The Sarah Test: Is Your Business Too Dependent on One Person?
Written By: Mathew Patterson
Last Updated November 9, 2026
At Quaker Oats, the chairman and the executive vice president never shared the same plane. It wasn’t about their egos. It was about making sure a single crash didn’t take out their key decision makers. “Key personnel travel policies” have been common for decades based on real-life disasters.
Your company might not be at that scale, and you probably don’t have multiple company jets to spread the risk around, but in your office there is likely one person who is critical to keeping the whole thing running. Let’s call her Sarah. She’s the person who knows the alarm reset code, the “one little trick” to doing payroll, and a dozen other permanent “temporary” fixes.
When Sarah finally goes on her trip-of-a-lifetime to the Amalfi Coast, that’s exactly when the alarm will fire up as your big client walks in. She’s your real key personnel, and there’s only one of her.
Why every business grows a Sarah
In the first months and years of a small business, it’s perfectly natural for one person, often the office admin or manager, to end up with all of the tasks that don’t obviously belong to someone else. Somebody has to do them, and that somebody is Sarah.
Like a tiny plant tied gently to a stake, a young business leans on those early people for support while it grows. Sarah is that tie. She was there when a thousand decisions were made, and she knows which buttons to push in what order. She’s the go-to person for every “how?” and “why?” question forever.
Sarah cares, she does great work, and she is the system before there is a system. And it works beautifully. Until it doesn’t.
A single point of success (and failure)
Sarah’s not a system, of course. She’s a person. She deserves to go on vacation. She’s going to get sick sometimes. She may move on to a new role or a new company. Or the work may simply become too much to handle.
Even if Sarah never takes a day off, businesses continue to grow. More staff members come in with more questions, all queued up and waiting for help from the one person who has the answers. Systems that rely on a single person’s knowledge are a dangerous weak point.
It’s not easy being Sarah
What makes it particularly tough for the Sarahs of the world is that the harder they work to keep things running, the less others see the duct tape and elbow grease holding it all together. That can mean nobody is even aware of a problem until something breaks.
For Sarah, it’s the very thing which made her critical to the business in the early days — being involved in all the decisions and setting up all the processes — that slows everything down once a company grows larger.
Once Sarah is aware she’s starting to become a bottleneck, it’s very hard for her to get out because there are so many people who need her help. You might be the Sarah in your company, and if so you’ll know that feeling well.
An escape plan for any Sarah should mean getting information out of her head and tasks off her hands.
The Sarah test
Before the pressure in your company builds up to breaking point, try to identify the risks by asking a few pertinent questions. Start with these, and then ask your own Sarah what she thinks are the danger areas.
- If Sarah called in sick on payday, would everyone still get paid on time?
- How many times a day does someone ask her where the schedule is or whether their PTO was approved?
- What task does Sarah do that nobody has ever even watched her do?
- Can she take a week off without checking her messages?
When you’ve got your answers, take a deep breath. She’s still here. Now, make yourself a list of the questions that only Sarah can answer and sort them by how frequently they come up.
If it’s an everyday question that only Sarah can answer, that needs a system. Do you need a schedule people can check for themselves? Or software that compiles the overtime reports automatically? Or a way to manage PTO that gives everyone insight into their balances and the status of their requests? Spend some time up front setting up a better system to save many hours later on.
If it’s a rare question but the answer is only in Sarah’s head, that needs to be documented and saved somewhere that everyone can find it.
If it’s a question Sarah has been answering but that really anyone could answer, then consider sharing that work among the team.
Don’t replace Sarah, empower her
The ideal outcome is not that Sarah ends up without work to do. It’s that she moves on to even more valuable work inside the company, leaving behind a reliable system that can work without her constant input.
When you’re going to make changes, bring Sarah into the planning stages. Nobody knows better than her what the system needs to do — or where it might go wrong.
Lone Wolf sells hunting gear, so mid-to-late fall is peak season. It’s also when “everybody wants to be off at the exact same time,” says Jared Kropidlowski, Lone Wolf’s head of customer service. Even for a small team, a spreadsheet didn’t reliably show who had already booked time off or whether anyone was left to cover.
Ashley handles operations at Lone Wolf, so she was the one who went looking for a fix. “She did her research and found the one that works best for us,” Jared says. Using Buddy Punch, the team can see who’s out and when “without having to do a bunch of follow-ups. Like we can just see it; it’s right on the calendar.”
When asked to imagine life without Buddy Punch, Jared said “I think that would overwhelm Ashley with payroll processing.” Lone Wolf’s Sarah is an Ashley, but one who has managed to extract some of her work and hand it off to a system that can run without demanding all of her time.
Another good reason to include Sarah in any changes is to make sure she always feels heard. Losing parts of your work, even annoying parts, can feel like a demotion. By asking for her input in designing the new system, you’re giving her some control over her work and treating her as an expert and not a problem.
When done well, replacing some of Sarah’s work with systems lets her grow in her own role while making sure the business can grow more easily.
A time for every Sarah
You can’t build a company without someone filling in all the gaps that appear when you’re growing fast and figuring things out. That’s the time you first need Sarah, the tie holding that seedling of a business to the stake as it grows toward the light.
If you leave the same tie in place for too long, though, it can start to cut into the plant. Much better to take it off before that happens. Give Sarah new, more valuable work to do — and let her take that Amalfi trip knowing the place won’t fall apart without her.
