The operating agreement
A written document, signed before the first draft. It exists so that the first difficult moment is a procedure rather than an argument.
Engagements that skip it do not avoid the boundaries. They discover them through an incident, at the founder's expense.
The sign-off matrix
Every category of content sits in one of three tiers. Assign all three before production starts.
Autonomous. Publishes without review. Typically observational posts, industry commentary inside the agreed lane, and reshares with a take that follows the fingerprint. This tier is what makes the cadence survivable, so it should be the largest one by volume.
Review before publish. Anything in these categories, without exception:
- Numbers of any kind: revenue, headcount, growth rates, client results.
- Named clients, partners, or investors.
- Opinions about named people, including competitors and former employees.
- Anything touching the founder's regulated ground: medical, financial, or legal claims.
- Hiring, fundraising, or anything a reader could price as material news.
- Posts that reference internal decisions not yet announced.
Founder writes or explicitly dictates. Condolences, apologies, anything about a death or illness, public disagreements with a named person, and responses to a crisis. A ghost drafting these is a category error even when the voice is perfect.
Escalation triggers
Name the trigger, the person pinged, and the response window. Vague escalation clauses fail precisely when they are needed.
Standard triggers worth writing in:
- A journalist comments or DMs. Nothing is answered. Ping the founder and whoever handles press, within the hour.
- An angry customer posts publicly. Draft nothing. Route to whoever owns that relationship.
- A post gets unusual negative velocity. Agree in advance what "unusual" means for this account, and who decides between leaving it, editing, and deleting.
- A legal or regulatory word appears in a draft or a reply thread.
- Anyone asks whether the founder writes the posts themselves. Agree the answer in advance, in writing, and let the founder set it.
The clauses that matter later
Deletion authority. Who can delete a live post, and how fast. Usually both parties, no permission needed, questions afterward.
Account access. Which credentials the ghost holds, under what arrangement, and the offboarding step that revokes them. Access lives in the client's own password management, never in a shared document or a message thread.
Attribution policy. Whether the engagement is disclosed, to whom, and how the founder answers if asked directly. This is the founder's call and it belongs in writing, so nobody improvises it under pressure.
Approval defaults. What happens when the founder does not respond by the deadline. Silence is not approval on anything in the review tier. Autonomous-tier content ships on schedule regardless.
Off-limits standing list. Carried from the world bible. People and topics that never appear, whatever the news cycle does.
Termination and archive. What happens to the story bank, the corpus, and the drafts when the engagement ends. The founder's own stories are the founder's.
Review
Revisit the matrix quarterly and after any incident. Most engagements find that the autonomous tier can safely grow over time as calibration improves, and that one or two categories need to move the other way. Both moves are signs the agreement is working.