1. Business Development Role Contract
Purpose: Ecosystem growth.
Product: Cash-flow.
Process: Client acquisition, partnership development, marketing.
Essential functions:
- Navigating the system boundary of engagements with partnerships and customers.
- Contributing market and relational intelligence to inform organisational capability, service design, and delivery, without owning their definition or alignment.
2. General Description
This function creates deal-flow within the organisation by leveraging an understanding of existing products and services to engage partners and prospective customers. It identifies new and alternate market opportunities and feeds this intelligence into value proposition design and the organisation’s roadmap. Unlike technical development or event organising, this function’s focus is the interface between the organisation and the market: it is, in effect, the seed of a growth function.
Carrying this function successfully over time means integrating multiple sources of relational information from real-world engagements into the organisation’s internal capacity to deliver value to its partners and customers. Ongoing communication with adjacent functions (such as event stakeholder profiles, or product and service delivery) is required to continually inform and renew those patterns, even though defining or aligning them sits outside this function’s authority and accountability. This function has succeeded when the organisation can identify exactly where and how to direct and materialise value delivery.
Across a given term, this function operates across several repeating cycles, often simultaneously:
- Beginnings. Self-guided learning about the markets the organisation operates in or could operate in, and how the organisation has delivered value so far, and why.
- Early developments. Client acquisition, deal-flow, revenue growth.
- Later developments. Generating feedback across full service delivery cycles, and identifying new challenges and opportunities with hindsight from completed projects.
- Completing. Establishing a whole-system, coherent understanding of business development at a given organisational scale, and unlocking higher orders of value creation.
Maturity in this function is marked by the shift from running individual cycles to holding several at once, and from responding to opportunity to shaping where opportunity is directed. At its fullest expression, this function is entrusted to grow a team around it and deepen its scope to a qualitatively distinct degree, laterally into adjacent domains or vertically into organisational strategy: what the organisation would recognise as a head of growth function.
Example 1. The organisation is adapting strategy and service delivery. A new prospective customer arrives with several years of existing relational history. This function must onboard into that relationship carefully, honouring its nuances, clarify the opportunity, and inform the relevant scope and success criteria of service delivery.
Example 2. The organisation has multiple years of validation for a given service and a track record of delivery across varied contexts. This function must carry forward the why and how of that track record into building a pipeline of clients, and later converting them into deals.
Example 3. This function identifies adjacent funding and/or service delivery opportunities, communicates them to relevant team members, and begins organising around their realisation.
3. Out of Scope and Role Responsibility Boundaries
3.1. Products and services definition. This function surfaces market signal: what clients ask for, what partners need, where demand clusters. It does not define or approve what the organisation offers. Reason: offering design requires visibility into delivery capacity and organisational risk outside this function’s remit. Boundary: this function feeds the definition process; the function that owns product and delivery makes the decision.
3.2. Alignment between organisational capability and service delivery. Confirming the organisation can deliver what is being sold (capacity, quality, sequencing) is an internal operations function, not an external-facing one. Reason: this function has visibility into market and relational conditions, not into internal delivery capacity, and holds no standing to arbitrate between the two. Boundary: this function flags a mismatch when one appears; the function with delivery authority resolves it.
3.3. Protocol governance and organisation-wide strategy. Ecosystem growth is not protocol design. This function works within the protocol’s existing terms to grow activity and cash-flow; it does not shape the protocol itself, its incentive structure, or its governance rules. Reason: that is a governance-level decision affecting all participants, not a growth-level one.
3.4. Contracting terms beyond the engagement boundary. Navigating the boundary of an engagement means recognising and communicating where the organisation’s scope starts and stops. It does not extend to drafting binding legal terms, setting pricing structures, or final contract sign-off. Reason: boundary-navigation is a judgement and communication skill; contracting is a distinct legal and financial authority. Boundary: this function identifies and raises boundary issues; the function with contracting authority resolves them.
General principle. This function carries visibility and voice into adjacent functions (product, operations, governance, legal) but not authority or accountability over them. It notices and escalates where these adjacent domains break down; it does not own the fix.
4. Structural and Legal Terms
4.1 Engagement structure. This contract uses adaptive structuring: compensation and scope are set per engagement rather than fixed in advance. This is provisional. Once the organisation reaches recurring revenue above $10k/month, the contract will be reviewed with the aim of upgrading to a fixed salaried position.
4.2 Commission-based compensation. New deals are compensated across three independent dimensions, each graded 0-5%:
- Sourcing the opportunity (e.g. identifying a grant, customer, or partner).
- Developing the relationship and deal.
- Securing the deal.
These gradings are not fixed in advance. They are used on an ongoing basis to navigate risk, effort, and outcome for each deal, and must be discussed frequently and as early as possible in the life of an opportunity, not settled retroactively.
4.3 Post-commission compensation. Compensation for work following deal closure (e.g. account management, delivery support) is defined on a case-by-case basis, dependent on available budget and the level of involvement expected. This is set separately from the commission structure in 4.2.
4.4 Meetings and communication. This function attends regular meetings to surface insights and inform adjacent domains, per Section 2. Beyond scheduled meetings, this function is expected to initiate and schedule its own meetings whenever timely communication with relevant team members is needed to inform their work.
4.5 Legal standing. This function operates as a sub-contractor. It is responsible for its own self-employment obligations, tax, insurance, and any other legal or regulatory coverage required in its own jurisdiction. The organisation does not provide employment status, benefits, or associated protections under this contract.
4.6 Term and notice. This contract runs on a rolling 6-month term. The first 3 months constitute a probation period, included within (not additional to) the first 6-month term; the first full term therefore ends 3 months after probation concludes. Either party may terminate the contract with 1 month’s mutual notice.
4.7 Ongoing learning and organisational development. This function is expected to maintain ongoing learning and communication about the organisation, in support of its continued development and design. Working regeneratively, from a living-systems perspective, means holding that everything is in continuous renewal, in every direction, at once. This function should expect to keep opening itself to complexity and nuance that could not have been foreseen at the outset. Humility, practiced actively and continuously, is necessary to sustain both this work and the relationships it depends on. Further documentation on the organisation’s principles and practices will be provided.
4.8 Organisational integrity in networked contexts. This function operates across highly networked spaces, including web3 and multi-stakeholder networks. Care must be taken to learn and navigate what organisational integrity means in these contexts. It is advised to approach the co-founding team with an attitude of open learning, in order to build clarity and confidence ahead of engagements rather than in the course of them.