The Unaudited Asset
At some point in the last month, you made a decision worth more than your house. You probably made it in a hotel lobby, or in the car between meetings, or at 10:40 at night after a day that started with a 6am flight. You made it quickly, because that is what you are good at, and because there were eleven other things behind it in the queue.
If that decision had been a financial transaction of the same size, it would have passed through controls. Someone would have checked the numbers. Someone would have asked whether the inputs were sound. There would have been a paper trail, a second pair of eyes, a moment of institutional doubt built into the process on purpose.
But it wasn't a transaction. It was a judgement. And judgements, in your company, have exactly one control: you.
Founders audit everything. The accounts are audited. The legal position is reviewed. The codebase gets penetration-tested by people paid to break it. Before an acquisition, you will pay serious money for due diligence on a company you might buy – its numbers, its people, its skeletons. The entire apparatus of a well-run business is a machine for checking inputs before they become commitments.
Everything gets diligence except the person doing the diligence.
Think about what that means. The single most consequential variable in your company is the state of the person making its largest decisions. Not the strategy deck. Not the hiring plan. The strategy deck and the hiring plan are outputs of that variable. And it is the only variable in the entire operation that nobody measures, nobody reviews, and nobody is allowed to question.