West Sussex Founder Publishes First Book Addressing The Hidden Problem Costing SME Owners Their Freedom
Littlehampton-based Business Operations Specialist Gemma Hunter releases The Founder Dependency Score, a practical guide for UK small business owners who cannot step back from their own businesses.
Gemma Hunter, founder of Hunter Admin and a Theo Paphitis Small Business Sunday winner, has published her debut book addressing one of the most widespread but least talked about problems in UK small business: founder dependency.
The Founder Dependency Score: The Map to Building a Business That Works Without You is available now for pre-order on Amazon, with a launch date of 5th July 2026. The book is priced at £19.99 and is also available free to Kindle Unlimited subscribers.
The book draws on Gemma's experience working inside service businesses across the UK, where she repeatedly observed the same pattern. Capable founders with growing teams and increasing revenue, who had nonetheless become the operational centre of everything their business did. Unable to take a proper holiday. First point of contact for every decision. The business growing, but the founder's freedom shrinking with it.
Gemma developed the Founder Dependency Score, a free online diagnostic tool, to give founders a measurable picture of how reliant their business is on them. The tool has been taken by founders across the UK since its launch and measures dependency across five domains: Decisions, Knowledge, Delivery, Revenue, and Resilience.
The book expands on that diagnostic framework, taking each domain in depth and providing practical exercises for founders at every stage of the dependency scale. Gemma Hunter, founder of Hunter Admin, said:
"Most founders I work with are not struggling because they are doing something wrong. They are struggling because the business grew around them rather than beyond them. The decisions, the knowledge, the delivery, the revenue, it all still runs through one person.
That is not a character flaw. It is a structural problem, and structural problems have structural solutions. I wrote this book because founders deserve a clear, honest map of where their business is and what to build next. Not motivation. Not a list of productivity tips. A working guide that meets them wherever they are and shows them specifically what to do."
West Sussex Founder Publishes First Book Addressing The Hidden Problem Costing SME Owners Their Freedom
About the book
The Founder Dependency Score: The Map to Building a Business That Works Without You is structured across three parts.
Part One introduces the concept of founder dependency and explains the five domains and five score bands in plain terms. Part Two goes deep into each domain, with practical exercises designed to surface specific gaps and vulnerabilities. Part Three maps out what each score band means from the inside and provides targeted actions depending on where the reader sits.
The book concludes with the well known two-week test: the measure of a truly founder-independent business. The concept of testing a business by stepping away was popularised by Michael Gerber in The E-Myth Revisited and developed further by Mike Michalowicz in Clockwork. The two-week test used throughout this book is my own adaptation of that principle, calibrated to the reality of most SME service businesses.
It is available for pre-order on Amazon now at £19.99, with a launch date of 5th July 2026. It is also available free on Kindle Unlimited.
The Founder Dependency Score: The Map to Building a Business That Works Without You eBook : Hunter, Gemma , Hunter, Gemma: Amazon.co.uk: Books