What a Decision-Rules Document Actually Looks Like

A practical look at the doc a founder-led firm should write before a senior hire walks in. What's inside it row by row, what isn't, and where a Blueprint fits when the writing has stalled.

By Wednesday, most founders reading along have the format. The eight rows are clear. The three columns are clear. The block is usually about what the doc looks like once it's filled in.

The honest answer is this. A hireable Decision-Rules Document is more concrete than what most founder-led firms write when they sit down to "write the rules." The format is the surface. The content is the real doc. The first 90 days will go well or badly based on whether both exist.

This post is about what's in it. Not the shape. The actual written rules, with a worked example for each of the eight rows.

The example firm

To make this concrete, the examples below use a made-up firm. A 14-person fractional CMO firm. $4M in yearly revenue. Founder still in delivery. The firm is about to bring in a Director of Delivery to own quality review and to split capacity across 6 senior consultants.

The role passed the readiness scorecard at 6 of 8. The decision is made. The offer is in motion. The doc is what the hire reads in week one.

Each row below is what one row of that firm's doc might read. Not a template. An example in plain language, at the level of detail the worksheet asks for.

Eight rows, worked

Row 1. Pricing exceptions

Rule: Standard engagements price in the $40k to $120k band per quarter, depending on consultant mix. Discounts up to 10% require sign-off from the Director of Delivery. Discounts above 10% require founder approval.

Exception: Named strategic accounts (currently 3 accounts, listed in Appendix A) price at the band agreed at relationship start, with annual increases of 5% unless renegotiated. Discounts on strategic accounts are not discounted from list; they are priced from the strategic-account band.

Escalation threshold: Any pricing that would set a precedent across multiple accounts, any discount above 15%, or any pricing involving a multi-year commitment longer than 18 months, escalates to the founder.

That's a row. It's specific. It has thresholds. It has named exceptions. The Director of Delivery can read it and act.

Row 2. Scope creep

Rule: Out-of-scope asks under 10% of remaining engagement value can be absorbed by the senior consultant team without a change order, with the Director of Delivery informed within 48 hours. Asks between 10% and 20% require a written change order signed by the client and the Director. Asks above 20% trigger a re-scope conversation.

Exception: New engagements in their first 30 days carry an additional 5% absorption tolerance, because scope is still being calibrated and small adds during ramp are part of the relationship-building cost.

Escalation threshold: Any scope change above 20%, any cumulative change history above 30% on a single engagement, or any change involving a deliverable category not in the original engagement, escalates to the founder.

Row 3. Client escalations

Rule: Client concerns on deliverable quality, timeline, or team interaction are owned end-to-end by the Director of Delivery, with the founder informed by Friday end-of-week summary. Concerns involving a request to change the assigned senior consultant are co-decided by the Director and the founder. Concerns involving the firm's strategic positioning or the founder's prior commitments are escalated to the founder immediately.

Exception: The 3 named strategic accounts (Appendix A) carry an additional protocol: the founder is informed within 24 hours of any concern, regardless of category, even if the Director is owning resolution.

Escalation threshold: Any concern that involves a written client demand for refund, any concern raised at the executive level above the day-to-day client point of contact, or any concern that would require pausing delivery, escalates to the founder immediately.

Row 4. Refund authority

Rule: Director of Delivery can issue partial credits up to $5,000 per engagement without checking, applied to the next invoice cycle. Credits between $5,000 and $15,000 require founder approval. Credits above $15,000, or any full-engagement refund, require founder approval and a written internal post-mortem.

Exception: Standing-policy credits per the engagement contract (e.g., service-level credits for missed delivery dates per stated SLA) are issued automatically by the Director with no approval required, regardless of dollar value.

Escalation threshold: Any credit above $15,000, any full refund, or any credit that would set a precedent across accounts, escalates to the founder.

Row 5. Hiring authority

Rule: Director of Delivery owns hiring decisions for senior consultant roles below $180k base, including final offer authority within stated comp bands. Roles between $180k and $250k base are co-decided by the Director and the founder. Roles above $250k base, any role with equity component, or any role reporting directly to the founder, are decided by the founder with the Director consulted.

Exception: Replacement hires for departing senior consultants below $180k can be decided by the Director without founder sign-off, even if the replacement comp moves up to $200k, as long as the firm's total senior-consultant comp envelope holds.

Escalation threshold: Any role above $250k, any role with a non-standard structure (equity, profit share, retainer-plus-bonus), or any termination of a senior consultant who has been with the firm more than 24 months, escalates to the founder.

Row 6. Vendor selection

Rule: Director of Delivery can sign vendor contracts up to $25k annual contract value without checking. Contracts between $25k and $75k require a written one-paragraph rationale to the founder before signing. Contracts above $75k require founder sign-off.

Exception: Existing-vendor renewals at the same or lower contract value can be signed by the Director regardless of contract size, as long as the renewal is on existing terms or better.

Escalation threshold: Any contract above $75k, any multi-year contract with a commitment longer than 18 months, or any vendor in a strategic-tier category (currently: brand identity, audit, legal counsel), escalates to the founder.

Row 7. Project sequencing

Rule: When inbound exceeds capacity, the Director of Delivery sequences using this ranking: (1) named strategic accounts, (2) renewal-at-risk accounts, (3) accounts with the highest revenue-per-consultant-week ratio, (4) accounts in their first 90 days. Capacity allocation runs weekly, decisions documented in the Monday operations meeting.

Exception: Founder-named priority engagements (typically 1 to 2 per quarter, named by the founder at quarter-start in the strategic review) take precedence over all other sequencing logic for as long as the priority designation holds.

