The problem
You did not build a company. You built a job.
It is the most common shape of a successful small business. Revenue is real and growing. The owner closes the important deals, holds the key customer relationships, approves the decisions that matter and carries the institutional knowledge in their head.
It works — right up until it becomes the ceiling. Growth stops at the limit of one person’s attention. Staff wait for permission instead of acting. Nothing meaningful survives a two-week absence.
And when it comes time to sell, the market prices it exactly as it is.
What it costs
The owner-dependency discount.
Businesses that depend on their owner trade at materially lower multiples than businesses that run on systems — for the same revenue, the same customers and the same margins.
Buyers apply a blunt test: does this business make money after the owner leaves? If the answer is no, they are not buying an asset. They are buying a job — and they pay accordingly.
Where we start
The dependency review.
A fixed-fee, fixed-scope engagement that maps exactly where the business depends on you, scores the concentration points a buyer would check, and returns a ranked sequence for unwinding them.
- Revenue concentration — who actually closes deals, and who owns the relationships
- Decision rights — where approval bottlenecks, and what staff will not act on alone
- Institutional knowledge — what exists only in your memory
- Credentials and licences — what the business operates under that is personally yours
- Continuity — what breaks first when you are unreachable
You finish with a written assessment, an estimate of the valuation gap, and a plan you could execute without us.
Then the build
Structure, not advice.
The review tells you where the business depends on you. The build is the work of removing it — and it is delivery, not recommendations in a deck.
Responsibilities
Every function named, and one person accountable for each — not a job description, an accountability map.
Decision rights
What each role decides alone, what needs consultation, and what genuinely reaches you. Written down and honoured.
Procedures
The work that only you know how to do, documented well enough that someone else can do it to the same standard.
The handoff
Sequenced transfer of relationships, approvals and knowledge — deliberately, with support, rather than all at once.
Also part of the practice
The work that usually surfaces alongside it.
Operations and process
Mapping how work actually moves through the business, finding where it stalls, and rebuilding the steps that cost the most time for the least return.
Pricing and margin
What each product, service or client actually earns once delivery is counted properly. The fastest-payback work available to most small businesses.
Reporting you can act on
A small set of numbers the owner sees weekly, chosen because a decision follows from them — not a dashboard nobody opens.
Roles and hiring
What the next hire should actually be responsible for, written before the job is advertised rather than after the wrong person starts.
Systems selection
Choosing the software the business will run on, and sequencing the move — without buying a platform that solves a problem you do not have.
Preparing to sell
Closing the gaps a buyer will discount, in the order that moves the valuation most, well before a sale process starts.
We have sat on the buyer’s side of the table and written the due diligence. We know precisely what gets discounted, because we have been the ones applying the discount.
That is the difference between this and business coaching. The work is not organising your org chart for its own sake — it is closing a gap that has a number attached to it, assessed the way an acquirer would assess it.
For companies operating across borders, the problem compounds. Delegation that works in one office frequently fails across a language and culture boundary, where accountability breaks along a line most advisers never see. It is the intersection of both halves of what we do.
Find out what the business is worth without you.
The dependency review is scoped and priced before it starts, and it stands on its own — whatever you decide to do next.