Bus number

What is your bus number?

“But Honey, if I get hit by a bus, this life insurance policy will make sure that you and the kids are looked after”. We have all asked the question, or contemplated the ramifications of someone being hit by the proverbial bus.

Lourens Coetzer, a very bright computer genius, turned this around in a discussion we were having recently, and coined the measure “bus number”: The number of people in an organisation which, them all being hit by a bus, it would take to destroy a business.

A stand alone, one man self employed operation obviously has a bus number of 1. Any employee, no matter what he does, and how he earns his crust, has a bus number of 1. Standard Bank has a bus number of hundreds, maybe even thousands, we would think. But what if all the tech wizards were wiped out in a bomb blast at the annual prize giving? That bus number might only be 20.

{Ed: that seems a bit extreme. At least some of the techs would be in the hydrangeas smoking weed.}

More than considering how many people any particular enterprise is able to lose to the bus, it appears that the crucial bus number needs to be considered at the weakest point in the enterprise.

• The business is entirely dependent on its sales staff to keep the machinery running, with a short lead time, and there is a single rainmaker making up that sales team – the bus number is very low.
• The sales department is diversified and competitive – the bus number is high.
• The business is a professional practice – the bus number is determined by the number of competent professionals.
• A single CAD designer distributing work to a group of machine operators…
• Software developers in a disorganised or poorly documented project…
• That single black shareholder/director upon whom the enterprise depends for its BEE score, now that the government appears to be abandoning its “once empowered, always empowered principle.

That quick list demonstrates how tenuous is the grip SMMEs have on their futures, and it is worrying in the present, but even more so in the future, where business values depend on the sustainability of the enterprise.

So the challenge is to raise your bus number, to account for the systems and redundancies built into your business. It is unlikely that any reasonably sized, privately owned business would have a bus number above 3.

• The owner or CEO, the financial manager and the factory manager
• The owner or CEO, the sales director and the factory manager
• Just, the top three sales people

As we develop Lourens’ concept label, all sorts of derivatives spring to mind:

• Bus number as a proportion of all employees
• Bus number per turnover
• Bus number as a proportion of training budget
• Bus number critical point of failure!
• Bus number replacement lead time

And as we reconsider the example of the empowerment score card bus number, it appears that ministerial interference is once again threatening the future values of our businesses, with random brain emissions. Thank you, Minister Zwane.