Every business runs on the knowledge, skills, relationships, and judgment of the people within it. Your people are the source of delivery capability, client continuity, and competitive edge. In financial terms, they are the asset the business is most dependent on and least likely to have formally valued.

Human capital is what your people bring to your business: their expertise, their networks, their decision-making style, their experiences and knowledge. It is accumulated over time and is rarely evenly distributed. Often, in founder-led and family-run businesses, a significant proportion of human capital sits with a very small number of people – usually one.

People, viewed as an asset, require certain conditions to maintain and increase their value.

Under sustained pressure, poor operating conditions or prolonged uncertainty any asset will deplete in value, perhaps not always visibly and rarely in a linear fashion. By the time the cost registers commercially, the depletion has usually been underway for some time.

We view human capital as the asset our work is designed to protect.

The diagnostics we use, the operating shifts we recommend, and the structures we help to build are always intended to ensure what your people bring to the business is available, distributed, and not diminished by their working environment.

What would it cost your business if your three most knowledgeable people were unavailable for six months? How might you choose where that knowledge is made available to anyone else?