Escalation threshold: Any sequencing decision that would defer a strategic account by more than two weeks, any decision that would require declining a renewal opportunity, or any quarter where the firm is at or above 90% utilization for more than 4 consecutive weeks, escalates to the founder.

Row 8. Quality bar

Rule: A deliverable is ready to ship when (a) it answers the brief originally agreed, (b) the senior consultant on the engagement has signed off in writing, (c) it has been formatted to the firm's deliverable template, (d) the executive summary fits on one page and is reviewed by the Director of Delivery. We do not ship if any of these is no.

Exception: Engagements above $100k carry an additional gate: the Director of Delivery reviews the full deliverable, not just the executive summary. Engagements involving a new service line carry a third gate: the founder reviews until the firm has shipped 5 deliverables in that line.

Escalation threshold: Any deliverable above $100k engagement value where the Director has a quality concern, any deliverable in a new service line, or any deliverable a client has formally objected to in the last 30 days, escalates to the founder for review before shipping.

What the document is not

A Decision-Rules Document, as we mean it, is not the org chart. The org chart is who reports to whom. This doc is who decides what.

It is also not the strategic plan. It does not say what the firm should become. It says how the firm runs today and where this hire fits in.

It is not a handbook either. It is specific to this role and this hire, not a general operating doc for the firm. (Though writing it often surfaces gaps that need to become a general operating doc later.)

And it is not a permanent document. It is the doc for the first 12 months. After a year in the role, the rules settle. The exceptions shift. The escalation thresholds widen. The founder's involvement narrows. The doc is the starting point, not the steady state.

When the writing needs an outside pressure test

Some founders can write the doc themselves. Firm size, the founder's writing muscle, and how much the role overlaps with the founder's own work all factor in. When the founder can do it cleanly in two to four hours of focused work, that's the right path.

Some can't, or can but won't. The writing often feels less urgent than the work already on the calendar. Two patterns to flag in self-led writing that doesn't get done.

The rule is judgment, not text. The founder knows the pricing logic, the quality bar, the scope rule. But writing them down is a different task than applying them. The doc gets started, reaches two rows, and stalls.

The second pattern is naming spending thresholds, refund limits, and authority bands. Each one needs a real call the founder hasn't made yet. Most founders prefer the unwritten version, even though the unwritten version is what creates the cc-the-founder pattern. And when the founder writes the strategic-account exception, they sometimes find the strategic-account list isn't written down anywhere either. That gap is worth surfacing before the role goes live.

The Altvina Blueprint is the fixed-scope engagement built to get this work unstuck. It is a diagnosis, not a ghostwriting service. It does not write the firm's Decision-Rules Document for them. What it delivers is a Bottleneck Diagnosis that names why the rules keep routing through the founder, an Operating Roadmap that puts the rule-writing in order against the firm's other operational work, and a Decision Framework: the structure for the recurring decisions the firm currently handles inconsistently. The framework tells the founder which categories belong in the doc and what each row needs to settle. It also surfaces the categories that aren't really decision-rules problems but positioning or pricing problems in disguise.

A firm walks out of a Blueprint knowing exactly which rows its Decision-Rules Document needs, what each row has to resolve, and where the rule-writing sits in the larger sequence of fixes. The founder writes the 2 to 4 page doc itself, against that framework, so the senior hire walks into a written surface, not a moving target. If you'd rather start with the worksheet on your own, the printable 8-row version is at altvina.com/assets/decision-rules-worksheet.pdf.

When the writing doesn't need outside help

Naming where a Blueprint doesn't fit is part of how we earn the recommendation where it does.

If you've already written the eight rows, the rules are concrete, and the exceptions and thresholds are set, the doc may be done. The test: a peer reads it and confirms they could act on it without checking with you. A Blueprint at that point is buying writing you don't need.

If the senior hire is starting in less than 30 days and the doc is most of the way written, finish it on your own. Check in with the hire in week one. Don't pause for an outside engagement.

If the bottleneck is acute, a senior person leaving in 30 days, a client renewal at risk, a delivery quality crisis already in motion, the next 30 days are triage, not architecture. The Blueprint is for the next quarter, not the next month.

The Blueprint is the right step for a firm that has decided to hire and has 8 to 12 weeks of runway before the role must be filled. It also fits firms that have tried writing the rules in-house and stalled on three or more rows. An outside view can pressure-test rules against patterns that look the same from the inside but produce very different hires.

Closing

The Altvina Blueprint turns "we should write the rules down" into a clear plan for doing it: a diagnosis of why the rules still live in the founder's head, a roadmap that orders the writing against the firm's other work, and a decision framework that tells the founder which rows the doc needs and what each one must resolve. The founder writes the doc from that framework. For a founder-led firm with three or more starred rows on the worksheet and the time to act this quarter, the Blueprint is the highest-leverage next move. Bringing the hire in against an undocumented surface costs more than pausing to write it.

Tomorrow's post closes the week with the most expensive non-handoff in fractional firms. It covers the "trust your judgment" framing and the pattern that produces capable senior people who never quite become autonomous.

Continue the series

This is part 4 of a 5-part series on The Decision-Rules Document Your Next Hire Should Inherit. The full arc:

• Monday: When Founder-Judgment Becomes a Routing Tax
• Tuesday: What It Costs the New Hire When the Rules Live in Your Head
• Wednesday: The 8-Row Decision-Rules Format
• Thursday: What a Decision-Rules Document Actually Looks Like (this post)
• Friday: Why "Trust Your Judgment" Is a Non-Handoff

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