Codie Sanchez wrote something in Inc. recently that every founder should tape to their monitor: book 14 days, no laptop, no Slack, no calls, and see what happens. Her question is brutal and perfect: “If the business lost you tomorrow, would it be a Tuesday or a funeral?”
Two days later, Zoom published its Out of Office Index, a Morning Consult survey of 1,000 U.S. knowledge workers, and the numbers explain why so few people take her up on it. Seventy-five percent said work stalls for at least a day when a key teammate is away. Sixty-eight percent would rather monitor their inbox than fully unplug. Fifty-seven percent leave vacation days unused.
I’ve written a lot about this problem: the 80 percent delegation rule, the 5 C’s of delegation, and why a CEO should do only three things. But I want to tell you about the most extreme version of Codie’s test I’ve ever run, because I didn’t do it on purpose.
In 2025, I ran for Town Supervisor of North Hempstead, New York. For the better part of a year, I knocked on doors, raised money, sat through candidate forums, and gave my businesses a fraction of the attention I’d given them for two decades. I lost the race by 11 points in November. But here’s what didn’t happen: none of my companies fell apart. Apprentice was acquired a month after the election. Kerpen Ventures kept writing checks.
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That wasn’t luck. It was 15 years of learning the lesson Codie is teaching. Here’s what I’d add to her test.
Two weeks tells you about your systems. A year tells you about your people.
A two-week vacation exposes whether the invoices go out and the customer emails get answered without you. That’s process. A year away exposes whether anyone makes a decision you’d disagree with and turns out to be right. That’s leadership. Across the campaign, my teams made calls I wouldn’t have made, and most of them were better than mine. If you’ve never been gone long enough for someone to overrule you in absentia, you don’t know whether you’ve built leaders or assistants.
The 75 percent stat is a founder problem wearing an employee costume.
When Zoom says projects stall because a colleague is on PTO, that’s not the colleague’s fault. It’s the design of a company where knowledge lives in people instead of in systems. The fix is boring: a documented backup for every role and a written playbook for every recurring task. Boring is what lets people leave. If your best employee can’t take two weeks, you’ve built a bottleneck and paid it a salary.