If the business needs you there to work, it isn't a business yet. It's a job.
This is an uncomfortable test to run on something you've built, because most of us have built the job version without realising it. It earns money. It has customers. It looks, from the outside, like a real business. And then you take a week off and it quietly stops, because the thing holding it together was you, standing in the middle of it, doing the bits nobody else can do.
A job pays you for being present. A business pays you whether you're present or not. The difference isn't size or revenue – it's whether the machine runs when you step away from it.
So I build for my own absence on purpose. I ask, every time I do something twice, whether the business should be able to do this without me. Often the answer is yes, and the work is to make that true – to write it down, automate it, hand it off, design myself out of the loop.
It feels strange, building something to need you less. It's the most useful thing you can do for it.
Build for absence, or you've just bought yourself a job with extra admin.
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