Key person risk works both ways

Ask where your top five accounts would stand if one person changed jobs, on either side, and the answers get uncomfortable. A partner retires and takes a client book in their head. A client sponsor moves on and the successor has a preferred supplier already. Neither event is rare; both are survivable only if seen early.

Map the concentration

For each strategic account, count the genuine relationships, not contacts on a list but routes with recent, warm traffic. One is a single point of failure. Two with the same seniority is barely better. The healthy pattern is a small web: multiple people on both sides, at mixed levels, so no single departure severs the account.

Broaden deliberately, before you must

Widening coverage is slow, so it has to start before the risk matures: second partners introduced on live work rather than in a crisis lunch, juniors paired with rising counterparts who will be directors in five years, and every succession on the client side treated as a ninety-day re-earn of position. The map tells you where to spend that effort first.

Revenue that depends on one friendship is not an account. It is a favour with an invoice.