Your phone buzzes while you're away. Not an emergency, just a decision that can't happen without you. That's not leadership. That's a structural problem, and it costs more than your holiday.

The Chaos King problem

Most founders underestimate their own dependency until someone else points it out. Usually a buyer, at which point it becomes leverage against you rather than insight for you.

Decisions route through you. Client relationships exist only in your head. Processes live in your memory instead of documentation. These are transferability risks, not signs of indispensability.

The gap between a business that runs without its founder and one that doesn't can be 15–25% of enterprise value or more. That's what buyers price in for key-person risk.

You might not be planning to sell but the cost is still real.

What this costs you now

Your calendar is the bottleneck. Decisions queue waiting for your availability. The team hesitates on calls you'd approve anyway, because they're trained to wait for you. Small delays compound into real margin drag.

Your Saturday looks like your Tuesday because the business can't run without you answering the phone. You're facing a structural problem, not a capacity bottleneck.

The same issues that would concern a buyer are already costing you: in speed, in margin, in the parts of your life the business has colonised.

Who this is for

This diagnostic is built for owner-managers and founders running businesses where they suspect they might be the bottleneck.

This is for you if:

  • You want to know what a buyer would see if they examined your decision-making patterns
  • You're building toward exit but unclear how "stuck" the business really is
  • You suspect you're a bottleneck but can't see exactly which functions are worst
  • You need a structured way to think about delegation that isn't "just hire people"
  • You'd like your phone to stop buzzing when you're supposed to be off

Whether you're 18 months from a transaction or have no exit plans at all: the same fixes that would impress a buyer also give you your time back.

What the diagnostic measures

The diagnostic scores your business across three dimensions of transferability.

Decision dependency (DCI). Where does authority concentrate? How many decisions require your explicit approval versus your team's standing authority? This catches the "shadow approval" pattern: decisions that are delegated on paper but still route through you by habit, expectation, or lack of confidence.

Operations dependency (ORI). What happens if you're unavailable for three weeks? Which processes exist only in your head? Where would a new hire, or a buyer's operations team, struggle to understand how things actually work? This surfaces documentation gaps and tribal knowledge.

Capability dependency (CRI). Does your team have the depth to operate without you? What actually happened during your last extended absence? Does the market know your senior team, or just you? This surfaces succession gaps and single points of failure.

Each index maps to specific patterns that show up in founder-dependent businesses.

The patterns we detect

Decision concentration. Bottlenecks where approval authority hasn't actually transferred. Low approval thresholds. The gap between delegated-on-paper and delegated-in-practice.

Relationship risk. Client and supplier relationships that exist only in your head. Escalation paths that route through you by default. Personal brand dependency.

Undocumented operations. Processes that live in memory, not systems. Tribal knowledge that walks out the door when someone leaves.

Capability gaps. Management instability. Untested independence. Whether the team can actually run without you, or just thinks it can.

These patterns often overlap. The Chaos King, the founder who hoards decisions while doing the operational work, typically shows several.

What you get

Health Score. An overall measure of how independently your business operates today, scored 0–100 across six business functions. You see exactly where concentration is highest.

Dependency breakdown. Where decisions stall, where relationships are concentrated, where knowledge hasn't been captured. Mapped to specific functions so you know which area to fix first.

Valuation impact estimate. What this dependency level typically costs in exit scenarios. Not precise to the pound, but directionally useful. The 15–25% discount range is research-backed.

Transfer priorities. Which dependencies to address first, based on enterprise value impact and practical difficulty. Not a generic "delegate more" list. Specific actions ranked by your scores.

How it works

13 questions. 10–15 minutes.

Questions about decision authority, relationship ownership, knowledge capture, and operational resilience. Honest answers give useful output. Sanitised answers give comfortable nonsense.

Full results available after email unlock. No paywall for the core diagnostic.

See where you stand

Run the Founder Dependency check

Find out what's holding the business to you, and what that concentration is costing: in margin, in time, or in future deal value.

Want precision tracking? The Authority Gap Calculator measures the seven operational metrics that drive your score. Requires one week of decision tracking.