Founder Dependency Calculator
What is being the bottleneck costing you?
Five questions. See how much of your annual reward disappears into decisions and firefighting your team should already own.
Salary plus dividends, whatever combination you actually take out.
For example: signing off proposals or pricing, approving small purchases, resolving a dispute between team members, checking work before it goes to a client.
For example: stepping in on a client escalation, redoing someone's work, resolving a conflict that should have stopped at manager level.
Annual cost of founder dependency
£26,400
Of your week routed through you
22%
Early Warning Signs
A modest share of your reward is still tied up in work your team should own outright. It isn't costing much yet, but it's worth naming before it becomes habit.
- Healthy Delegation
- Early Warning Signs
- Bottleneck Forming
- Growth-Constraining Bottleneck
- You Are The Ceiling
Reactive hours tend to cost more than this number shows. They interrupt flow and carry a switching cost this calculator doesn't capture. If most of your dependency hours are firefighting rather than approvals, treat this figure as a floor, not a ceiling.
This is a directional estimate, not a precise accounting figure. It's designed to make a pattern visible, not to survive an audit.
What to do next
List the specific decisions and escalations that still land on you, and pick one to hand off first. Small, deliberate moves now stop this hardening into a pattern.
Free, no-pressure conversation
Talk your result through with an expert, free
Thirty minutes, no pitch — just a clear read on what's routing through you and what to hand over first.
Book your free call with Barry