Your first job is to get the keys back: the administrator accounts, the domain name, the email admin login, the password vault and the backups. Turn off the access that person still holds, write down everything only they knew, and prove that a backup can be restored. A person here calls you back the same business day, usually within an hour, and works through that list with you.
Start with the accounts that unlock everything else. The Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace administrator login. The domain registrar, where your website address and your email addresses actually live. The password vault, or the spreadsheet the passwords were kept in. The backup account. The router and firewall login. The remote-access tool they installed on the office computers. Change what you can change today, and write down what you cannot get into yet, because that second list is the one that matters.
Turn their user account off instead of deleting it. A deleted mailbox takes the mail, the calendar and the shared files with it, and those are the first things somebody asks for on the second day. A disabled account keeps all of it and locks the door at the same time.
The setup lived in one head, and that is the real loss. It shows up in small ways over the following weeks. Nobody knows which supplier the internet line is with. The licences were bought on a personal credit card. The domain is registered to a personal email address. The backup runs to a drive in a cupboard that nobody has opened since spring. The two-step login codes for the administrator account go to a phone number that walked out with its owner.
None of this is unusual. One capable person looking after everything is how most small offices run until the day it stops.
Can somebody other than the person who left get into every system your business depends on? Is there a written note of how the network, the email and the backups are set up? Has anybody restored a real file from the backup in the last month? Does anything still arrive at the old mailbox — supplier invoices, system alerts, password resets?
Write the answers down as you collect them. The list you build in that first week becomes the documentation the business never had.
Three habits turn a resignation into a scheduling problem. Every account registered in the business’s name, with the billing on a company card. Two people who can get into anything critical. A written record of what is set up and where, kept somewhere you can read it without asking anyone’s permission.
It makes the next hire cheaper as well. Somebody walking into a documented office is useful within days. Somebody walking into an undocumented one spends the first month finding out what exists.
When an owner calls us the week their IT person leaves, this is the shape of it.
That inventory is the free infrastructure audit. You keep it either way, and it is worth having even if you replace the role in-house.
Leave your name and your number. A person calls you back the same business day, usually within an hour, and works through the account list with you on that call. Nothing gets changed without your say-so.