In this week's newsletter, Aaron Moncur has a conversation with Jeremy Jarrett, a corporate and M&A attorney at Sacks Tierney in Scottsdale, Arizona, with more than a decade of experience helping businesses navigate complex deals from mergers and acquisitions to venture financing across technology, defense, and manufacturing industries.
Getting into business with a partner...it's much easier to get into one than to get out of one. When rubber hits the road and you hit a hard time, and pretty much every business will at some point, it gets really hard to get out of a partnership.
In this episode:
Why partnership agreements prevent catastrophic failures when relationships deteriorate or unexpected events occur
How one-page contracts can sustain businesses for a decade before causing irreparable damage in a single transaction
Why large companies maintain negotiation flexibility despite presenting terms as non-negotiable across all vendors
How payment term misalignment creates cash flow crises when suppliers demand faster payment than customers provide
Bonus Content:
Why the Decline Narrative Regarding US Manufacturing Misses What's Actually Happening
S6E45 Jeremy Jarrett | Legal Advice & Strategy for Starting An Engineering Business
Most engineers starting businesses focus on the wrong legal priorities. Setting up an LLC takes minutes and costs little, but the decisions around partnerships, contract structure, and payment terms can determine whether a company survives its first major challenge. Jeremy Jarrett shares insights from representing companies through acquisitions, venture funding, and business disputes that reveal a consistent pattern: businesses that document governance and terms while everyone still gets along avoid expensive problems later. The conversation covers practical negotiation strategies that work even with Fortune 500 companies, the hidden dangers of inadequate contracts that work perfectly until they catastrophically don't, and why engineers should think twice before bringing in partners without comprehensive shareholder agreements. These aren't abstract legal concepts but operational decisions that affect cash flow, ownership, and whether your company survives its first serious dispute.
>If YouTube isn’t your thing, check out this episode and all of our past episodes on Apple, Spotify, and all the rest.
Quick! When your automation fails, what gets protected first? Humans, the machine, or the product?
Most teams design backwards. They optimize for product quality, then machine uptime, then (maybe) add safety guards.
Pipeline Design & Engineering's order of protection:
Humans first. Always.
Machine second.
Product last.
Why? No humans = can't run machine. No machine = can't make product. Your responsibility is handing operators a system they trust won't hurt them.
We follow ANSI B11.0 standards and conduct risk assessments before finalizing any design.
Designing safe automation systems? Pipeline Design & Engineering follows safety-first protocols on every project.
Partnership Documentation: Why Agreement Terms Matter More Than Entity Formation
Setting up a legal entity is straightforward. Most law firms assign the paperwork to paralegals because there's little that can go wrong. The real legal complexity emerges when ownership splits between multiple people.
The first question an engineer should be asking is, with respect to this new business, are they going to be the sole owner or not? Because if they're the sole owner, it's very, very easy. If there's going to be more than one owner, the amount of documentation and the importance of the documentation changes.
Sole owners can be loose with corporate housekeeping. Partners cannot. The documentation needs to address what happens during inevitable stress points: when someone gets hit by a bus, when a divorce threatens to pull equity into family court, when one partner stops contributing while still holding shares.
The biggest mistake isn't necessarily a legal one. It's just sort of having a rosy vision of the future and not realizing it's always exciting when you're first getting started. Everyone thinks it's going to work. You have this great idea. You don't think about what happens if my business partner gets hit by a bus, or what happens if they get embroiled in a nasty divorce.
The value of comprehensive agreements becomes clear when problems arrive. Jarrett represented a financial services firm that granted equity to top employees with a buyback provision: if they left, the company could repurchase shares with 20% down on a five-year low-interest note. Years later, when an employee departed, the owner pulled the agreement from a drawer and executed the buyback without stress or legal dispute.
The client called me and said I was so worried. I didn't know what we were going to do. When I pulled the document out of a drawer and just said, Oh, I can do that. This is great. And that was probably a clause he hadn't thought about in two and a half years.
The goal is clarity while relationships are good, so predetermined solutions exist when relationships deteriorate.
Why the Decline Narrative Regarding US Manufacturing Misses What's Actually Happening
The conventional wisdom says US manufacturing is in terminal decline, but look at the Reshoring Initiative's data: over 2 million jobs have returned since 2010, with the first million taking ten years and the second million taking just four. In 2024 alone, 244,000 manufacturing jobs were announced through reshoring and foreign direct investment. The cumulative jobs chart shows acceleration. SpaceX reuses rocket boosters that other countries throw away. Tesla casts vehicle structures in single pieces. Semiconductor projects accounted for $102.6 billion in capital investment in just six months. The perception gap between what people believe about American manufacturing and what the data actually shows reveals more about outdated narratives than current capability.
Read the full article on The Wave.
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