If one person vanished,would the business survive?

For each key person — anyone whose sudden absence would hurt — it scores six continuity dimensions (customer/vendor relationships, knowledge that lives only in their head, sole-authority decisions and access, a trained successor, continuity/key-person protection, and the share of output they personally drive) into a 0–100 resilience score and a verdict: COVERED, EXPOSED, or SINGLE POINT OF FAILURE. Then every person rolls up to a company bus-factor verdict — RESILIENT, KEY-PERSON GAPS, or FRAGILE. It answers the one question owners and acquirers actually care about: could the business keep running if this person vanished for a week?

Because being critical isn't the same as being a single point of failure — and conflating the two is the mistake this audit is built to avoid. The real bus-factor definition is precise: a person only creates that risk if they are BOTH key/irreplaceable AND unbacked. So the kill-chain gate forces SINGLE POINT OF FAILURE only when two conditions are present at once — the person holds irreplaceable relationships or knowledge (a load-bearing dimension marked 0) AND there's no trained, tested backup (the backup dimension marked 0). A brilliant, load-bearing person with a documented successor is covered; an unbacked role that holds nothing irreplaceable is survivable. Only the intersection actually halts the business, so only the intersection fires the gate.

Clear either half of the kill-chain — and the cheaper half is usually the backup. Train and test a successor for the core work and the gate releases even while the person stays load-bearing, because the fall now has somewhere to land. Or reduce the concentration itself: document the knowledge into accessible SOPs, or introduce a second owner on the key relationships. The audit names the single highest-leverage fix per person (it points to the backup first when the gate fired), so you always know the one move that changes the verdict. Most teams close the backup half first to stop the bleeding, then work down the dependency over time.

No — and it must not be used that way. It grades a continuity posture, not a person's worth, performance, or value. A SINGLE POINT OF FAILURE verdict is a statement about how the business has organized its knowledge and relationships, not a judgment of the individual — in fact it usually reflects that the person is trusted with too much and backed by too little. It is not an HR action, a performance review, or grounds for any employment decision. Use it to decide where to document, cross-train, and back up critical work — the fixes protect the business and the person both.

It's fully offline and deterministic — it connects to nothing. You get a runnable scoring engine, a workbook that reproduces it exactly (a Start Here guide, a Dashboard, and a Key-Person Scorecard with the mark definitions built into each column), a six-person worked sample, and two playbooks: a Key-Person Risk Audit playbook (how to identify your key people and mark them honestly) and a De-Risking runbook (how to close the gaps — backup ownership, knowledge documentation, relationship sharing, continuity protection). The on-page demo, the workbook, and the engine all run the same math and agree to the number.

The Founder-Time Leverage Audit is about what the founder should hand off to free their own time — a delegation and leverage decision. The Key-Person Risk Audit is about continuity: if any key person (founder or not) disappeared, would the business survive, and where is it dangerously dependent? One is about offloading work you shouldn't be doing; the other is about backing up work that would stop if the person were gone. They pair well — what you delegate in one often needs a documented backup in the other — but they answer different questions.