The company systems index

Last time I said a company is the part of the work that keeps happening when the people who normally do it are not there.

Then I had to find out whether we have one. A definition you cannot check is just a nice sentence, and I have been wrong about this before: in 2021 I had 2,000 members, four cohorts, revenue and graduates earning in dollars, and no company at all.

So I listed the machinery. 41 capabilities across eight domains. The list is general and should work for anyone. The scores are ours.

Two decisions about the list

Group by failure, not by department.

Sales, marketing, operations, finance, HR. That grouping comes from companies that have those departments. We have none of them and I am not sure we ever should. Grouping by org chart means grouping by an organisation I do not have.

So each domain is a job the company has to do, and a specific way it dies if it cannot. That works at one person and at four hundred.

Score on running.

Three states, and only the last one counts.

DESIGNED  ──►  BUILT  ──►  RUNNING
it is written  it works    someone else uses it,
down                       regularly, without me

A document is not a system. Working software nobody has used is not a system either. I have spent months mistaking both for progress.

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A. Direction and identity

Decides what the company is for, what it will not do, and where it is going, so that people can act without asking.

Failure looks like: every judgement call routes back to the founder, because quality is their taste and taste cannot be delegated.

Capability	What it has to do	Ours
Ethos and values	Hold a line when holding it costs money	Written
Positioning and voice	Say what the company is the same way every time	Runs
Canonical history	One account of where this came from that everyone can point at	Runs
Goals and planning	What we are trying to hit this year, and by when	Nothing
Decision record	What was decided, why, and what would reverse it	Nothing

2 of 5. The voice guide governs every draft we publish and the history is written down and dated. There are no annual goals. Every decision we have made is findable only by knowing which document it is buried in, which is knowledge in a head where the head is now a folder.

B. Demand and growth

Makes work arrive on purpose instead of by luck, from people you have not met yet.

Failure looks like: the pipeline goes quiet, and by the time it is obvious you are negotiating from weakness and taking work you would have refused.

Capability	What it has to do	Ours
Marketing and content	Make a stranger understand what you do and why it matters	Written
Business development and partnerships	Reach people through organisations that already have their trust	Written
Sales process and pipeline	Turn an interested person into a signature, the same way each time	Written
Grants, tenders and proposals	Bid for money that arrives as a programme instead of a client	Written
Nurture and follow-up	Stay useful to someone who is not ready yet	Built, unused

0 of 5. Five documents, four of them written this month, and not one executes. Email capture works and nothing has ever been sent.

C. Delivery and client service

Turns a signed thing into a delivered thing, at a standard, repeatably, and keeps it working afterwards.

Failure looks like: the first project goes fine because the founder did it, the third slips, and nobody can say why the second one was better.

Capability	What it has to do	Ours
Intake and qualification	Decide fast whether to take the job at all	Written
Scoping, pricing and proposals	Turn a problem into a price without improvising	Nothing
Delivery method	How a team builds the thing, the same way twice	Written
Quality and review	A named person checks the work before it leaves	Built, internal only
Handover and post-delivery support	What happens in month four	Nothing

0 of 5. The last row is the one that bothers me. Our whole argument is that other people build, hand over and leave. If a client asked me today what happens after handover, I have nothing written down.

D. People and talent

Finds people, grows them, decides who is good at what, and pays them, without that judgement living in one person’s memory.

Failure looks like: a good person leaves and a capability leaves with them, because it was never anywhere except inside them.

Capability	What it has to do	Ours
Recruiting and vetting	Find people and decide on evidence who gets in	Runs
Onboarding and induction	Turn an accepted person into one who knows how things work here	Built, unused
Roles and responsibilities	Who may do what, enforced by the system	Runs
Performance and review	Reviewed work producing a score attached to a person	Built, unused
Progression	A visible path from claimed skill to proven one, earned not granted	Built, unused
Compensation and offboarding	How people get paid or own a piece, and how they leave	Written

2 of 6. Five of six are built, which makes this the most complete domain we have on paper. Three of those five have never met a real cohort.

E. Money and finance

Knows what you charge, what you are owed, what you have, and how long it lasts.

Failure looks like: you run out. Or worse, you never knew you were going to, because nothing was counting.

Capability	What it has to do	Ours
Pricing and rate card	Decide what you charge once, not per conversation	Nothing
Invoicing and collections	Get the money you are owed, on time	Nothing
Bookkeeping and accounts	Keep a record of what came in and what went out	Nothing
Payments to people	Pay contractors properly, with tax deducted and remitted	Written
Capital and runway	Know how long you last	Nothing

0 of 5, and four of them do not exist in any form. This is the domain that closes companies and it is the emptiest column in our index.

