The Dependency Score

I was sitting with a B2B SaaS team whose deck was full of charts pointing up and to the right. Good product, real customers, a team that believed the engine was working.

So I asked what share of those deals had come from outside the founder's network.

Someone said sixty percent. Someone else said thirty. Then the room started negotiating with itself, which is usually the moment worth paying attention to.

I filtered the CRM myself. The answer was somewhere between ten and fifteen, and even that was generous, because inbound turned out to mean a friend of an investor, or somebody the founder had met at a conference three years earlier.

The number mattered less than the spread. Nobody in the room was lying. They had never had a reason to look, because nothing was visibly broken. Revenue was real. The customers were real. The relationships were real.

That is what makes this one hard to see. A company running on its founder's network does not look like a company with a problem. It looks like a company with a pipeline.

What it has is a contact list with a CRM wrapped around it.

The distinction shows up the moment you try to transfer it. A network belongs to the person who built it. A new sales director inherits the contacts and none of the history, none of the trust, and none of the context, because the context lives in the founder's head and nowhere else. When the founder is in the room, the room changes. When the founder is not in the room, the room is just a room.

No CRM has a field for that.

The ceiling arrives quietly. The introductions that used to appear without asking appear less often. The sales cycle stretches by a couple of weeks. And the signal I now watch for above all the others: the founder starts getting pulled into early-stage calls simply to get prospects to take the meeting, when a year earlier they were only needed to close.

I diagnosed this in twenty companies before I admitted I had it myself.

When I started out on my own I called everyone I knew. Former colleagues, former clients, people I had worked with a decade earlier who still picked up when they saw my name. Twenty-five years of relationships became my entire pipeline, and for a while it worked better than I expected. The phone rang. The projects came in. I told myself it was sustainable, because the relationships were deep and wide and real.

Then it stopped working. Gradually, which is the part nobody warns you about. The calls I had not yet made grew fewer. The warm introductions cooled by a degree or two. After a year I did not have enough to keep going at the pace the business needed.

Then I moved to Quebec, where I knew nobody. No former colleagues, no loyalty, nobody who would take a meeting out of affection. I had to build from zero, deliberately, the way I had been telling founders to build for years.

I had spent years telling founders to build the system before they needed it. I did not understand what I was asking of them until I had to do it myself with nothing to start from.

One question worth sitting with this week: take your last twenty closed deals and count how many would have happened without you in the conversation.

That number is your dependency score. The gap between it and what your team would have guessed is the more interesting figure.

Alex

P.S. The quicksand doesn't feel like failure. It feels like being very busy.