Corporate Governance
Corporate Governance is not board-deck bureaucracy. It's the decision-making infrastructure that determines whether GTM can scale without every commercial decision passing through the founder.
“If every discount above 10% has to go through the founder, you don't have a governance problem. You have a bottleneck disguised as control.”
Otto GTM ObservatoryThe friction point between control and commercial speed
Effective commercial governance defines clear approval thresholds (discount, contract length, contractual exceptions) delegated to different levels of the organization, freeing management from repetitive decisions to focus on the truly strategic ones.
Without this structure, every enterprise negotiation requiring a non-standard condition ends up crossing more hierarchical levels than necessary, lengthening the sales cycle and frustrating both the sales team and the prospect.
Anti-patterns
Common mistake: building governance only to satisfy formal compliance requirements (committees, written policies) without translating it into concrete operational thresholds the commercial team can apply in daily practice.
Second mistake: leaving governance entirely informal and verbal during the growth phase, only discovering during funding or M&A due diligence that no documentable commercial approval process exists.
Practical Application
A company where every discount above 5% requires CEO sign-off records a 34% discount approval ratio, with an average approval wait time of 4.2 days that lengthens the sales cycle. After introducing delegated thresholds (sales manager up to 15%, VP sales up to 25%, CEO only beyond), the ratio rises to 91% and average wait time drops to 0.6 days.