Founder Dependency Assessment
Most founder-led companies in Eastern Europe are founder-driven: revenue, client relationships and team retention hang on one person. Standard due diligence surfaces it after the LOI, when walking away is expensive, and it kills post-acquisition performance in the majority of deals we have seen.
Twelve questions, asked early, show how much of the company leaves with the founder, and what the deal has to do about it.
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Companies our team has worked inside
What's inside: the 12 questions and the score
Twelve questions, one answer each. Count the answers that point at the founder.
- Which clients would take a call from someone other than the founder?
- Who negotiated the last three contracts?
- What share of revenue sits with clients the founder brought in personally?
- Which decisions wait for the founder in a normal week?
- Who approves hires, pricing and scope changes?
- Who ran the company during the founder's last two-week absence, and how did it go?
- Which three people would leave if the founder left?
- Who owns the relationship with the top three clients in the CRM, and who owns it in reality?
- What does the founder do after the deal, in writing, and for how long?
- What happens to key people's compensation at close?
- Which processes exist only in the founder's head?
- What has the founder refused to delegate, and why?
Reading the score
- 0 to 4 answers point at the founder: a founder-light company; the price can stand on the operations.
- 5 to 8: a dependency to price in, with a transition plan and retention instruments agreed before the LOI.
- 9 to 12: the company is the founder; the deal needs a staged transition and an earn-out that pays for what survives it.
Who is this for
For acquirers before the LOI, and for founders a year before a sale:
- Corporate development and fund teams who want the dependency priced in before the process, with the transition plan on the table
- Strategic acquirers who need the founder to stay committed and the clients and the team to stay with the company
- Founders preparing an exit who want to see their company the way a buyer will, and fix it first
A founder who scores high has the same twelve items as a to-do list; our team runs that list inside the company before the sale.
Need the read on a specific company?
Companies our team has worked inside
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