Sixty-one per cent of UK businesses have no comprehensive plan for who takes over their senior roles, and 22 per cent of those admit succession is not part of their strategy at all (Newman Stewart, June 2026). The tidy explanation is that these firms have not got round to it. A sensible thing they will do when the diary clears.
I have never found that explanation convincing. The plan is missing far more often because nobody in the building actually wants it to exist.
Being needed is a reward, and people guard their rewards
The person who is the only one who can do a thing holds something valuable, to the business and to themselves. Being the one nobody can manage without is job security, quiet status, and a kind of importance that no title hands you on its own. If you are the only one who understands how the billing is configured, or the only person the biggest customer will actually take a call from, you are difficult to remove, hard to overrule, and impossible to ignore. That is a comfortable seat.
Now ask that person to write it all down, train two colleagues to the same standard, and make themselves genuinely replaceable. You are asking them to hand back the thing that keeps them safe. Most will nod, agree it is the right idea, and never quite finish the document. Rarely through laziness. More often through a self-interest most of them have never said out loud, and some have never noticed.
I watched this for years in fibre. There was always one engineer who held the real configuration of the fault-management system in his head, one commercial manager who was the only relationship the key client trusted, one team lead the field crews would actually take a 6am call from. None of it was written anywhere that mattered. Each of them was, in their own corner, the single point the operation ran through. And each of them, if you were honest about it, rather liked being that point.
The owner is the clearest case, and the least examined
The owner-dependency conversation usually gets treated as a design problem. Build the operating system, delegate with real authority, install a management rhythm so decisions stop routing through one desk. That is true, and I have written about the mechanics of it before. Underneath the design problem sits a quieter one the owner rarely admits: the business needing them is the clearest daily evidence that they matter.
Take that away and a question arrives that a lot of founders have spent years avoiding. If it runs perfectly well without me, what am I actually for. It is easier to stay slightly indispensable than to sit with that. So the handover documents stay eighty per cent finished, the number two is never quite given the last decision, and the owner keeps one hand on a lever they claim to want to release. The discipline of building a business that does not need you runs straight into the discomfort of no longer being needed.
It runs all the way down
This is not only a founder problem. Every layer of an organisation has its indispensable person, and each one is a small bet the business has placed on a single individual staying, staying well, and staying loyal.
The current climate is exposing those bets fast. As the fibre build race enters its endgame and firms trim, the sector is shedding people. CityFibre has notified around 200 staff of possible redundancy (ISPreview, July 2026), and it is far from alone across telecoms and professional services. When someone walks out with knowledge that lived only in their head, the business finds out, the hard way, which dependencies it never removed. The cost does not show in the redundancy line. It shows three months later, when the thing that person quietly held together starts to come apart.
Buyers have learned to price this. Private equity firms replace portfolio-company chief executives during the holding period in around 65 per cent of cases, and most of that turnover is the firm’s own doing (AlixPartners, March 2026). A business whose value rests on one irreplaceable person is a business a serious buyer marks down, because the first thing they model is what happens when that person leaves. Operational maturity that does not depend on a single heartbeat is worth real money at exit. Concentration is a discount.
Why this is the biggest risk you carry
Set the emotion aside and look at it as exposure. A key-person dependency is a bet that one individual will not resign, will not burn out, will not be poached, and will not simply have a bad year at the wrong moment. You would never sign off a supplier arrangement with no second source and no contingency. Yet firms run their most important internal capabilities exactly that way, and call it loyalty.
The risk is invisible precisely because the person is good. Everything works. The faults get fixed, the client stays happy, the numbers land. The dependency is doing its job, right up until the day it is not, and by then there is no one else who knows how. The better the indispensable person, the more comfortable the business gets, and the larger the hole they leave. Competence is what hides the risk from view.
That is the trap in the succession data. The 61 per cent are rarely careless. They are running businesses that feel stable, staffed by capable people who are quietly holding critical knowledge alone, and nothing about a stable-feeling week signals the exposure underneath it.
Designing yourself out is the actual job
The mark of a well-built function is simple to state. The person who built it can be on holiday, off sick, or gone for good, and it holds. If it cannot survive their absence, it was never finished, however smoothly it runs while they are there.
When I built the operational side of a fibre business during its growth phase, the piece I am most sure was right was the academy. We trained field engineers to a documented standard so the operation depended on the standard rather than on the handful of people, myself included, who first wrote it. The systems built to outlast the people who built them are the ones that let a business scale from one town into many without the wheels coming off every time someone left. That came from deliberate design, the slow work of removing every single point the operation could not afford to lose.
It starts with an uncomfortable question asked honestly of every important role, including your own. If this person resigned tomorrow, what breaks, and how long until it hurts. The honest answer usually names three or four people the business is quietly betting on, and almost none of them are in the succession plan, because the succession plan was written for job titles rather than for actual dependencies.
Then comes the harder part, which is the incentive. As long as being the only one who can do a thing is the safest place to stand, people will keep standing there. The businesses that fix this reward the opposite. They value the manager who has made themselves unnecessary to the daily running over the one who is heroically holding it all together, and they say so, out loud, in who gets promoted. Getting that built into how the week actually runs is slow, unglamorous work, and it is the difference between a business that owns its capabilities and one that merely rents them from the people who happen to hold them today.
The person who makes themselves indispensable has confused being needed with being valuable. The two point in opposite directions. The most valuable people in any operation are the ones who could leave tomorrow and be barely missed, because what they built stays behind and keeps working without them. Their standing survives it intact. Making yourself replaceable is the whole of the job.
References
- Newman Stewart. “Businesses exposed to operational risk as succession planning gaps persist.” June 2026. Read Article
- AlixPartners. “Eleventh Annual Private Equity Leadership Survey.” March 2026. Read Article
- ISPreview. “Broadband Altnet CityFibre Notifies 200 UK Staff of Possible Future Redundancy.” July 2026. Read Article
