The owner took a fortnight off. Nothing broke. Nothing was decided either.

The holiday test is the most popular measure of owner dependency and one of the least informative. A better version asks what actually got decided while the chair was empty.

By Steve 5 min read
Abstract bridge artwork for The owner took a fortnight off. Nothing broke. Nothing was decided either.

The holiday test is folklore by now: if the business survives two weeks without you, it is not dependent on you. Owners come back from a fortnight away, find no fires, no lost customers, no payroll disaster, and conclude the succession problem is smaller than they feared. It usually is not. Nothing broke because nothing had to break. A fortnight is shorter than the cycle time of almost every decision that matters, and a business can absorb a great deal of deferral before deferral looks like damage. The useful question…

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