The Successor Test · free, no email required
Is your business worth passing on?
One question governs the twenty below: what would the person who should take over tomorrow actually see? Not what you built — what survives you. Twenty questions, about ten minutes, an honest verdict at the end.
Five crossings × four questions, each scored 0–5. Your answers stay in your browser — nothing is sent unless you ask for your Crossing Map at the end. Background reading: why business handovers fail.
The five crossings
0 / 20 answered
Process
Does the machine run without you — or are you the machine?
If you disappeared for three weeks without a phone, how much would keep running?
Are your key know-hows documented and tooled — or stored in heads, mostly yours?
How much of your team's week goes to repetitive tasks a machine could do today?
Could a successor read the true state of the business — revenue, margin, pipeline, commitments — in one screen and ten minutes?
Visibility
Do you exist where the world now searches — or only in your address book?
Ask ChatGPT or Google AI for the best companies in your sector, in your area. Are you in the answer?
How much of your revenue depends on the owner's personal address book?
Do new clients arrive every month without anyone going to get them — site, content, reputation?
Is your reputation written down somewhere — dated cases, reviews, published work — or purely word of mouth?
People
Is anyone being prepared to take over — or is everyone still "the intern"?
Is there someone on the team who could run the company in three years — and is anything being done today to prepare them?
Does your team use AI in their daily work — or watch it from a distance?
If your #1 key person (besides you) left tomorrow, would the company survive it — backup, documentation, cross-training?
Is the intimate client knowledge — history, sensitivities, the unspoken — shared, or locked in your memory?
Matter
Would your workshop impress a successor — or scare them off?
Would your production tools stand comparison with a competitor equipping themselves today?
Do painful or dangerous manual steps make hiring harder — jobs nobody applies for anymore?
Can you prototype or run small series in-house — or does everything go through slow subcontractors?
Would a reasonable machine investment — robotics, laser, 3D, CNC — raise your margin as soon as next year?
Borders
Does the business depend on one market — or does it travel?
How much of your revenue depends on a 100 km radius, or a single market?
Have you already sold — not prospected: sold — outside your home market?
Is your offer exportable as it stands — language, standards, format, delivery?
Is the expansion potential documented and provable — or would a successor have to invent it?
Your verdict
Where to cross first
A ferryman takes one ford at a time. These are your two weakest crossings — each has a venture in the galaxy built precisely for it.