When you run a consultancy, a lot of the business naturally depends on you.

You win the work and deliver a lot of it. You know the clients, understand the history and make most of the important decisions.

Even with some support, it's normal for a long list of things to still come back to you.

The difficulty is that, over time, it becomes harder to tell which parts of the consultancy genuinely need you and which have simply come to depend on you.

Dependency builds naturally

Most small consultancies are not designed in advance. They develop around the work that comes in.

You win a client, create a proposal, organise the work and add whatever else is needed to keep the consultancy running.

When you are working on your own, or with very limited support, doing most of this yourself usually makes sense. Bringing someone else in to handle a task that takes you ten minutes may create more work than it removes.

Over time, you become very efficient at keeping everything moving. You know where things are, what each client expects and the workarounds that keep your systems functioning.

It works, but it also means the consultancy gradually develops around what you know, remember and do.

That dependence builds without an obvious moment when you decided to create it.

Capability can hide dependency

The things most likely to change are usually the things causing an obvious problem.

Much of the work that accumulates around your consultancy isn’t causing one. You just deal with it.

Your capability compensates for the friction, so there is little reason to question how the work gets done.

Some dependency is valuable

Some parts of the consultancy should depend on you.

Your perspective, relationships, experience and ability to see what others miss may be central to why clients choose you in the first place. Removing that involvement would not necessarily make the business better. It could make it less valuable.

So it’s less about whether the consultancy depends on you, and more about what it depends on you for.

What has simply come to depend on you?

When you work on your own or run a small consultancy, almost everything defaults to you.

That doesn’t mean everything deserves the same amount of your time or attention.

Some work depends on you because it draws on what is distinctive about you. Other work depends on you because the process has developed that way, you hold the knowledge, or you have simply always done it.

There may also be work you have outgrown but continue to carry because it still brings in revenue you don’t want to lose. An old service, a longstanding client, or work you probably wouldn’t choose to take on today.

Some activities may only still be there because you have never questioned whether they need doing at all.

From inside the working week, these can easily merge into one category:

Things I need to do.

Your consultancy needs you. But not everything in it that depends on you does.