Founders are often handed maps. Tax maps. Jurisdictional maps. Investment-allocation maps.
Maps are useful when the destination is known. They are misleading when it is not.
Most principal-class decisions — about succession, about timing, about what to tell which child first — are made in territory that is not yet on any map. The advisor's role, in those moments, is not to produce a chart. It is to hold a compass.
A principal who had worked with three previous advisors described the difference: 'They all had maps. None of them had a compass.'
A compass does not promise the route. It promises orientation. It tells the principal which direction is north, which is south, and which decision — taken now — would later prove to have been a turn in the right direction.
Composure is partly geographic. It is the willingness to operate in unmapped territory with the right instrument, rather than the wrong illustration.
The Drafting Room rarely produces a map. It produces a compass.
If the territory in front of you has no map, the audience is the place to find the compass. Jasmine receives principals at this stage, privately.