F. Evidence and knowledge

Makes what you did checkable by a stranger, and keeps what you learned where the next person can find it.

Failure looks like: years of real results you cannot prove, so every new conversation starts from zero.

Capability	What it has to do	Ours
Documentation practice	Every job leaves behind the artifact showing the thinking	Runs
Case studies and publishing	Turn finished work into something a stranger can check	Runs
Impact and outcome tracking	Set targets in advance, including the point you call it a failure	Built, unused
Analytics and measurement	Know what people actually do on your own surfaces	Built, dormant
Knowledge bank	A library people can learn from without asking the founder	Nothing

2 of 5. I have lived this failure: four years of outcomes I could not show anyone. The outcome framework is the strongest thing in this domain and it has measured nothing, because the cohort it was written for has not started.

G. Governance and risk

Keeps the company legal, insurable, and able to survive a dispute or a bad month.

Failure looks like: one unreviewed contract, one unconfirmed tax obligation, and a company with no buffer stops existing.

Capability	What it has to do	Ours
Legal entity	A registered company that can sign, hold, and be held to account	Runs
Published policies	Rules people agree to, recorded, not assumed	Runs
Contracts and templates	Paper that survives a dispute	Written
Compliance, tax and insurance	The obligations that end you quietly if ignored	Nothing
Risk and continuity	Backups, a tested restore, and a register of what you own	Nothing

2 of 5. Six contract templates are drafted and none have been through a lawyer, which means we have six documents and zero usable contracts.

H. Infrastructure and technology

The systems everything else runs on, and the ability to get them back.

Failure looks like: it stops working and nobody can restart it, or it comes back without the data.

Capability	What it has to do	Ours
Core systems	The software the business actually runs on	Runs
Deployment and release	Ship a change without ceremony or downtime	Runs
Identity and access	Prove who someone is, on every request	Runs
Hosting and environments	Servers that stay up and cost what you expect	Runs
Backup, recovery and asset register	Get everything back after the worst day	Nothing

4 of 5, and the missing one is the worst gap in the whole index. Everything this company remembers lives in a database whose restore I have never tested.

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Our index: 29 out of 100

Twelve of 41 capabilities run without me. As a score out of a hundred, that is 29.

Index score	29 / 100
Capabilities listed	41
Running	12
Written down and not running	17
Domains at zero	3 of 8
Running systems that earn money	0

29 is the headline. The last row is the one that should worry me more.

And the three domains sitting at zero are consecutive. B, C and E. Demand, Delivery, Money. Put them in a line and they are the entire path from a stranger to a paid invoice:

  B. DEMAND  ──►  C. DELIVERY  ──►  E. MONEY
  0 of 5           0 of 5            0 of 5
       └──────── the whole path from a stranger
                 to a paid invoice, at zero ────┘

Everything we run is at the two ends: the servers underneath and the writing on top. The middle, the part where a company converts attention into work and work into money, is empty.

The strength is also the trap

People and brand have always been the part I am good at, and the index says so. Every capability we run is in exactly those two places: identity, evidence, the front door of the community, and the machines that hold them up.

That is not luck. It is what I reach for, so it is what got built.

It is also precisely how I ended up in 2021 with 2,000 members, a brand people recognised, and nothing that survived me getting tired. Being excellent at the thing you are already excellent at is not progress. It is the most comfortable way to avoid the work that would actually change your position.

So the number I am chasing is not the total.

Demand at 80% running. Four of five.

Marketing, business development, sales and proposals all executing. Written does not count. Contacted, quoted, followed up, recorded. Four of those five are documented well enough that I could hand them to someone tomorrow, and not one has put us in front of a single person.

Fixing Demand is the only move that unlocks two other domains, and it is the one I am least naturally inclined to do. Those two facts are related.

What is your index?

Run it on your own company. Three questions.

What are the ways your company could die? Not your departments. Your failure modes. Do that before listing anything, because the failures decide what belongs on the list.

What capability stops each one? Four to six per domain. You will name things you have never named, and that is most of the value. Three of our 41 were not on any list until I sat down: a decision record, post-delivery support, and a tested restore.

For each one, does it run without you? Not does it exist. Not do you understand it. Could someone else use it today, without asking you how.

Count the yeses, divide by the total, multiply by a hundred. That is your index. It tells you more than revenue does, because revenue can come from one person working very hard, and that is a job with extra steps.

Ours is 29 out of 100. In two years the question will not be whether that was impressive. It will be whether it moved, and whether we said so if it did not.