The Partnership Diagnostic: An Expert Read on What's at the Root of the Friction
This isn’t just a longer version of the free assessment. It's Sunny Sabbini's own expert analysis and evaluation of your specific partnership, identifying what's actually driving the friction between you, what it will take to address it, and in what order you should approach the patterns that need repair.
I'm Sunny Sabbini, and I work with business partners and cofounders in recurring conflict in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Business Partner Conflict · Business Partner Counseling · Cofounder Coaching
Why Both of You
Many clients ask why both partners need to be involved this early in the process. This is not a rule for its own sake, rather both partner’s participation is crucial for the accuracy of the diagnosis. This read looks at what the partnership, as a system, is doing, not just at what either one of you is doing individually. A read built from one partner's account of the friction won’t fully capture the actual patterns running between two people. Without both partners' perspectives, the diagnosis can’t lead you to real solutions.
How This Is Different From Everything Else Here
It’s w being specific, because several offers on this site can sound similar. The free Friction Assessment is self-scored: you answer questions, you get an automatic read on your individual pattern, at no cost, in a few minutes.
The Cofounder and Partnership Reset is a shared, half-day group session, working alongside other partnerships. You’ll learn how partnerships in general tend to work, and how your partnership relates to that.
The Partnership Diagnostic is a direct, interpreted read of your specific partnership, delivered privately, built from real clinical and strategic depth rather than a self-scored instrument. It tells you what an outside expert sees, including what's genuinely hard to see from inside your own dynamic.
What It Looks At
The diagnostic evaluates several dimensions of the partnership at once: How each of your individual mental models of the business and the future have shifted since you started, and where those models have quietly diverged. How authority actually moves between you day-to-day, compared to how it was originally structured. . Where trust is solid and where trust is thin. What's actually blocking changes you've both said you want to make, even with real effort behind them. And how much capacity each of you currently has to hold disagreement, tolerate uncertainty, and commit to something you didn't fully choose.
We’ll start with what's working and worth protecting before we move toward the gaps. Identifying what’s working isn’t faint praise. A partnership that has named what it values is in a different position to hear hard truths than one that starts the conversation already on the defensive.
What You Get
A written report, and a strategic recommendation: what the partnership most needs, in what sequence, and why. That recommendation might point toward Partnership Coaching, toward a more structural engagement, toward a specific next step, or toward something else entirely, depending on what the diagnostic actually finds.
Valuable Wherever You Take It Next
The report is yours regardless of what happens after our call together. . If you decide to continue working with me, we’ll use the results as a starting point for our work together. If you decide to work with a different coach, a therapist, a mediator, or nobody at all, the report names what's actually driving the friction between you, specifically enough that whoever you bring it to next doesn't have to start from zero. Most partnerships spend the first several sessions with any practitioner just getting oriented, the diagnostic shortens the orientation time no matter who you work with.
The Diagnostic Is a Good Fit If:
This tends to be the right next step when:
If what's actually going on involves something beyond what a structured conversation between two partners can address, we'll figure out the right referral instead.
Investment
This is a defined, fixed-scope engagement with a set price: $2,500 for two partners. $3,000 for three. $3,500 for four.
Where to Start
The next step is a call, not a booking form. We’ll have a short conversation to confirm this is the right fit before either of us commits the time. If you're both ready for that conversation, [schedule a call - link pending]. If only one of you is looking into this so far, start with the free Friction Assessment or “Your Partner Doesn't Know You're Here Yet” instead.
Open Items (carried forward, unchanged by this pass)
Process mechanics: whether this tier uses an individual-then-joint session structure, and turnaround time from intake to report. Still the biggest gap.
Cross-site handling: one shared page, two site-specific pages, or one page the other site links into.
Call-booking link and intake mechanism aren't built yet.
Whether “both partners required” is correct as written.
The IP-protection paraphrase of the five assessed dimensions is still a judgment call, not a confirmed decision.
Sunny Sabbini, M.A.
(415) 895-0786
San Francisco Bay Area
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