The Dependency AuditHow much of your sales engine still runs through you — and where the pressure is greatest.
In many owner-led B2B firms the real constraint is not sales activity. It is sales concentration: the filtering, the first conversation, the follow-up, the numbers and the judgement calls all sit with one person. Growth then stops at whatever that person can personally carry.
The five areas it scores
Exhibit 01Scored 0–8 per area. The total shows how deep the dependency runs; your highest-scoring area shows where the pressure is greatest. Extracted from The Founder Handover.
Twenty statements. Answer as the business behaves when you are busy, not on a good week.
Score each one on the last 90 days rather than your intentions. Your result appears as you go: your answers are calculated in your browser, and your audit responses are not submitted or stored by this tool.
What your score means, and what to do first.
The areas are ordered deliberately. A later one built on a missing earlier one collapses, so weight your effort by score but keep the sequence.
| Score | Zone | What it means, and where to start |
|---|---|---|
| 0–12 | Distributed | Sales already runs substantially without you. Work selectively: go straight to your highest-scoring area and tighten the weekly operating rhythm. A full rebuild is more than you need. |
| 13–24 | Transitional | The most common zone for a growing B2B firm. Parts of the system exist but are inconsistent, and they fail exactly when you get busy. Run a full 90-day handover on one customer segment. Expect the biggest gains in Follow-Up and Numbers. |
| 25–32 | Concentrated | The business is genuinely capacity-bound by you. Do not attempt all five areas at once; transferring everything together usually overloads the handover. Keep the five in sequence, but put the most effort into your highest-scoring area. Build each one to a usable standard, prove it holds, then move to the next. |
| 33–40 | Owner-carried | Effectively every sales decision routes through you, and the revenue line is a direct function of your calendar. Complete a two-week stabilisation first: put every open opportunity in one place, set your pricing floors, choose the first customer segment and name the person receiving the handover. Then begin with Filter. |
Your row is highlighted automatically once all twenty statements are answered.
The honest caveat
This is a directional self-assessment, not a diagnostic. It tells you where the concentration sits; it cannot tell you what it is costing you, and it is only as accurate as the honesty of your scoring. Score it twice — once as you would describe the business to a client, once as it behaved last month — and work from the second number.
The test that matters
Pick one live opportunity. Hand it over completely — no forwarding, no copying yourself, no rescuing it in week two. What breaks in the next 21 days is your real result, and it will usually match your highest-scoring area above.
Three ways forward, depending on how far you want to take it.
A 28-question assessment across seven revenue dimensions that shows where revenue control is strongest and where it is breaking down. Free, about ten minutes, results on screen.
The full system this audit is drawn from: the five transfers, the 90-day plan week by week, the withdrawal test, and eleven fill-in templates. Written for owner-led B2B firms that have outgrown running sales personally.
Bring your score and your highest area. We will work out what is actually holding the transfer back, and what the first 30 days should contain.
Amit Sharma · Revenue Pulse Consulting
Revenue Strategist & Fractional Sales Leader, with more than eighteen years in B2B sales and revenue leadership across fintech, telecom and payments, and a GMP credential from the Indian School of Business. Revenue Pulse works with owner-led B2B and SME firms on the problem this audit measures: revenue that depends on one person's presence.
Free to use, print and share in full and unaltered, including inside your own business. Not for resale, and not to be republished as your own work. Nothing here is a guarantee of a revenue outcome; results depend on what you do with it.