Control is not one thing. Board seats, reserved matters, drag and tag, and the difference between owning less of your business and having less say in it.
When founders hear the word majority, they picture handing over the keys. Someone else’s name on the door, someone else deciding who gets hired, what gets quoted, how the work gets done.
That picture is wrong, but it’s wrong in an instructive way. Control is not one thing. It’s a bundle of different rights, and in a well-built deal, that bundle gets divided deliberately, on paper, before anyone signs anything. Founders who understand the bundle negotiate deals they can live with. Founders who treat control as a single yes-or-no question get surprised later, and the surprises are never pleasant.
Having been on both sides of these transactions, here is the bundle, unpacked.
Day one, nothing moves
Start with what a good deal does not change, because it’s more than people expect.
We say it half-jokingly, but we mean it: we don’t turn up and start putting our things in your drawers. The founder keeps the same desk, the same team, and the same decisions on the things that fill a week: who gets hired, how jobs are priced, which work gets taken, how it gets delivered. Nobody from our side is in the business pulling levers, and we’re not the expert in your trade. You are. A partnership that fails to respect that fails, full stop.
What changes is where the biggest calls get made. Taking on serious debt. Major capital spending. Buying or selling a business. Changing the shareholding. Those move to a board where founder and partner sit together. In practice it’s a far narrower list than the word “control” suggests.
The bundle, piece by piece
Ownership percentage is the economics: who gets what share of profits, and of the proceeds if the business is ever sold. It’s the number everyone fixates on, and by itself it decides less about your daily life than any other item on this list.
Board composition is the forum for the big calls above. Seats and votes are set in the shareholders agreement, and they don’t have to mirror the shareholding.
Reserved matters are the list of decisions that require specific approval no matter who holds the majority. This is the piece founders most often don’t know exists, and it’s the one that protects a minority holder with actual teeth. If the list is thoughtful, a majority partner cannot restructure the shares, sell the assets, load the business with debt or remove a director without you.
Drag-along and tag-along sound like jargon and matter enormously. Drag-along: if the whole business is sold, the majority can require everyone to sell on the same terms, because buyers want 100 per cent. Tag-along is your mirror protection: if the majority ever sells its stake, you have the right to sell yours on the same terms, rather than waking up minority partner to a stranger you never chose. One protects the deal. The other protects you.
Your role is the last piece, and the one to get in writing. Director, managing the day to day, on defined terms, in the shareholders agreement. Not offered as a courtesy. If a prospective partner is vague on this piece, that vagueness is the answer.
Ring-fencing: control of the downside
There’s a version of control nobody asks about in the first meeting and everybody appreciates later: containment.
In our model, every business stays its own entity, with its own board and its own name over the door. What happens in one doesn’t reach the others. And when the group’s growth engine works on a business, that work is contracted at arm’s length, priced and documented like any supplier, so nobody’s equity quietly leaks away in fees to the parent. Mistakes stay contained. Wins compound.
No two deals are the same
We’ve now been through this enough times to say it with confidence: every deal we’ve done has looked structurally different, because the structure follows the intention. A founder staging toward retirement over five years needs different paper than one who wants capital and a partner for a ten-year build.
Which leads to the observation I’d offer any founder heading into a negotiation. The paperwork should reflect an intention you’ve both already agreed on in plain language. If the legals turn adversarial on day one, if every clause becomes a trust battle, that’s not a documents problem. That’s a red flag about the partnership itself, and it runs in both directions. We’d walk away from that deal, and you should too.
The question that actually matters
So skip “what percentage am I keeping” as your first question. Ask this instead: which decisions can I make alone, which ones need the table, and is that list written down?
Percentages describe who owns the business. That list describes what running it will actually feel like for the next decade.
On our approach page we say it plainly and I’ll repeat it here: in the formal sense, yes, you give up control when you take on a majority partner. What you buy with it is a board that can back a decision with capital instead of arguing about it for six months, a business that stops depending on one person, and a partner who loses if you lose. For the right founder, that trade isn’t the cost of the deal. It’s the point of it.