How to run a key-person dependency audit

Before you start

Timing: before a sale, financing round or succession — or now, because all three arrive with less notice than they promise. Frame it to the team as an exposure audit, not a performance review; the top scorers are the most valuable people, not a problem list.

The steps

Step 1 — List candidates beyond the org chart

Start from traffic, not titles: who gets interrupted most (see the concentration-risk diagnostic), who is named in 'only X knows' sentences, whose holiday causes queueing. Include the quiet anchors — a veteran technician can outweigh a director.

Pitfall: Auditing only management. The classic finding of these audits is a critical dependency two levels below the board's radar.

Step 2 — Assess the four strands per person

Score each candidate on: knowledge (what only they know), relationships (clients/suppliers who buy from them, not the company), authority (what stalls without their sign-off), and skills/licenses (what only they may or can do). Different strands need different mitigations — knowledge can be captured, authority can be delegated, relationships need pairing.

Pitfall: Collapsing everything into one 'importance' score. A licensing dependency and a knowledge dependency look identical at 30,000 feet and need opposite fixes.

Step 3 — Test replaceability on real cases

Per top candidate, take three real recent situations they handled and ask: could the next-best person have handled it from available documentation and systems? Have that person actually walk through one. The gap between 'we have procedures' and 'someone else could do it' is the audit's core finding.

Pitfall: Accepting 'yes, roughly' answers. Roughly is where the exposure lives; the walk-through makes it concrete.

Step 4 — Score exposure × horizon

Combine impact (from the strand assessment) with horizon: age and tenure, market demand for their profile, signs of restlessness, health where known. A moderate dependency on someone retiring in two years outranks a severe one on a settled thirty-five-year-old.

Pitfall: Treating horizon as gossip. It is actuarial, not personal — the same logic banks apply to key-man insurance.

Step 5 — Report in business terms

Translate the top exposures into the language decisions are made in: deal-price discount risk at sale, continuity risk for the bank, successor ramp-up cost, client revenue at risk. One page, five lines, numbers where honest and an explicit note where not.

Pitfall: Reporting in HR language. 'Retention risk on employee 47' moves no budget; 'the service revenue on our installed base routes through one retiring memory' does.

Step 6 — Assign a mitigation per dependency

Per strand: spread (train/duplicate), capture (knowledge base), pair (relationships get a second face), delegate (authority), insure (the financial residue), or accept (documented, for the low end only). Owner and date per item; revisit annually.

Pitfall: Filing the audit. Its shelf life is the shortest of any document in the company — horizons move.

How MentX compresses this

MentX is a personality-aware knowledge base: it captures the knowledge of a company's key person — from meetings and a guided intake track — into a living, temporal knowledge graph with full source attribution. MentX is the standing answer to the knowledge strand: the audit's top knowledge dependencies become the capture roadmap, starting with the shortest horizon. For a company preparing a sale, the captured base doubles as due-diligence evidence — how buyers price key-person knowledge.

Checklist

• Candidate list built from traffic, not titles
• Four strands scored per candidate (knowledge / relationships / authority / skills)
• Replaceability walk-through done on real cases
• Exposure × horizon ranking on one page
• Report written in deal/continuity terms
• Mitigation, owner and date per top dependency