Your time
The phone comes on vacation.
The week off keeps moving to next quarter.
Founder dependency
A good company can still wait on its founder.
Founder dependency is when too much work still comes back to you. Decisions wait, and your team checks before acting.
What it sounds like
You may already recognize it.
- Decisions bottleneck at your desk, including the ones you have delegated twice.
- How things get done lives in your head, and nowhere anyone else can reach it.
- Performance improves when you are present and drifts when you are not.
- Your team has titles that grew faster than their authority did.
- A buyer or successor will ask how the company performs when you are not there.
What it costs
The company’s value
Buyers look closely at owner risk.
In Value Builder’s analysis of more than 80,000 companies, businesses that can run without the founder were valued about 35% higher.
How it is measured
Start free. Go deeper if it helps.
The free Founder Dependency Snapshot looks at four areas: Decisions, Team ownership, Repeatable work, and Time away.
The paid Dependency Audit goes deeper, with forty statements across eight areas that you and each of your leaders answer on your own.
See the Dependency AuditIf you stepped away tomorrow, what would break first?