Owner Independence Diagnostic
Your business is worth what it is worth without you.
Forty nine statements, a written report on the seven things that keep a business tied to its owner, and time with someone who has spent twenty five years inside businesses like yours, reading it with you. You leave with your own first move, whether or not you work with me again.
$495 plus GST, payable on booking. The session goes in the diary the same day.
Three questions worth an hour of anyone's time
Most owners have never had these answered with numbers.
ONE
How much more money could you generate working on the business, with forty per cent of your time back?
Every owner has a number for what the business could do. Almost none have costed what their own hours are capping.TWO
Where is your involvement adding real value?
Some of what you carry is holding the roof up. It should stay, and it should be written down as kept on purpose.THREE
And where is it simply habit?
The quote you always check. The call that always comes to you. Nobody decided this; it just never got handed over.What the diagnostic measures
Seven categories, thirty five points each.
Not a personality profile and not a quiz. Forty nine statements you rate from strongly disagree to strongly agree, built from twenty two businesses over seven years and several hundred documented owner dependencies. Your lowest category is your headline. Your highest gets named and credited, because knowing what you have already built matters as much as knowing what you have not.
The business is the owner. Very little moves without them.
There are managers. The owner is still the hub.
The work has moved. The authority is the question.
It runs without them. What is left is deliberate.
Who decides when you are not available, and whether their decisions stand.
Where the work comes from, who prices it, and whose relationships the clients are.
How much of the actual work is still yours, and who sets your week.
Whether there is anyone to hand it to, and whether the seats you fill stay filled.
What the business knows, and how much of it lives in one head.
Who sees the numbers, who uses them, and whether anyone can see forward.
Whether the things you hand over stay handed over. The one that predicts everything else.
What you get
A report written to your answers, and someone who has seen it before to read it with you.
Where the business sits
Your score on the Owner Independence Ladder, and where the business sits on the Business by Design lifecycle, calculated from your answers rather than from an impression.
Your headline category, statement by statement
All seven statements in your lowest category with the answers you gave, and what that pattern usually means in a business your size.
What is holding it, and what moves it
The category is where the dependency sits. This is the reason it stays, and the one or two moves the numbers point toward. Including the move that would be a mistake.
The gaps to explore
Five places your own answers pull against each other, each with the question your team gets asked. This is the page owners argue with, which is the point.
Time with someone who has done this before
Sixty minutes, one to one, booked when you pay and held within two weeks. Twenty five years mentoring owners of family and privately held businesses, and an instrument built from twenty two of them. You are not being read a report by the person who generated it.
Your first move, in writing
One dependency, the move that shifts it, and the test that proves it stayed shifted. Yours to run, with or without me.
How it runs
Nothing gets produced on spec.
You book and pay
The session goes in the diary on the same day. That order matters: a report nobody has time booked to discuss is a report nobody reads.
You answer forty nine statements
About twenty minutes, on a phone or a laptop, on your own. First instinct is the right answer. Two short questions at the end do more work than the forty nine.
I build the report
Scored, written to your actual answers, and sent to you the day before we meet so you have read it before we start.
We spend the session on it
Not a presentation. A conversation with someone who has sat in this chair with twenty two other owners: which of these you want gone first, why it has not gone already, and what would have to be true for it to stay gone.
The fee
$495, and you leave with your first move.
$495PLUS GST, PAYABLE ON BOOKING
- The full forty nine statement Owner Independence Diagnostic
- Your written report, scored and built to your answers
- Sixty minutes one to one with Chris, booked when you pay
- Your first move, named and written down
If you finish the session and do not have something worth $495, say so and I will refund it.
Book the diagnostic and your sessionFit
Who this is for.
Worth the $495
- An owner of a family or privately held business, founder or next generation
- Somewhere between five and one hundred people
- At capacity, where growth now costs the owner hours they do not have
- Thinking about a sale, a succession or a bank in the next few years
- Willing to be told which of their habits is the constraint
Not yet
- A sole operator or a team of two. There is nobody to hand anything to yet
- An owner who wants the report and not the conversation
- A business in a cash crisis. Fix that first, then come back
- Anyone looking for a valuation. This measures dependency, not price
Questions
Before you book.
How long does the questionnaire take?
About twenty minutes. Forty nine statements rated one to five, plus two short questions at the end about which outcome you want most and the last time you were out of the business for four consecutive weeks.
Does my team get asked as well?
Not in this. The team version, the Mirror, asks them twenty one of the same questions and the distance between your answers and theirs is usually the most useful thing in the whole method. It is the next step rather than part of this one, and we will talk about whether it is worth running.
Is this a sales meeting?
The session is about your report. I will tell you at the end what the twelve month program would do with it, because that is my job, and you are free to take your first move and run it yourself. Plenty do.
What if my answers make me look bad?
They will show something you already suspect. Every business in the evidence base carried around seventeen dependencies, including the ones that have since sold well. Scoring low on a category is information, not a verdict.
Who sees it?
You and me. Results go into an anonymised register that improves the instrument, with nothing that identifies you or the business.
Stop counting what you handed over. Count what stayed gone.
$495 plus GST. Twenty minutes of questions, an eleven page report, and a session that ends with a decision.