A Core Pillar of Provenance Family Advisory
Enterprise Independence
Preparing founder-led enterprises to operate, grow, transfer and create value beyond the founder.
The Problem We Solve
The most valuable asset rarely appears on the balance sheet.
Relationships, judgment, institutional knowledge, supplier networks and market strategy live inside the founder. Most families treat this as an operational weakness. It is a valuation risk, and in the case of an unexpected founder death it becomes an estate crisis: the family believes it owns an enterprise worth one number, then discovers the operating asset is worth materially less because the person who held the value is gone.
This is founder dependency, the silent discount on nearly every founder-led enterprise.
The Transferability Gap
Current value and transferable value are rarely the same number.
When a founder departs, two forces attack family wealth at once: earnings deteriorate as relationships and judgment leave the business, and the valuation multiple compresses as buyers discount what remains. The market already prices this risk. When an acquirer requires the founder to remain for years and ties part of the purchase price to an earnout, that is evidence of incomplete transferability.
Founders apply this test instinctively when evaluating a competitor’s business. Few apply it to their own. Provenance measures the gap and closes it.
The Question That Changes Everything
If you disappeared tomorrow, what would this company be worth twelve months from now?
We do not open with “What is your exit strategy?” We begin with the harder question. The founder knows what the business is worth with them in it. Enterprise Independence establishes what it is worth without them, then converts founder value into durable enterprise value.
The Framework
Seven dimensions of independence.
We evaluate and institutionalize the enterprise across every dimension where value can depend on one person.
Leadership
Can leadership function without the founder?
Knowledge
Does institutional knowledge exist beyond the founder?
Relationships
Do clients and partners belong to the enterprise?
Operations
Are processes and decision systems institutionalized?
Supply Chain
Can supplier relationships survive a transition?
Capital & Governance
Can ownership, governance and capital transition cleanly?
Strategic Mobility
Can the enterprise transfer, expand or internationalize?
Founder value becomes enterprise value, and the enterprise becomes transferable.
The Diagnostic
The Enterprise Independence Index.
Our proprietary diagnostic scores the enterprise across all seven dimensions, identifying the degree to which enterprise value is exposed to founder dependency and the specific dependencies that threaten transferability. The result is an Enterprise Independence Score and a sequenced roadmap for closing the Transferability Gap.
Diagnose
Where enterprise value still depends on the founder.
Score
The Enterprise Independence Score across seven dimensions.
Sequence
A roadmap ordered to close the Transferability Gap.
Preserve
Value that transfers across people, generations and geographies.
The Outcome
Value preservation and strategic transferability.
Families devote enormous effort to minimizing estate taxes, structuring trusts and diversifying portfolios while a larger risk sits inside the operating company: the loss of twenty, thirty, even fifty percent of enterprise value to founder dependence. An independent enterprise preserves that value and creates enterprise optionality. Sell, keep, transfer to the next generation, professionalize, recapitalize, or expand internationally through Provenance’s cross-border network. Markets move quickly and windows close. The family does not have to decide today, but it must be ready before the decision arrives.
Succession is the deliberate transfer of the founder’s intangible capital into systems, people, governance and institutional knowledge before that capital disappears. We ask what the next generation can do with the enterprise the founder built. Keep it. Transform it. Take it global.
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