Dr. Vo runs a medical clinic in Austin. She’s the kind of doctor who’s good at what she does, takes patient relationships seriously, and has built something real over the years.
She also told me she can’t take vacations.
Not that she doesn’t like vacations. Not that she’s a workaholic who prefers staying busy. Can’t, as in: the clinic closes when she leaves.
The covering doctor who fills in for her isn’t licensed to see her patients. So the last time she took time off, they had to shut down the clinic. The business stopped completely because one person wasn’t there.
This is what software developers call the bus factor. And it’s not just a tech problem.
What the Bus Factor Actually Means
The bus factor is a simple question: if a key person on your team got hit by a bus tomorrow, how many people would have to scramble?
The original framing is a bit dark, but the question is genuinely useful. It’s asking: how concentrated is the critical knowledge, access, or capability in your business?
A bus factor of 1 means one person leaving would break everything. A bus factor of 5 means five people would need to disappear before things fell apart. Higher is better.
For Dr. Vo, the bus factor was 1. She was it. The clinic’s ability to function was entirely dependent on her being physically present.
It’s More Common Than You’d Think
I work with a lot of small business owners and team leads, and the bus factor shows up constantly. Just not usually as dramatically as a clinic shutting down.
Sometimes it’s the founder who’s the only person who knows how to do client onboarding, so every new customer goes through them personally, no matter how busy things get.
Sometimes it’s the office manager who’s the only one with the QuickBooks password, so every hire, every vendor, every billing question flows through one person.
I was working with a professional services firm recently and noticed they had a similar problem — one person controlled all the software access for the whole team. New clients coming in, staff transitions, permissions for different tools — it all ran through that single person. They were a bottleneck, not by choice, but by design. The work itself wasn’t complicated. The concentration was the problem.
The pattern is the same every time. Things got concentrated in one person not because anyone planned it that way, but because that person was available, capable, and said yes enough times that the system organized itself around them.
The Part That Catches People Off Guard
Most people don’t think about their bus factor until they need to leave.
A sick week. A vacation that’s been planned for months. A family emergency. That’s usually when it surfaces — not in a planning meeting, but in the moment when you realize you can’t actually step away.
Dr. Vo knew the problem existed. She’d felt it for years. But the pressure of daily operations kept pushing the fix to the back of the list. It wasn’t until she tried to take time off that the real cost showed up.
This is the thing about single points of failure: they’re invisible until they fail.
The Fix Isn’t Always Dramatic
Here’s what I told Dr. Vo after she walked me through this: the solution doesn’t have to be complex.
It might be documenting one process in enough detail that someone else could run it. It might be sharing access credentials with one other trusted person. It might be training one staff member to handle one type of patient call.
You don’t have to solve the entire dependency problem at once. You just have to bring the number down.
Bus factor of 1 → bus factor of 2. That’s a meaningful improvement. Someone else can cover, at least partially, if you’re gone.
The real first step is knowing your number. Most people haven’t actually thought about it explicitly. They’ve felt the pressure of being needed everywhere, but haven’t mapped out exactly where the concentration lives.
So try this: write down every part of your business that would stop or significantly slow down if you were unavailable for two weeks. Anything that only you know how to do, only you have access to, or only you are trusted to handle.
That’s your bus factor list. It tells you where to start.
Why It Matters More at Small Scale
Big companies have redundancy built in, even if imperfectly. Multiple people know the same systems. There’s documentation. There are backups.
Small businesses usually don’t have that by default. The founder wears seven hats. The team is lean. Things get done because someone figures it out, and that someone tends to be the same person every time.
Which means the bus factor problem is actually a bigger risk the smaller the operation.
Dr. Vo is working on this now — building out documentation for the parts of the clinic that rely entirely on her, and thinking about what it would actually take to train someone else to cover certain functions.
It won’t happen overnight. But the goal is clear: a business that can function, at least partially, without her. One that doesn’t shut down every time she needs to leave.
That’s what a real business looks like.
One way to build more leverage into how you work: The 25X Productivity System is where I teach the frameworks for identifying where your time and energy are most concentrated — and how to start distributing them.
Thanh Pham
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