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Dependence has no symptoms while the person is present. It produces speed rather than friction, and the cost is entirely deferred.

1. What Key-Person Dependence Actually Looks Like
2. Why It Feels Like Reliability
3. Mapping Who Knows What
4. The Questions That Reveal It
5. What Happens on Day One Without Them
6. Measuring It Without a Framework

What gets documented is the part a competent person could work out anyway. The gap is reasons, exceptions and judgement.

1. The Knowledge That Never Gets Written Down
2. Why Documentation Projects Fail
3. Writing the Minimum That Actually Helps
4. Where to Keep It So It Is Found
5. Keeping It Current Without a Programme
6. Recording Decisions, Not Just Procedures
7. The Things That Cannot Be Documented

Access takes an afternoon while knowledge takes months, which makes it the first thing to do.

1. Client Relationships Held by One Person
2. Supplier and Contractor Knowledge
3. Access, Passwords and Accounts
4. Signing Authority and Approvals
5. Regulatory and Professional Registrations
6. The Bank, the Insurer and the Accountant

Resilience has a real price. Costing it honestly is what makes the cheap items actually get done.

1. Deputising: Making It Real
2. Pairing and Shadowing That Works
3. Rotating Tasks Nobody Wants to Rotate
4. Cross-Training on a Small Team
5. When the Expert Resists
6. The Cost of Spreading Knowledge
7. What to Spread First

The absences are already happening. Wasting them as rehearsals is the largest free loss available.

1. Planned Absence: Holiday as a Test
2. Unplanned Absence: Illness and Emergency
3. Long-Term Absence
4. The Owner Who Cannot Take a Holiday
5. Covering a Role Nobody Else Understands
6. What to Do in the First Week

Notice exists so that work can be transferred, not so that projects can be finished.

1. Notice Periods and What They Are For
2. The Handover Document
3. Handover Conversations That Work
4. When Somebody Leaves Badly
5. Keeping the Door Open
6. Sudden Departure Without Notice
7. Death or Serious Illness of a Key Person

A vacancy is the cheapest moment to reduce concentration, and the advantage disappears within three months.

1. Designing Roles That Do Not Concentrate
2. Hiring for Overlap
3. Growing Past the Founder
4. Documentation as a Hiring Advantage
5. Succession Without a Successor
6. When the Right Answer Is to Stay Dependent

The end state as a description, twelve common failures, and the order to do things in.

1. What a Resilient Small Organisation Looks Like
2. What Succession Planning Cannot Do
3. Common Failures, Listed
4. A Checklist for the Whole Thing
5. Glossary and Where to Start