Five people with everything in five heads is the same fragility as fifty.
This is not only for companies of one. A small team gets more out of it, because the failure it prevents is the one small teams feel hardest.
Why small teams are more exposed, not less
In a large company a departure is absorbed because several people hold overlapping knowledge. In a team of five there is no overlap. Each person is the sole holder of their part, and losing one is losing a function rather than a headcount.
The same structure that lets one operator run a company lets a small team stop being the single point of failure for their own areas.
How roles get shared
A brain repo is co-owned. The person supplies judgment and the standards; the folder holds the craft and the procedures; the agent executes. The person is not replaced by the folder, they are the reason it is any good.
The mandate ladder turns out to be a delegation tool for people too. Advise, propose, apply within a cap, apply is the same progression a new hire moves through, and writing it down makes the promotion explicit rather than assumed.
“Those folks that have those skills, it's kind of like their superpower. This is an extreme example, but I don't think it's going to be the last by any stretch.”
What it is not
It is not a redundancy plan and the book argues against using it as one. The framing throughout is the operator who does not scale payroll in the first place, not the one who cuts. Nobody gets replaced because nobody was hired.