3 QUESTIONS TO ASK

There comes a point in your leadership journey when you start looking at work and contemplate whether this business is actually worth your trouble. That moment is a game-changer because it does not just shift how you see someone else’s company, it shifts how you run your own work.

Founders stop building for control and start building for capability. Employees stop working towards performance reviews and start understanding performance drivers.

And investors, well, they have been asking the hard questions from day one. You don’t need to be an investor to start thinking like one. All you need is a sharper lens and the three question gut check even for that business we pretend is just going through a phase.

1. Can it run without the owner?

Otherwise known as the hit-by-a-truck test. If the owner goes on holiday, does the business coast on, or combust inward? Are they focusing on making strategic decisions or also fixing the printer and chasing overdue invoices?

If a business cannot run without the head honcho, that’s a problem.  A real asset that is scalable should function without being hand-fed every five minutes. If it cannot, then it is not scalable with its high dependency factor. Congratulations, you are stuck until you actively make a change!

2. Is the revenue repeatable?

Everyone looks good during a boom but what happens when the algorithm changes, or when the trend fades or when the market sneezes?

Repeatable revenue is built on systems, not streaks so it depends on retained customers, recurring contracts, product-market fit. If your business is held together by a trending sound, an underpriced product, or one rainmaker salesperson who holds 83% of client relationships in their head, that’s a house of cards and it is pretty darn windy out there.

3. Are systems built strong, or held together with duct tape and goodwill?

Gaffer tape does look tidy from a distance, especially framed with colour coded spreadsheets and someone named Margaret who just knows where everything is. But real systems can predict outcomes and are built to scale. They are documented, repeatable, testable, the kind of thing someone else can walk into and immediately just get it.   

Ask yourself if someone else would pay to inherit the way this business works…or would they run?

You might be thinking, but I am not selling my business, or that I am not even a founder, I just run a department. That does not matter as this lens is not about valuation, we are focusing more on viability. This lens will sharpen your leadership, force you to see fragility before it becomes a fire and makes you ask harder questions and build stronger answers. This mindset makes you indispensable, you will stop ticking boxes and start building infrastructure like a strategic multiplier. 

It is never too early to start seeing the game behind the business and work towards protecting your time, energy and eventual exit.