Many mid-size firms we meet in Taiwan(China) have a capable second generation and a founder who still signs everything that matters. The public story is “they are not ready.” The private file tree says the deputy was never given a complete set.
Process debt is the pile of exceptions that never made it into a folder: the customer who always pays late and is still shipped, the uncle who still holds a stamp, the English pack for buyers that does not match the Mandarin production note. None of this is solved by a motivational offsite.
The deputy pack we teach is unromantic: order of documents, phone numbers, which language is the record for each act, and a list of things the founder still will not share. We write the last list in the close letter. Pretending those gaps are closed is how consulting becomes decoration.
Banking tokens and share structures are legal work. We stop at the door and say so. What we can do is stop the firm from discovering, on a Thursday, that the import licence scan lives only in a personal email.