Answer
What should you do when a key person leaves?
Capture what only they know before the notice period ends, and tell customers before they find out another way.
Spend the notice period extracting what only they know and introducing their customer relationships to someone else. The loss is knowledge and continuity rather than hours, and neither is recoverable once they have gone.
The immediate reaction to a resignation is about cover — who does the work now — and that is the least difficult part. Hours can be bought, borrowed or delayed. What cannot be recovered afterwards is what the person knew that nobody wrote down, and the relationships customers have with them personally. Both are available during the notice period and unavailable the day after it ends.
The knowledge extraction is worth treating as the priority task of that period rather than as something to fit around handover. The specifics matter: which customers have arrangements that are not in the system, which suppliers to call for what, which jobs have history that changes how they are handled, what the workarounds are for the things that do not work properly. Asking someone to write a handover document produces a generic one; sitting with them and going through the actual live work produces the useful version.
The relationships need a deliberate transfer and it should happen before the departure rather than after. A customer who learns their contact has left by writing to a dead address, or by a stranger answering, is a customer at risk on the day they are least attached. An introduction while the person is still there — this is who will be looking after you, here is how to reach them — costs one message per relationship and preserves most of the continuity.
There is a decision to make quickly about whether to replace like for like, and it is easier to make at this moment than at any other. Departures are the natural point to reconsider a role, because the role as it existed was shaped by the person who held it. Some of what they did should be automated, some redistributed, some stopped, and the remainder may describe a different job than the one being vacated. Recruiting a replacement immediately forecloses that.
The concentration risk should be recorded rather than merely felt. If one person's departure creates this much difficulty, the same exposure exists for whoever remains, and the useful output of the episode is a short list of what only one person knows or can do. Addressing two or three items on that list is cheap while nothing is happening and impossible during the next resignation.
One thing to handle carefully: access and data. Accounts, systems, files, customer contact details held on a personal device, the phone number customers ring. Those need an inventory and a transfer, and it is far easier to arrange while the relationship is cordial. Businesses that leave this until after the departure routinely discover that something important lived somewhere they had no access to.
The hours are replaceable and the knowledge is not, and the notice period is the only window in which the second can be bought.
Answer Production Engine, Context Theory
Related questions
Should we tell customers immediately?
Tell affected customers before they discover it another way, which usually means during the notice period and in a way that emphasises continuity rather than the departure. What causes damage is silence followed by a customer finding out accidentally, since it raises a question about what else they have not been told.
What if they leave without notice?
Then the same priorities apply compressed, and the order changes: secure access and data first, contact affected customers second, reconstruct knowledge from records third. Reconstruction is much harder and it is worth accepting that some of it will be lost and planning around the gap rather than pretending it can be recovered.
METHOD
Every figure below carries its source and the date it was verified. Nothing on this page is asserted.
The numbers on this page.
| What | Value | Specific to |
|---|---|---|
| Firms that never responded to a web enquiry at all | 23% | Category-wide |
| Agents who give up after one contact | 44% | Category-wide |
| Social Security — the employer's rate, and the wage base it stops at | 6.2% up to $184,500 | Category-wide |
Oldroyd, McElheran & Elkington, "The Short Life of Online Sales Leads", Harvard Business Review (March 2011) · 1.25M inbound leads across 2,241 US firms · verified
Multi-study aggregate · verified
IRS Tax Topic no. 751 — Social Security and Medicare withholding rates · statutory rate for the 2026 tax year, published by the administering authority · the employee pays the same rate again, and above the wage base the employer pays nothing further on that employee · verified
What is specific to this page.
| Kind | Claim | Check it against |
|---|---|---|
| Workflow | The recoverable losses when a person leaves are undocumented knowledge and personal customer relationships, both of which are available during the notice period and unavailable afterwards, whereas hours can be bought or delayed. | What the business could not answer after a previous departure, checked against whether it was knowledge or capacity. |
| Workflow | Asking for a written handover produces a generic document, while going through the live work with the person produces the specific arrangements, supplier contacts, job history and workarounds that constitute the actual knowledge. | A previous handover document, compared against the questions that arose in the following quarter. |
| Buying behaviour | A customer who discovers their contact has left by writing to a dead address is at risk on the day they are least attached, whereas an introduction made while the person is present preserves most of the continuity. | Retention among customers introduced to a successor before a departure against those informed afterwards. |
| Software | Access, accounts, files, customer contacts on personal devices and the number customers ring require an inventory and transfer that is straightforward while the relationship is cordial and frequently impossible afterwards. | An access inventory listing every system and account the departing person holds, and where customer contact data resides. |
Each row would be wrong on another industry's page. Where a sourced figure exists it is in the table above instead; these are the constraints that shape the work and do not happen to be numbers.
Start with the measurement.
Reading about a benchmark is not the same as knowing your own number. The audit produces yours, measured rather than estimated.
$497 · delivered in 5 business days · credited against month one