Scoring owner-dependence: the diagnostic

You measure owner-dependence by scoring five core functions from 0 to 2 on a single question: does this run for a fortnight without the founder touching it? Score sales, follow-up, delivery, reporting, and cash collection; the total out of ten is your owner-dependence score. Most founder-led service firms I see score between two and four — which means the business is not a machine the founder owns, but a job the founder cannot leave.

What exactly are you scoring?

Five functions, because five covers the revenue engine end to end without turning the diagnostic into a project:

1. Sales — new opportunities are generated, progressed, and closed.
2. Follow-up — leads and proposals are chased on schedule, and dormant contacts are reactivated.
3. Delivery — client work is produced and shipped to standard.
4. Reporting — the firm's numbers (pipeline, revenue, delivery status) are visible without anyone compiling them.
5. Cash — invoices go out on time and get chased when late.

The framing matters: you are scoring the function, not the people in it. A brilliant salesperson who only knows what to do because the founder briefs them daily is still a score of zero. The question is whether the system runs, and that is a design property — the same one examined across a whole business in The Founder-as-Bottleneck Report.

How does the scoring work?

Each function gets 0, 1, or 2:

Be harsh at the boundary between 1 and 2. "My ops manager handles it but asks me about anything unusual" is a 1. "I'd get a report at the end of the fortnight and nothing would have stalled" is a 2. The fortnight test is deliberately longer than a week because a week of founder absence is survivable on momentum; two weeks exposes which processes actually have an engine.

What does your score mean?

Out of ten: 0–3 means the founder is the business — a holiday is a shutdown, and a sale of the firm would be a sale of the founder's diary. 4–6 is the common middle: delivery usually runs, but growth stops the moment the founder stops selling. 7–9 means the machine mostly runs and the founder works on it rather than in it. Ten is rare and usually temporary, because growth adds new unsystemised work faster than most firms document it.

The pattern behind the middle band is consistent: delivery scores well because clients force the discipline, while sales and follow-up score worst because nobody external complains when they silently stop. That asymmetry is exactly why firms stall at the founder's personal selling capacity — the full anatomy of that ceiling is in Why service firms plateau at the founder's capacity.

Where do most firms lose points?

Follow-up and reporting, and for the same reason: they are invisible until measured. Follow-up fails quietly — an enquiry answered two days late, a proposal never chased — and the cost never appears in any ledger. Speed matters more than most founders assume: as an industry rule of thumb, contact rates drop roughly 8x once a new lead is more than five minutes old, yet in owner-dependent firms a fast response depends entirely on whether the founder happened to be at their desk. Reporting loses points differently: the numbers exist, but only the founder can assemble them, so "how are we doing" is a half-day of spreadsheet archaeology instead of a glance.

What do you do about a low score?

Fix one function at a time, lowest score and highest revenue impact first — usually follow-up. The mechanism: when a function scores 0, then document it before anything else, because you cannot hand over what is not written down. When it scores 1, then find what still routes through you — a trigger, a check, an approval — and move that specific dependency to a rule, a dashboard, or a delegated authority. When it reaches 2, then leave it alone and move to the next function; polishing a working system is procrastination with good optics.

For deciding what runs each function once documented, use the gates in Delegate, automate, or delete: the triage — much of what scores 0 today should end up as software, not headcount. Re-score quarterly. The score drifts down as the business grows, and catching that drift early is far cheaper than rediscovering it during your first fortnight off in three years.

---

Next step: the Growth System Audit — £450, seven days, credited against any build — maps where your growth system leaks and what to build first.