$1,950 for the first ten. Then $2,500.
You get a Hogan*-based read of how you lead, how you can increase your effectiveness, and a plan you can act on. Hogan shows you the strengths you already lean on and the blind spots you cannot see from the inside.
Book your diagnostic*Hogan is a validated, work-focused personality assessment used in business since 1987. It measures how others experience you at work, not how you see yourself.
The owner doesn't need another quarterback.
You lead the company: the customers, the vision, the calls only you can make. I run the option play, the people-side work that takes owner dependency off the board before it caps your growth or your eventual sale. Full disclosure: I am a Husker football fanatic, so the metaphor is personal. Tom Osborne revolutionized college football with the I-formation option at Nebraska, and I have been running some version of it ever since.
Because the most expensive risk in an owner-led business is not on the balance sheet. It is on the org chart, and most of it routes through one person. In the option, the play dies the moment the quarterback will not pitch the ball. Same for a business that runs on its owner.
Owner-led businesses, and the people who advise them.
You are the owner or leader of an owner-led business, roughly $10M to $100M in revenue. You built it and you still run it. Decisions route through you, the bench is thin, and the business cannot yet operate, scale, or sell without you in the middle of it.
Or you are earlier in the arc, a founder whose business still runs through you because it always has. At your size that feels normal, and mostly it works. That is the founder bottleneck, and it is owner dependency before it has a price. Keeping it from forming is easier, and cheaper, than untangling it later.
Or you are the fractional executive or business consultant already inside one of those companies, hired to move a mandate forward, and you keep hitting the owner as the blocker. In every case the work is the same: reduce the dependency so the business can move.
I fill the people gap, and I make you look good.
You were hired to move something forward, a technology roadmap, the numbers, the operating system, the brand, the sales engine, and you keep hitting the same wall: the business runs on the owner, and nobody below will decide. That leadership gap sinks the mandate you were brought in to deliver.
Bring me in. I fill the people gap, execute your play, and bill direct, without getting between you and your client. You are the quarterback. When the owner shifts, your work lands. If the work surfaces something outside my lane, I bring in the right specialist rather than reaching for your relationship.
Owner dependency is leadership readiness, named from the other side.
In an owner-led business, the owner is usually the most valuable asset and the single biggest risk. Projects stall waiting on one decision. People will not act without a sign-off. Knowledge, relationships, and approvals live in one head. Value is suppressed, growth caps out, and when a sale eventually comes, a buyer prices a key-person discount straight into the number. In football terms, the offense is bottled up: everyone waiting on one player, and no lane opening.
The problem is rarely that the owner is doing the wrong things. It is that everything still routes through them, and no one has helped them see the pattern or build the bench around it. That is fixable, and it is where I start.
Warm with the people.
Honest about the pattern.
For 25 years I have walked into messy rooms and put structure where there was not any, across financial services, state government, a luxury brand, and executive coaching at every level. I served as chief people officer to a former Nebraska governor and led the largest state agency merger in Nebraska history, a 2,200-person integration where people and trust were the difference between a change that held and one that fell apart. The work I am known for is telling the truth in rooms where everyone else is offering the comfortable version of it.
Now I bring that to owner-led businesses. Owners call me the one person in the room who does not tell them only what they want to hear. I will tell you privately when your own pattern is the thing holding the business back, and then I will help you change it.
Start at the top. Like everything should.
Every engagement starts at the top, with the leader, because you cannot unwind owner dependency around a leader who cannot yet see their own pattern. I assess it, I coach it, and I help build the organization around the owner so the business can run without them. First the self-awareness, then the behavior change, then the design and bench that make it stick.
I work through whoever opened the door. Owners come to me directly, or a fractional executive, consultant, board, or advisor already inside the business brings me in. When a partner brings me in, they stay the quarterback with their client. I fill the people gap, make them look good, stay in my lane, and bill direct, the way an accountant does. I never go around the person who opened the door.
The people side is not a personnel issue. It is where the value is.
I did not start SGR Advisory from a tidy business plan. I started it from a crossroads. After a career spent walking into messy rooms and putting structure where there was not any, I kept being the person who would say the candid thing everyone else was avoiding.
That work led me to a pattern I could not unsee. In the lower middle market, owners spend years, sometimes decades, building a business, and over time the whole thing comes to depend on them. It cannot scale past their capacity, cannot run without them, and cannot sell without a discount. It is not a character flaw. It is what happens when a founder is good enough to hold it all together for long enough.
So I built a firm that starts where the problem starts: with the leader. I assess it, I coach it, and I help build the organization around the owner so the business can finally stand on its own. When the owner can step back and the business keeps moving, everyone wins. That is why I do this work.
Start with the dollars.
Run the Sprint.
Steer the execution.
A path from what owner dependency is costing you to a business that can run, scale, and sell without you. Start with the number, or with the standalone diagnostic.
1. Economic-Opportunity Calculation (free)
A one-page read of the value at risk in owner dependence, built from ten inputs you already have and SGR’s benchmarks. It answers one question: Is owner dependence likely costing you money, and roughly how much? The number that starts the conversation.
2. The 30-Day Owner Dependency Sprint
The core engagement. It houses the Founder and Owner Leadership Diagnostic (Hogan plus interpretation) and delivers the Prioritized Action Plan: the eight-dimension score, the value at risk, and the prioritized work that reduces the dependency and lifts the value, ahead of any sale. Where “how big and what to do” get answered. Priced by exit scenario, $10,000 for an immediate exit to $25,000 for a multi-year transition, $15,000 typical.
3. Monthly Steering, plus the coaching and design it takes
SGR steers you and your team through the Prioritized Action Plan month-by-month: coaching, organizational design, culture, and leadership development, until the business genuinely runs without you. $3,000 per month.
Human Capital Projects
Discrete, scoped engagements when a specific need surfaces: organizational and talent assessments, post-acquisition integration, talent reviews, succession and bench planning, and the specialized people work a situation calls for. Available on their own or alongside the steering retainer.
Prefer to start smaller?
The Founder and Owner Leadership Diagnostic is also available on its own, from $2,500. A Hogan-based read of how you lead, how you can increase your effectiveness, and a plan you can act on. It is the front door to the Sprint and the steering that follow.
Scope boundary
SGR works only in its areas of expertise and stays out of payroll, benefits, and compensation. Administration that surfaces, such as job descriptions, is outsourced so the work stays strategic.
About Hogan
Hogan is a work-focused personality assessment, in use since 1987 and validated across millions of professionals. What makes it useful here is that it measures reputation rather than self-image. It reads how other people actually experience you: the strengths you lead with, what surfaces when you are under pressure, and the values driving your decisions. That is the part you cannot see from the inside, and it is why the read is about patterns rather than opinions.
Let's talk.
No pitch. No deck. A real read on where the business runs on you.
If the business runs on you, it is likely costing you in growth, in your time, and in your options later, usually before you notice it.
The most useful thing I can do is spend 30 minutes on where that dependency actually lives in your situation. An honest read on what is routing through you and what it would take to change it.