OWNER DEPENDENCY ASSESSMENT
How dependent is your business on you?
Most owner-operated businesses carry more in one person’s head than anyone realizes — until that person is unavailable. This free assessment gives you a clear, structured reading of where your business depends on you (or any single key person), and where it can already run without you.
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WHAT IT MEASURES
What “owner dependency” actually means
Owner dependency is the degree to which a business relies on one person’s knowledge, judgment, relationships, or presence to keep operating normally. A low-dependency business keeps serving customers, making routine decisions, and moving work forward when the owner steps away. A high-dependency business slows, stalls, or stops.
Dependency isn’t a character flaw — it’s a natural result of building something yourself. But left unexamined, it quietly caps how much the business can grow, how freely the owner can take time away, and what the business is worth to a future buyer. The first step is simply seeing it clearly.
THE SIX AREAS
Six areas where dependency hides
The assessment reads your business across six connected areas. Each is scored on a 0–100 dependency index, and together they form your overall Owner Dependency Index.
Six equally-weighted areas
Each area carries the same weight toward your overall Owner Dependency Index. Hover or tap a slice to read what it measures.
THREE PERSPECTIVES
One business, seen three ways
A dependency reading is most useful when it compares how the business is seen from more than one vantage point. The same six areas can be assessed from three perspectives:
- PerceivedOwnerThe owner's assessment of how the business operates.
- ObservedTM / BrokerThe assessor's assessment based on available information, observation, and evidence.
- ExperiencedStaffAn aggregate of individual responses from relevant employees or operating staff.
When the owner’s view and the staff’s view of the same area differ sharply, that gap is often more revealing than either score on its own. This tool lets you run the owner assessment on its own, or add staff perspectives to compare.
HOW IT IS SCORED
How the scoring works
Every question is answered on a 0–4 scale, from fully independent to critically dependent:
- 0IndependentThe work can generally proceed without dependence on the person being assessed.
- 1Minor frictionSome assistance or intervention may be needed, but normal operations generally continue.
- 2Material frictionReliance on the person can delay or complicate normal operations.
- 3Major dependenceThe person is regularly required to keep this area operating effectively.
- 4Critical dependenceThe area may be materially disrupted if the person is unavailable.
Answers are averaged within each area and converted to a 0–100 index. The overall Owner Dependency Index is the average across all twenty-four questions. Each score falls into one of five plain-language bands:
- 0–20Low apparent dependency
- 20–40Limited but meaningful dependency
- 40–60Material dependency
- 60–80High dependency
- 80–100Severe dependency
PRIVACY & LIMITATIONS
What this is — and what it isn’t
Your answers stay with you. The assessment runs entirely in your browser. Nothing you enter is sent to a server or stored online. Closing or refreshing the page clears everything.
Scores are assessment-based indicators, not validated industry benchmarks or a formal business valuation. It is a structured way to think clearly about how your business operates and where responsibility is concentrated — not a formal audit or valuation.
Methodology ODI/KPDI 4.1. V1 provides a downloadable PDF report. V2 is planned to introduce file saving and sharing, along with metric building and tracking.
AFTER THE ASSESSMENT
Seeing the number is the start, not the finish
A dependency reading tells you where the business leans on one person. Turning the reading into a business that runs without carrying everything personally is the work Turning Mill does — mapping how work moves, removing single points of failure, and building the systems that let other people carry the load reliably.