For business owners
How much of your business depends on you?
Most owners have never been asked. Most find they know more of the answer than they expected — and one part they don’t. That part decides what you are free to do next.
Fifteen minutes. You do not need to be planning a sale — most owners who do this are not.
Why it matters
The same things hold you back whichever way you want to go.
A business that cannot run for two weeks without you can’t easily be grown, handed over, or left alone either. The review measures what holds it, then shows what each of those means for the direction you actually want.
It lives in your head
The pricing exception, the reason you use that supplier, the customer who needs handling a particular way. None of it is written down, because you have never needed to.
Nobody has ever asked
Your accountant sees the numbers. Your lawyer sees the documents. No one has looked at the whole picture and asked what would happen if you stopped.
You find out under pressure
An offer, an illness, a lender’s question. By then it is expensive to fix — and you are fixing it on somebody else’s timetable.
What you get
A written review, not a number.
One document, written for you, that your accountant or lawyer can read without translation. Five parts, in this order.
What you have built
What already runs without you. This comes first, because it usually goes unsaid.
What relies on you
The decisions, knowledge and relationships that still route through one person — named specifically, not in general.
What difference that makes
Six constraints, read plainly. What each one would mean to a successor, a lender or a buyer.
Where that leaves your options
The directions you said you were interested in, with the constraints attached to each. Including staying exactly as you are.
What a lender or buyer would ask
The questions coming, written down before anyone is in the room asking them.
Written from your answers
Every review is built from a real set of answers rather than assembled from a template. Two businesses that answer differently get different documents.
Read the example review →How it works
Four steps, one document.
You answer
About fifteen minutes. Questions ask what has actually happened in the last year, not how you would rate yourself. Anything that does not apply to you is not asked.
We read your answers back against each other
We ask about the same thing more than once, from different directions. Where your answers don’t line up, that gap is usually the most useful thing in the document.
A person reviews it
Nothing reaches you unread. Anything the review flagged but could not settle on its own is worked through by hand before the document is sent.
You take it to your advisers
One document, forwarded once. Everybody is looking at the same page instead of their own corner of it.
What gets looked at
Six things we look at. One of them is yours alone.
Where it applies
Whichever of these you want, the findings are the same.
You tell us which of these you are interested in at the start. The review reports the same findings either way — what changes is which constraints get attached to which direction. Choosing to leave things as they are is a first-class answer.
- Grow revenue significantly
- Reduce my own hours without giving up ownership
- Hand it over to family
- Hand it over to the management team or employees
- Sell to an outside buyer
- Keep it running much as it is
The method
We went looking for the number every competitor implies they know.
It does not exist. No study, dataset or survey identifies the point at which an owner can safely step back — so this review does not pretend to one. There is no overall score, because a single figure lets one real problem be cancelled out by strengths somewhere else.
What replaces it is a short list of things that bind absolutely, and a plain reading of everything else.
What no one else will tell you →Who it is for
Owners, and the people they trust.
You have run this for years and never had it looked at whole.
A client conversation that starts from evidence rather than a hunch, with the gaps already named.
The questions that get avoided, written down calmly, before they become an argument.
Questions
Before you start.
Do I need to be planning something?
No, and most people who do this are not. It is as useful for deciding to keep going as for anything else.
Is this a valuation?
No. It produces no value, no price and no rating, and it makes no recommendation about selling.
What if I do not know an answer?
“I’m not sure” is on every question and is left out of the calculation rather than counted against you. Not knowing is itself worth recording.
Who sees it?
You do. You decide who else. We do not broker, list, or introduce businesses to buyers.
How far along is it?
Early. The questions and the way they are read are still being refined, and we have not yet tested them against a large group of owners. In plain terms: the instrument is in draft and has not been tested against a founder sample. We would rather say that than imply otherwise.
Fifteen minutes, and you will know where you stand.
No overall score. No grade. No recommendation about selling.