I’m one of the founders and the main technical/operator-facing person in a healthcare tech company. We’re commercially viable and have strong client retention, but we’ve been underperforming for ~18 months because our GM (5% owner, full operational control) is a major bottleneck.
He spends most of his time managing upward and controlling optics with the majority owner (also owns a major healthcare corporation - we are under this “mother company”), who is mostly absent and gets one short board update every 6 months based entirely on the GM’s reporting. Day-to-day operational issues are routinely left to the team to absorb and solve, and when things escalate, blame gets pushed downward.
I manage technical service across the client base, have strong relationships with staff, dealers, and customers, and I’m the main person holding the operational side together. I’ve spent the last 18 months trying to correct issues internally, with increasing friction and no structural change. I brought some concerns to main ownership back in October, they reassured me initially but I haven’t heard anything else since then.
The latest issue is a proposed merger with another company in our sector that has a poor reputation. BIG RED FLAGS ALL AROUND. I was pulled into technical diligence because I’m the main technical person internally, and what I found was not good. Since then, every concern I’ve raised has been minimized or reframed.
At this point I’m trying to assess whether this is:
still fixable through escalation, a governance problem that needs to go directly to ownership
or the point where staying stops being loyalty and starts being complicity.
For people who’ve been in similar founder/operator situations, how do you tell the difference?