On removability

The founder asked me last week if I could "step in for a few months." She'd been working sixty five hours and her business had grown thirty eight percent year on year. She wanted help. What she needed was something else entirely.

She'd built something genuinely good. A specialty supplements brand, eight million in revenue, profitable, growing. The team was seventeen people. The product was loved. She had three children under ten. She was also, she said over coffee, "completely fried."

The "step in for a few months" framing is the one I hear most often. It comes from a sensible place. The founder has identified that they are the bottleneck. They have done the responsible thing — they have admitted it. They have decided to bring someone in. They want the someone to relieve the pressure.

The problem with this framing is that it solves nothing.

If I step in for a few months and do the commercial work, the commercial work stops being broken for a few months. Then I leave. Then it breaks again. The founder is now in exactly the position she was in before — fried, bottlenecked, working sixty five hours — except she has also spent six figures and learned that hiring senior help feels good but doesn't help.

What "removable" actually means

The right question isn't can someone help me for a few months. The right question is am I removable from this function. The two questions look similar. They are not.

To be removable from a function means three things, in this order. First, the function has a written operating model that someone other than you can read and run. Second, there is a named human in seat whose job it is to run it. Third, the systems and scorecards exist to tell that human, and you, whether the function is working — without you needing to be in the meeting.

Most founder led businesses I see have none of those three. They have the founder, doing the function, by feel. The founder is the operating model. The founder is the named human. The founder is the scorecard.

This works at three million in revenue. It struggles at eight. It will not survive twenty.

The honest version of "I'll help"

What I told her, eventually, was that I couldn't help her for a few months. Not in any way that would actually solve the problem. I could come in for six. I could bring an embedded senior operator with me. We could rebuild the commercial function — properly, with the operating model written, the scorecard in place, the lead in seat. Then we would leave. The price was $75,000. The duration was non negotiable. She would have to commit to not being in the room for the work.

She thought about it for about four seconds. Then she said: "but if you do it for six months, and you actually fix it, then I'm worth a million dollars more next year. That's what you just calculated."

Yes. That's what I just calculated.

She signed two days later.

The number

The reason the Removability Index exists on the front page of this site is that the number is the start of the conversation. If you ran the calculator and got back twenty percent, you are the business. If you got back ninety percent, you don't need me — you have already done the work, or your business has done it for you.

If you got back somewhere in the middle, which is where almost every founder I meet lands, the number is also the size of the problem in money. Multiply your annual revenue by the gap. That's the rough order of what being unremovable is costing you, per year.

That figure tends to be larger than the cost of fixing it.

That, in one number, is why we exist.