Forty questions about who actually decides, who holds the relationships and who carries what is in your head. And the first one is the question I ask every owner I meet: can you be gone three weeks with the phone off?
Find Your Owner Dependence ScoreI want to be clear about something up front, because a score like this can land wrong.
The point is not that the business should run without you. It is that it should be able to. Those are different things. One is about being removed. The other is about being freed, which means you finally get to do the work only you can do instead of the forty things that just happen to land on your desk.
You will see the word transferable in the report. Read it as optionality, not as a sale. A business that could be handed to somebody else is worth more whether you sell it, hand it to your daughter or hold it another thirty years. Especially if you hold it. You are the ones who actually have to hand it over someday.
And the dependence this measures is not a failure. It is almost always the residue of something that worked. You built this by being the one who decided, the one who knew the customer, the one who fixed it. That was right. It just is not what the next stage needs.
The questions are specific and a little uncomfortable, on purpose. Not what you intend to delegate. What you actually did last month.
How much of the work still needs your hands. Time genuinely away from the business, nights and weekends, your role in delivering the product, who handles significant customer complaints and big negotiations and who breaks up the fights.
Who decides and who waits. Reporting lines, resource allocation, whether you go around the chain of command, who sits in on hiring, who assigns people to projects and whether somebody else prepares the numbers you manage by.
Whether the company plans or you plan. An annual process for goals and budgets, a leadership team that builds the strategy rather than receiving it and whether you are still the main source of industry knowledge and product expertise in the building.
Whether anybody outside the family has a real seat. An active board with actual decision-making authority, independent directors who are not employees or relatives and how ownership is held.
How much of the company's financial life runs on your name. Whether there is a CFO or a bookkeeper handing you statements, who decides on financing and capital spending, who sets customer credit terms and whether the debt still sits behind your personal guarantee.
Whether accountability lives in a process or in you. A real goal-setting and review process for managers and teams, incentive plans with defined expectations instead of subjective bonuses and anything in place to keep your key people through a transition.
Whether the company sells or you sell. Who represents the business at industry events, who leads business development, who holds the most important customer and partner relationships and who sets pricing and negotiates the significant deals.
Whether the culture is the company's or yours. How much of it reflects your personal values and style, whether people act on the strategy without being told, whether news reaches the whole team through something other than you and whether innovation happens without your push.
Short statements you agree or disagree with. No right answers here, only your current reality and the report is only as useful as you are honest.
You get a score from 0 to 100 across eight areas and a category: Highly Independent, Moderately Independent, Moderately Dependent or Highly Dependent. Higher means more of the business runs through you.
Each of the eight areas comes back with a written description of the pattern your answers point to. It is a picture of where things stand, not a to-do list.
Read each statement on its own. Most describe something you do, where agreeing means more of the business runs through you. But about a quarter describe something the company has, like a planning process or a board, and there agreeing is the good news. Do not answer on autopilot.
You will probably score poorly on Governance & Ownership. Almost everybody does. That section is largely asking whether you have an active board with independent outside directors. It also counts family ownership itself as a form of concentration, which for a family business may be the whole point. Take that one as information rather than a grade.
The assessment runs on a licensed platform, so the next screen looks different from this page. It asks for your name, company and contact information first. There is also a checkbox asking whether to send your answers to me. Check it if you want a second read on your results. Leave it unchecked if you would rather work through this on your own. You get your report either way.
Although key managers/ employees may have a significant influence on decisions made within the organization, you retain the ultimate decision-making authority in most areas, including prioritization and resource allocation. You interact directly with all key employees, and likely hired them personally. You may have some micro-management tendencies, but are comfortable delegating many tasks and decisions. You have the best understanding of the business metrics that matter.
That is the tone throughout. Eight sections, each one describing what your answers point to. It is fair, it is specific and it gives you something to react to.
This is a diagnostic. It shows where the weight sits. It does not pretend that one generic checklist can tell every family what to do next.
“The businesses worth the most, whether you keep them or hand them on, are the ones where the value lives in the company instead of in one person. That is it. That is the whole thing.”
Forty questions, about ten minutes and eight areas of your company scored from independent to dependent. Not so you can leave. So you can choose.
Find Your Owner Dependence Score
Get started today before this once in a lifetime opportunity expires.