Ten quick questions covering the areas that actually determine whether a business depends on its owner, or genuinely runs without one. Answer honestly, most owners are surprised by their own number.
No email required. Your individual answers are never stored, only your overall score.
Question 1 of 10
2 to 4 weeks
High dependency
Owner dependency is simply how much a business relies on its owner personally to function — day to day decisions, financial sign-off, key client relationships, and being the person everyone defaults to when something goes wrong. Every owner-managed business starts with a high degree of it. The problem is when that dependency never really reduces as the business grows.
It shows up as long hours that never ease off, a management team that's busy but not really leading, and a business that feels harder to run than its size should justify. It also shows up somewhere less obvious: in what the business is actually worth. A business that can't run without its owner is a business a buyer, investor, or successor sees as far riskier — and prices accordingly.
The Owner Dependency Scorecard gives you a quick, honest read on where you currently stand across the four areas that matter most — financial control, operational independence, revenue relationships, and people and capacity — and which of them is creating the biggest exposure right now.
A few things people usually ask before or after taking the scorecard.
It's how much a business relies on its owner personally to keep running day to day — approving spend, making operational decisions, holding key client relationships, and being the one people go to when something goes wrong. The more of this runs through one person, the harder the business is to scale, sell, or step back from.
The scorecard asks 10 questions across four areas — financial control, operational independence, revenue relationships, and people and capacity. Each answer scores 0 to 4 depending on how independently the business could operate without you. The total maps to a dependency band, from critical to low, and an estimated runway for how long the business could keep running without you.
There's no universal good score, but a business that could run for three months or more without its owner is in a small minority. Most owner-managed businesses score in the moderate to high dependency range, meaning real strain would set in within weeks of the owner stepping back.
No. It's a quick, self-assessed indicator of owner dependency, not a formal valuation or exit readiness review. It's meant to highlight where your biggest exposure sits — a useful starting point for a proper conversation, not a substitute for one.
Nothing automatically. The scorecard doesn't collect your name or email, so there's no follow-up unless you choose to book a conversation. If your result highlights a specific area of exposure, that's usually the most useful place to start.