Jason Henneberry
Author / Founder
Most founders believe that if they hire the right people, build better systems, and learn to delegate, eventually the business will stop depending on them.
Jason Henneberry believes that assumption may be the problem.
Jason is the founder of Dependency Design, the author of Why Your Business Won’t Let You Go, and a senior leader at Tango Financial, a national mortgage organization supporting more than 600 professionals. His career has included building companies, developing technology, selling a technology product to Rocket Mortgage, earning multiple mortgage industry awards, and discovering firsthand how success can quietly turn the founder into the biggest dependency inside the company.
But Jason’s story also includes the other side of entrepreneurship.
In 2008, after making a massive bet just as the market collapsed, he came frighteningly close to losing everything. He rebuilt, started again, and eventually helped scale a mortgage platform handling billions of dollars in annual volume.
Those experiences led him to a fascinating conclusion: handing someone a task is not the same as handing them ownership.
And sometimes the very instincts that made a founder successful, stepping in, solving problems, protecting the company, can become the invisible architecture keeping that founder trapped.
Jason’s work asks a deceptively uncomfortable question:
Did your business become dependent on you because it needed to, or because you accidentally trained it to?
