TMI / GLOSSARY
OWNER DEPENDENCY
Definition. Owner dependency is the share of a company's decisions, knowledge and relationships that cannot move without one particular person being available.
WHAT IT
MEANS.
It is the most common constraint TMI finds and the least often named, because it does not look like a problem from inside. The owner is good at the work, fast at deciding, and trusted by the customers. Everything routing through them feels like competence rather than risk.
The cost shows up in three places. It caps how fast the company can grow, because the constraint is one person's hours. It makes time off expensive rather than restful. And when the company is eventually valued — by a buyer, a bank or a successor — it is discounted precisely to the degree that it is the owner.
Reducing it is not about the owner doing less. It is about the context behind their decisions existing somewhere other than their memory, so that someone else can make the same call and be right.
WHAT IT
IS NOT.
Delegation
Handing over a task without the context behind it produces a worse version of the same decision and a rapid return to the owner. The context is the work.
Hiring a manager
A manager inherits the problem unless the knowledge was captured first. Owner dependency is an information problem wearing a staffing costume.
Every term in this glossary is one TMI uses in client work, which is the only reason it is here. The rest of the glossary →
SEE IT IN YOUR OWN COMPANY