The BUS Factor: Key Person Risk for CEOs

The bus factor is a count. The number of people who would need to become unavailable before a function, a department, or an entire business stops working. A bus factor of one means a single person is the only thing standing between normal operations and a serious problem. In most small and mid-sized businesses, that person is either a long-tenured employee nobody has ever cross-trained, a technical contractor who set something up years ago and never fully handed it over, or the owner.

Usually the owner.

This book is about finding those single points of failure before they find you.

Inside, you will learn how to run a bus factor audit on your own business, covering the five categories where single-person dependencies most often hide: knowledge, relationships, access, skill, and decisions. You will learn the specific patterns that create bus factor problems in growing businesses, why they are almost impossible to see from the inside, and what a practical fix actually looks like for each category.

You will also get a straight look at your own role. Most owners discover, when they actually count, that more decisions route through them than they realized, that more relationships are held exclusively by them than they should be, and that the team has been quietly working around a bus factor problem the owner was the last to notice.

The book covers documentation, cross-training, delegation, departing employees, vendor dependencies, sudden unavailability, and the connection between bus factor and business valuation. It closes with a 30-day action plan that turns the findings from the audit into a specific sequence of steps.

IT Support 101 Inc. is an independent advisory firm working exclusively with business owners and executive teams on the technology and operational decisions they cannot afford to get wrong. No commissions. No vendor relationships. Just clear, honest advisory work on your side of the table.