John Warrillow uses the fictional owner of an advertising agency to explore a company’s dependence on its founder. The story makes the difference between owning a business and being indispensable to every job easy to grasp.
It beats #7 for a small owner-led firm because the central problem is tightly defined. We place it below #5 because planning a transferable company is less urgent than getting a simple business moving. You need not want to sell to find the question useful: which service could a trained colleague deliver without you?
Source: Penguin Random House · AI illustration: Topnilo · OpenAI. Created with OpenAI; resized/recompressed.