How this engagement works.
Five short sections. Read them once.
Before any of the four proposals make sense, the vocabulary needs to be common ground. These are the five terms that carry the document — Steering Committee, PMO, Workstream, Workstream Lead, G4 cutover — and how Phase 1 becomes Phase 2.
Mathew — before we get into the commercial structure, indulge me five paragraphs of plain English. The language I use through the rest of this document — Steering Committee, PMO, Workstream Lead, G4 cutover, build-out, BAU — is the operating vocabulary I have spent twenty-plus years inside Big-4 engagements making fluent. I want you fluent in it too, because this document is a project plan you will live inside for the next thirteen weeks, and then a business you will run for five years after that. Five short sections. Read them once. Everything afterwards reads cleanly.
0.1 What a Steering Committee is
The Steering Committee is the small fortnightly forum where the Client (you, Mathew), the two Providers (me and Corrina), and any standing observers sit together for sixty to ninety minutes and decide: is the project on track, what needs to move, and what does the Client need to sign off in the next two weeks for the project to keep advancing.
In Phase 1 we run six Steerco meetings across thirteen weeks — a tight fortnightly cadence chosen because Phase 1 is a short, milestone-heavy build. Each Steerco gets a paper. The paper has three jobs: (i) a snapshot of where every workstream stands against its plan, (ii) a decision queue of items needing your signature this fortnight, and (iii) a forward look at what is moving in the next two weeks. The Phase 1 Steerco cadence and the executive summary I will be tabling each fortnight is already mapped — you can read every paper today at /engagement/pmo.
What Phase 1 Steerco is specifically for: locking the build-out content for the four workstreams that are not yet Implemented (WS3 Founder Capability, WS4 Legal, WS6 BDM-Vertical 1) plus the operating cadences of the three that already are (WS1, WS2, WS7). Six meetings, every one of which moves at least one workstream further right along the maturity ladder. By Steerco #6, every workstream is at Implemented, and Phase 1 closes by signing the Phase 2 Schedule on the same parchment.
0.2 What a PMO is (and what mine does for you)
A Project Management Office is the small unit that keeps the engagement honest — it owns the plan, the risk register, the decision log, the Steerco papers, and the discipline that holds it all together week-on-week. I am the PMO for Phase 1. One named accountable seat — me.
Inside a Top-4 firm the PMO is usually three to five people. Here, with seven workstreams and a 13-week clock, the PMO is one person — me — operating with the disciplined cadence I have spent twenty years internalising. That works because three of the seven workstreams are already Implemented at engagement start (the platform exists, the marketing surfaces exist, the investor pack exists), one is Built and waiting on a BDM hire, and one is Absorbed by architecture into another workstream. That leaves two workstreams (WS3 founder coaching, WS4 legal) needing the genuine build-out energy in Phase 1, plus the BDM-recruitment cycle on WS6. The PMO is right-sized to that workload.
The PMO surface is at /engagement/pmo — always-on, browser-readable, updated weekly. You can open it any morning of any day in the next thirteen weeks and see exactly where every workstream is, which RAID items are open, and which decisions are sitting in your queue. There is no monthly slide deck — the slide deck is a webpage, and it is always current.
0.3 What a Workstream Lead does
A Workstream Lead owns one of the seven workstreams. They are the named seat for that line of work — accountable for the deliverable, accountable for the KPIs, accountable for the Steerco-paper input on that workstream every fortnight.
Corrina, you have run programmes inside large agencies before — this is the same seat you already know. WS1 Marketing & Digital Acquisition is yours: positioning, marketing-mix discipline, the eight Door-3 surfaces, the 12-month delivery calendar, the FY27-FY31 acquisition trajectory. You are not a contractor inside someone else’s plan — you are the named accountable owner of an entire workstream that the rest of the engagement reads from. In Steerco you table WS1; in the PMO board you supply the weekly WS1 status; in Phase 2 you operate WS1 as the marketing engine of the business. One named seat, end-to-end.
The other six workstream leads are mapped in the engagement framework. WS2 (Commission Engine), WS3 (Founder Capability coaching), WS4 (Legal), WS6 (Vertical Partnerships & BDM), and WS7 (Investor Relations) all sit under CoSai delivery. WS5 (Platform Engineering) is Absorbed by design into WS2. Full architecture at /engagement/framework.
0.4 Phase 1 → Phase 2 · how a project becomes a business
Phase 1 is a project. Phase 2 is a business. The transition between them is called G4 Production Readiness — the cutover gate at which every workstream that has been building during Phase 1 begins operating as business-as-usual.
In Phase 1 we operate inside a 13-week clock with fortnightly Steercos, a PMO holding the plan, fixed fees, no performance economics, and a maturity ladder I am moving every workstream along week by week. At the end of August 2026, if everything has cleared G4, we do not start over — the project becomes the business. The same people, the same workstreams, the same KPIs, now operating under a 5-year performance-bonus structure with the cap table still pristine and zero equity issued.
This is the structural reason for keeping the same operators across the two phases — it is not sentimentality, it is compounding continuity. No handover. No learning curve. No lost context.
0.5 Phase 2 · the three stages inside the five years
Phase 2 is not five flat years. It is three named stages, each with its own focus, its own KPIs, and its own stage-exit gate.
Each of the four Phase 2 proposals (CFO and CMO) breaks each of these three stages down to operating cadence, named deliverables, stakeholder interfaces, and the stage-exit gate that has to be met before the next stage opens.