Insight
The thirty-day test
If the business stops when you leave, you don't own a business. You own a job with employees.
Could your business run without you for thirty days?
Not a holiday where you take calls from the hills. Thirty days in which payments, customers, suppliers, and difficult people are handled by someone else.
Most founders discover the answer is no. That is not a personal failing. It is how the business was built: by one person who cared more than anyone else.
The trouble is that a company built that way cannot be transferred to a child, a professional manager, or a buyer until the founder is no longer the system.
The objective isn't to sell the business. It is to make the business capable of being transferred.