Companion Worksheet
Eight parts of an operation can be owned, rented, or held entirely by somebody else. This scores where yours sit, weights them by what each one costs you if it disappears, and returns a single exposure figure — plus the one move that reduces it most.
For each area, pick the honest option — not the one that describes your plan.
Owned means it survives any single company deciding it no longer wants you. Rented means you pay for it but could move it inside a month without losing it. Theirs means if that company closed your account tonight, it is gone and you cannot get it back.
The areas are not weighted equally. Losing your audience list ends businesses; losing a scheduling tool ruins a week.
Audience contact
Can you reach the people who follow you without going through a platform — an email or phone list you actually hold?
Revenue & payments
Who holds the money before it reaches you, and who sets the rate they keep?
Content archive
Do you hold the masters of everything you have made, at full quality, somewhere you control?
Identity & address
Does your brand live at an address you own, or at a handle somebody else assigns and can reassign?
Distribution
Who decides how many of your existing followers actually see what you publish?
Customer & audience data
If the platform vanished tonight, would you still know who your customers are and what they bought?
Discovery
How do new people find you, and does that route depend on a single algorithm or gatekeeper?
Tooling & workflow
Could you keep operating next week if your main tool shut down or tripled its price?
Weighted across all eight areas. Zero means everything that matters survives someone else's decision; one hundred means your business exists at another company's discretion.
Exposure
Not yet scored
8 of 8 areas still unanswered. A partial audit understates exposure, because the areas you skip are usually the ones you would rather not look at.
Where the exposure sits
Each area is weighted by what losing it actually costs. The one that surfaces here is the highest weighted risk you are carrying, not simply the lowest score.
Complete the audit above.
Not independence for its own sake. The ability to say no.
Owning your stack does not mean building everything yourself — that trade is usually a bad one. It means holding the parts that cannot be rebuilt: the relationship with your audience, the archive of what you have made, the address people find you at, and the ability to get paid without a middleman setting the rate.
Everything else can be rented, cheerfully, from whoever does it best this year.