaches an agenda the partner has usually been reclassified from the reason the venture exists into an obstacle to owning it, and the argument is about fifty against fifty-one. That is not the comparison. This pack turns it into two annuities and one division. What the venture earns at scale, across the years after it reaches scale alone and with the partner, less what each route costs, is what the ground is worth. Against it: the partner's share of profit while they hold it, what sharing control costs, and the buyout price, which is the partner's share priced on success. Both costs that carry the share are straight lines in it, so the whole question reduces to the break-even hand-over, how much of the venture you can hand over before going alone is cheaper. A second distance falls out of the same rows: the break-even buyout multiple, the most the partner's share can be priced at before keeping the partner is cheaper than buying them out. It stops on two halts: no one has written down what entering alone would take, and no one has priced the way back.

The casebooks these cases come from.

The pack reads nine sourced decisions through the framework. They are drawn from these casebooks, each one a set of verified records on a single decision type.

A verified record has passed a mechanical claim-versus-source check, a second model's read, and human approval. The count is what exists today, not a target.