<aside> 📋 Frequency: Annually | Time: 60 min | Trigger: During annual planning in December

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A solo practice where everything runs through the owner has no exit — it has a shutdown. Most consultants don't think about exit until someone asks about it, and by then they've built a practice that can't be transferred, sold, or stepped away from without losing its revenue. Running this check annually tells you exactly how dependent your practice is on you, and which systems are missing between where you are and where you'd need to be.

Prerequisites

• Annual Planning Process complete or in progress — exit readiness informs the next year's systems priorities
• Your current SOP inventory — what's documented, what exists only in your head
• Your client concentration data — revenue by client, tenure, and contract renewal structure
• Your recurring revenue breakdown — retainer vs. project vs. one-time (consult a financial advisor or attorney on any valuation or legal implications)

Procedure

1. Audit your owner dependency across four dimensions: client relationships (do clients buy you or the firm?), delivery systems (what runs without you?), pipeline (does inbound exist, or does all business require your personal outreach?), and documentation (what would a capable person need to run this practice?). Rate each dimension honestly — this is diagnostic, not aspirational.
2. Run the Exit Readiness Assessment skill with your owner dependency ratings, SOP inventory, client concentration data, and recurring revenue breakdown as input. Review the output for your readiness score, critical gaps, and a prioritized systems gap list.
3. Review the critical gaps against your Annual Planning Process priorities. Any gap that appears on both lists (exit readiness gap AND annual plan constraint) is a first-tier systems project for the coming year.
4. Identify the single highest-leverage documentation gap — the process that only exists in your head and would most disrupt operations if you were unavailable. Schedule it as a Q1 systems project before leaving December planning.
5. Save the readiness assessment output with this year's date. It becomes the comparison baseline for next December — you'll measure progress against it in the Annual Planning Process.

Expected Outcome

You'll have a dated exit readiness assessment with an owner dependency rating across four dimensions, a prioritized gap list integrated into your Annual Planning Process, and one specific documentation project scheduled for Q1 — with a baseline to measure next year's progress against.

<aside> ⚠️ Common mistakes:

— Treating this as a distant-future exercise and pulling punches on the dependency ratings. Exit readiness isn't about selling next year — it's about whether your practice can survive you taking a month off. Rate your dependency as it actually is, not as you hope it is.

— Identifying gaps without scheduling the work. A gap list with no Q1 project attached is a to-do list that will still be there next December. The assessment is only useful if it produces one concrete next action before you leave the session.

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