The Founder Dependency Index
How Dependent Is Your Company on You?
Three questions. Sixty seconds. An honest read on whether you own a company or a dependency loop.
The Founder Dependency Index
Three questions. Sixty seconds. One number that tells you how dependent your company is on the person at the top.
Question 1 of 3
In the last 30 days, how many operational decisions required you personally?
Question 2 of 3
In the last 30 days, how many times did your company need you instead of needing the system?
Question 3 of 3
How many of your top 10 client relationships would be at risk if you were unreachable for two weeks?
What the Founder Dependency Index Measures
The Founder Dependency Index measures founder dependency in three places where it hides: decisions, exceptions and client relationships. It is the quick version of the Dependency Audit, the first of the eight frameworks, and it applies the same question as The Moron Test: does this work without heroics?
Decisions
The decisions question counts how many operational decisions in the last 30 days required you personally: 0–5, 6–15, or 16 and up.
Exceptions
The exceptions question counts how many times in the last 30 days the company needed you instead of the system: 0–3, 4–10, or 11 and up.
Client relationships
The client relationships question counts how many of your top 10 client relationships would be at risk if you were unreachable for two weeks: 0–2, 3–5, or 6 and up.
How the Founder Dependency Score Works
The founder dependency score adds up three answers worth 2, 6 or 10 points each, so every result lands between 6 and 30 and in one of three buckets. A Dependent or Critical result is where Discovery, Architecture and Deployment start.
| Score | Bucket | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| 6–8 | Independent | Your company runs. You have built structure. You are in the minority. |
| 10–18 | Dependent | Your company works, but it works because of you. You are one illness, one vacation, one bad quarter away from discovering how fragile it actually is. |
| 22–30 | Critical | You are the operating system. The company does not run without you in the room. This is not a growth problem. It is a survival problem. |
Questions
Founder Dependency Index: Questions
What does the Founder Dependency Index measure?
The Founder Dependency Index measures how much of your company runs through you, across three areas: operational decisions, exceptions the system cannot handle, and client relationships that depend on you personally.
How is the Founder Dependency Index scored?
The Founder Dependency Index scores each of the three answers 2, 6 or 10 points, for a total between 6 and 30. A total of 8 or less is Independent, 9 to 18 is Dependent, and 19 or more is Critical.
What should I do with a Dependent or Critical score?
A Dependent or Critical score means the company runs because of you, not because of the system. The next step is a Dependency Audit, which maps every thread that runs through the founder; it is the first phase of an engagement and the first topic of a 30-minute discovery call.
Book a discovery call →By Wes Struebing · Last updated