You founded AB Hailogix.
AB Hailogix is a catering and events company with thirty-five staff. It runs well because you answer every question fast. Your first two-week holiday starts in fourteen days, and you have promised your family the phone stays off.
Twelve requests will come to your phone before you go. Put each one in a tray. Your choices decide what your team can handle while you are on the beach.
Workshop version
The workshop version is for a facilitator and a group on one big screen, and takes about forty minutes. It also works for mentoring one founder. I give each client an access code.
The four trays
Done at once. It costs your hours, and your team still cannot do it while you are away.
A trained person takes it. If the person is not trained yet, you train them first. That costs hours now, and they cover that kind of work while you are away.
You set a limit, such as "Zawadi approves payments up to AfK.300,000". Inside the limit, your team decides without you.
It waits on your phone. Some requests come back bigger.
Watch two gauges as you play: your working week, and the evenings and weekends you give up when you work past your limit.
The fourteen days before your holiday
Your week
Evenings and weekends used
"If I relax, I will fall behind. If I log off, someone else will get ahead."
Drag the card onto a tray, or tap a tray.
What you have done
- Your moves will appear here.
Your team
Your holiday: fourteen days, phone off
Each day, something comes in. Watch who deals with it.
Your phone is off. The first day begins.
You are back. Here is what happened.
Founder Dependency Score
How the score works: each request that came in during the holiday has a size (small counts one, medium two, large three). The score is the share of that weight that waited for you, with a mistake counting half. Zero means the business ran without you. One hundred means everything waited.
The Core Map of AB Hailogix
Each box is one area of work. Your own box is crossed through, because you were away.
Why you got this result
What it cost
From my books
You have felt the problem. Here are the ideas from my books, in plain words.
The Core Map and the holiday test
In Stitch In Time, I ask leaders to draw a Core Map: the roles the business depends on. The test is plain. A role is critical if its absence for seventy-two hours would force an emergency response. A role with fewer than two trained, tested backups is a single-point dependency, and the map shows it as Brittle.
Write down the founder's limits
A decision right with a written limit lets another person act without calling you. Founders often find this line the hardest to write.
"The hardest line to write into any charter is the one that limits the founder. It is also the line that protects the founder best."
The fear of slowing down
"If I relax, I will fall behind. If I log off, someone else will get ahead."
In 5M Unbreakable, I call this the fear of slowing down. It keeps founders doing work that others could learn to do. My answer in the book is a Maintenance Plan in three parts:
- Baselines: protected sleep; movement for twenty to thirty minutes on more days than not; at least one person a week who leaves you feeling calmer; a digital off-ramp.
- Reliefs: short practices you can use during a hard day.
- Guardrails: for each trigger, write down your usual reaction, your new boundary, and who you will tell.
Protecting the core is a governance task
In Stitch In Time, I make the same point about the people the business depends on. Of the Margin Engine, I write:
"This is not a wellness initiative. It is a governance structure."
Round two: set up the tools first
Same fourteen days, same requests. This time you did three things a month earlier, in a calm week. Choose them now.
1. One decision right, written down with its limit
Choose the kind of decision and how far the limit goes.
2. One person trained as a tested backup
This person learnt the work and covered it for a day while you watched.
3. One Baseline protected
With a Baseline in place, tiredness will not slow your choices or cause a mistake.
Round one and round two, side by side
Same requests and same holiday. The only change is what was in place before the phone went off.