Your managers bring you the difficult decisions. Delivery needs your chasing. Growth has given you a bigger team and more work to carry.
Antony Draper Advisory works with founders of UK businesses, typically with 20–50 employees and approximately £500k–£10m turnover, and their leadership teams to find what keeps returning to the founder and change how the team handles it.
When the work is useful
Your leaders have responsibility but still need your approval to act. Delivery depends on your chasing. Standards drop when you step away. Growth is making the business harder to run.
You and your leadership team are ready to examine how work actually happens and change the responsibilities, decisions and behaviours that keep returning to you.
Who the work is for
Established UK founder-led businesses with a management team, typically 20–50 employees. Team size and operating complexity matter more than turnover alone.
The founder remains the approval point for routine decisions, customer exceptions or delivery problems, and the team is ready to change how it works.
Follow the work that comes back to you
First locate the dependency in Sales, Customers, Operations, Finance or People. Look at actual deals, customer problems, commitments, numbers and management decisions.
Then investigate why it returns: unclear priorities, permission to decide, missing handovers, information people cannot trust or leadership ownership. Different causes need different changes.
A new manager, COO, SOP or dashboard may help. The work is to establish which change fits, put it into practice and check what the team can now handle.
Diagnose
Identify where and why the business still depends on the founder. Trace decisions, delivery, standards and accountability through the real work.
Design
Clarify decision rights, accountability, standards and leadership ownership. Give leaders the authority and information to own their outcomes.
Embed
Work with the founder and leadership team to make the new operating behaviours consistent. Test them in the business and adjust where responsibility still returns to the founder.
Work with the founder and the team
The work connects the founder’s expectations with the conditions leaders need to deliver: explicit authority, observable standards, useful information and clear accountability.
Changes may include clearer decision thresholds, ownership across team boundaries, delivery reviews and an operating rhythm that gives the founder visibility without requiring constant intervention.
The scope of an engagement follows the business’s needs and is agreed through conversation.
The intended outcome
Decisions are made at the correct level.
Leaders take genuine ownership of outcomes.
Standards remain consistent without constant founder intervention.
Delivery does not depend on the founder chasing it.
Growth creates organisational capacity rather than more work for the founder.
The founder can focus on direction, value creation and the decisions that genuinely require them.
What we agree before an engagement
We choose a specific dependency to investigate, the people involved, the work to review and the evidence we will use to judge progress.
We agree the deliverables, responsibilities, timing and fee before work begins. The scope may include decision boundaries, an ownership map, operating measures and a management review rhythm.
Examples of progress to examine include fewer routine approvals returning to the founder, managers resolving exceptions within agreed limits and commitments delivered without chasing. These are measures to agree and test, not promised results.
Begin with the assessment
Start with the free 20-question Founder Independence Assessment. It gives you an indicative profile based on your answers and patterns to investigate. Then decide whether a conversation would be useful.