The week somebody leaves

The predictable problem

Module one recommended one person, one tool, one month, and it is still the right way to build competence. It also creates a single point of failure, and the failure arrives the week they hand in their notice.

What leaves with them, in a business that has not thought about this:

The subscriptions, if they were bought on a personal card and expensed. You cannot cancel what is not in your name.

The chat history, which by now contains a year of your customers’ messages, your pricing, your draft contracts and your supplier terms. On a personal account, that is not yours to retrieve or delete.

The prompt library from module two, if it lives in their notes rather than in a shared file.

The accumulated knowledge: which cases the tool gets wrong, which supplier’s invoices confuse the extraction, why that one rule is in the prompt.

The API keys, which continue to work perfectly after they leave and bill you monthly.

The setup that prevents it, done on day one

Business accounts, business email, business card. Not reimbursed personal subscriptions. This is the whole fix for most of the list, and it costs nothing extra at the point of purchase, only later, when you try to do it retrospectively and discover the history cannot be transferred.

Shared files for the shared things. The prompt library, the facts sheet, the events register, the automation notes. In the business’s own storage, where two people can open them.

A named second person on every tool. Not to use it daily; to have an account and to have done the task once. The test is whether they could do it next Monday without the first person.

A key register. Which keys exist, which automation each one belongs to, and who created it.

The leaving checklist

Half an hour, on the day, and it is easier if it is written down before you need it:

• Remove their access from each tool on the list.
• Rotate every API key they could have seen. Not review, rotate. It is free.
• Export any chat history that contains business material, if the plan allows it.
• Change shared logins. There should not be any, and there usually are.
• Sit down for twenty minutes and write the undocumented knowledge into the shared file while they are still there and willing.

That last one is the highest-value half hour of the whole handover, and it is the one that gets cancelled because the week is busy.

The month before, not the week of

Most of this is cheap in advance and expensive on the day, which is the same pattern as everything else in this module.

The one thing that cannot be done retrospectively at all is the account ownership. A personal chat history cannot be transferred to the business after the fact, on any major product, however amicable the departure. If you take one thing from this lesson before you need it, take that.

The rest (the shared file, the second person, the key register) takes about two hours spread over a few weeks, and the test of whether you have done it is simple. If your most AI-capable person went on holiday for a fortnight tomorrow, what stops?

The data obligation nobody thinks about

If your customers’ personal data has been sitting in an employee’s personal AI account, you are responsible for it under most data-protection regimes, and you now have no way to delete it. That is a genuine problem and it is not fixed by the employee promising to.

It is also a reason to be specific in the policy lesson’s page: business accounts are not a procurement preference, they are how the business keeps the ability to honour a deletion request.

When it is the owner

The same list, with one addition that is easy to avoid thinking about.

If the business is sold, or the owner is ill for a month, does anyone else know which tools run, what they cost, where the keys are and how to turn the automations off? The answer in most small businesses is no.

One document. Tools, accounts, costs, keys, what each automation does, how to stop it. Kept with the other things somebody would need: insurance, bank, accountant. It takes an hour to write and it is the difference between a difficult month and an expensive one.