# The 90-Day Owner-Dependence Reduction Plan

Owner dependence is the biggest single lever on what a buyer pays, and it is the one most owners have never measured. A buyer is not asking whether you are good at the work. They are asking what breaks the day you stop doing it. This plan takes one workflow off you in 90 days, then repeats, so that by the time you sell the honest answer to that question is "not much."

The method is the house Owner Replacement Sprint: one workflow at a time, four phases, 90 days. Run it once a quarter and you remove yourself from four major workflows a year. Do not try to hand off everything at once. One workflow that truly leaves your desk beats four that half-stick and teach the team your systems do not hold.

> The work that makes the business run without you is the same work that makes it worth the most when you sell.

## Start with the baseline (three numbers)

Before you change anything, measure where you stand. Three numbers tell the whole story, and you re-read them every 30 days to prove the plan is working.

| Baseline metric | Day 0 | Day 90 target |
|---|---|---|
| Owner hours per week | 55 | 44 |
| Escalations to you per week | 12 | 8 |
| Processes only you can run | 4 | 3 |

This is the filled example for Ridgeline Heating & Air, a home-services business where the owner priced every job, approved every discount, and was the only one who could smooth an unhappy key account. Twelve times a week the team stopped and waited for the owner. The plan below takes the largest of those bottlenecks, new-job pricing and scheduling, off the owner first.

## The one workflow chosen

**Workflow: quote a new job, price it, and get it on the schedule.** It was chosen because it drove 5 of the 12 weekly escalations and it gated revenue: nothing got booked until the owner priced it, so the owner was the bottleneck on the money. Move this one and the week loosens more than any other single change.

## Days 1 to 15: observe and map

You cannot hand off a workflow you have not written down. For 15 days, every time this workflow runs, capture it: what came in, what you decided, and why. Keep the interruption log open and log every pricing question in one line each. In the example, 11 quotes ran through in two weeks, and the owner logged the exact judgment made on each.

At the end, you have the real map: the 6 inputs a price depends on (job type, size, access, parts, crew hours, and the customer's history), and the 3 decisions that felt like judgment but were actually rules waiting to be written. Map it before you touch it.

## Days 16 to 30: standardize and document

Turn the map into a written procedure a role can run, not a person. Write the pricing SOP: the standard markup on parts (in the example, 35%), the labor rate per crew hour ($65 to $95 by job class), the 3 rules that used to be judgment ("any job over $8,000 or any commercial account still comes to the owner"), and the one-page quote template. Then build the routing table so the team knows which calls they now own.

The test of a good SOP: a competent new hire can run 8 of 10 quotes from the document alone, and only the top 2 come to a human. In the example, the written procedure covered every residential job under $8,000, which was 8 of every 10 quotes.

## Days 31 to 60: train and transfer

Now the work moves to the person, with you watching, not doing. Name the role that owns it (Service Manager) and the person in it (Renata Cole). For 30 days she prices every job to the SOP and you review each one within the day, correcting the SOP, not just the quote, whenever a gap shows. The corrections drop fast: 9 in week 1, 2 by week 4.

By day 60 the manager prices and schedules the routine jobs without you, and only the 2-in-10 exceptions (over $8,000 or commercial) reach you. Escalations on this workflow fall from 5 a week to 1. You have transferred the work, not just described it.

## Days 61 to 90: manage by output

The final phase is the hardest: you stop reviewing every quote and start reading the result. Once a week you look at the output, not the decisions: quotes sent, close rate, average margin, and any job that missed the margin floor. If the numbers hold, you do not touch the quotes. In the example, close rate held at 41% and average gross margin held at 38% with the owner reviewing nothing mid-week.

That is the shift that a buyer pays for: the workflow now runs on a role and a number, not on you. You manage the exception, not the task.

## The day-90 test

Prove it. Take 3 consecutive business days fully out of this workflow, phone off for it, and let the manager run every quote. If pricing and scheduling keep moving with no revenue lost, this workflow has left your desk. In the example, the owner took a 3-day test in week 12, 7 quotes went out without them, and nothing stalled.

Three days is the start. The finish line across all your workflows is the 14-day test: the business runs two full weeks with no call to you. One workflow does not get you there. Four do.

## Then repeat, and route the score

Run this plan again next quarter on the next-biggest bottleneck (in the example, approving discounts and handling the key commercial account), and again the quarter after. Four turns a year takes the owner out of the four processes that a buyer marks the business down for. The three baseline numbers should fall each quarter: 55 owner-hours toward 30, 12 escalations toward 4, 4 owner-only processes toward 1.

The static version is this page and the owner-light templates. The living, scored version, your Business Independence Score tracked as a number that moves each month, is the free Keystone diagnostic at https://app.trykeystone.io. This plan is general operating education, not accounting, tax, or legal advice. Every name and figure here is an illustrative example, not a real client.
