What You Lose When They Go
Everything the supplier knew leaves with them, no handover period is owed to you, and the only defence is having bought the knowledge while the work ran.
Reads as a businessReads as employmentCuts both waysDepends where you are
Four factors, and no total. Every bar is the same length: the side is the claim, the size is not. Correction is commercial here, and it is slower and blunter than the thing it replaces.
Everything the supplier knew leaves with them. There is no handover period you are entitled to and no obligation on them to be reachable afterwards. The only defence is to have bought the knowledge as a deliverable while the work was still running.
The practical issue in “What You Lose When They Go” becomes clearer when expectations and evidence are visible to both sides. Used for attendance sheet template, explore the software on its own site can add time and project context, provided the purpose is disclosed, access is limited and every consequential interpretation receives human review.
Businesses discover this at the worst possible moment and almost never at any other.
A broader benchmark for “What You Lose When They Go” is available through CIO project-management coverage. Use it alongside the brief and day-to-day facts so general guidance supports rather than replaces case-specific judgement.
What actually walks out
Not the deliverables, which you have. The reasons: why that approach was taken, what was tried and abandoned, which parts are fragile, what the client said in a meeting two years ago, where the thing that breaks every March actually lives.
None of that is in the output and all of it is what makes the output maintainable.
Why it is worse than with an employee
An employer has a notice period, colleagues who have seen the work, a handover process and often a mentor relationship that spread knowledge sideways while it was being created.
A one-person supplier has none of that by construction. The work happened in one head and left in one go.
Buying the knowledge as you go
The only thing that reliably works, and it is specified like anything else:
- Written handover notes as a deliverable at each milestone.
- Decisions recorded with their reasons, not just their outcomes.
- Documentation of anything bespoke, owned by you.
- A written account of what is fragile and why.
- Access and credentials held by you rather than by them.
All five cost money because they are work. That is the price of the arrangement, and it is considerably cheaper than the alternative.
The handover at the end
Worth specifying in the engagement rather than negotiating at the exit: what a handover consists of, how long it takes, and that it is paid.
Suppliers generally do this well when it is agreed and paid for, and badly when it is requested for nothing from somebody who has just been told the work is finishing.
Buying their time afterwards
Frequently available and rarely arranged. A former supplier will usually answer questions at an hourly rate, and the rate is cheap against the alternative.
What does not work is expecting it for free as a courtesy. A few suppliers will; most have other clients, and the goodwill runs out quickly once an engagement is over.
Credentials and access, which are a separate disaster
Accounts in their name, domains registered to them, services paid on their card, certificates issued to their email.
This is the single most common operational emergency when a supplier leaves badly, and it is entirely preventable by establishing at the start that anything the business depends on is held by the business.
The second supplier, one more time
The structural answer appears in several places in this collection and it is the same one here: somebody else who has done a small piece of the work and could pick it up.
It costs money for capacity you do not use. Weighed against the cost of an unplanned departure on a system nobody else has ever opened, it is usually the cheaper side.
Why this makes buyers reach for the wrong instruments
Because the fear of losing somebody is the strongest force pushing a business toward treating them like staff. Longer notice, exclusivity, restrictions, training, integration — all of it is driven by the knowledge that this person leaving would be a disaster.
Those instruments do not actually solve the problem. Nothing stops somebody leaving; the arrangement that makes their leaving survivable is a documentation requirement, not a tighter grip.
The departure you did not expect
Illness, a better offer, a change of direction, a client who hires them. None of these is in anybody's plan and all of them happen.
A useful question to ask about any long engagement: if this person were unreachable from tomorrow, what would stop? If the answer is something that matters, the gap is in what you bought rather than in their loyalty.
What you are allowed to keep
A practical point that catches businesses out: what the supplier produced may not be yours unless the engagement says so.
Ownership of work product, licences to use it, rights in anything built on top of existing material of theirs — all of it is a matter of what was agreed, and the default position differs by jurisdiction and by the kind of work. A business that assumed it owned something and finds at the exit that it has a licence instead has lost a negotiation it did not know it was in.
The review this suggests
For each long-running engagement, establish what exists in writing and what exists only in one person's head.
Most businesses find the second list much longer and find that it would take three paid days to fix. Three days is the price. It is worth comparing against what the same business spent the last time somebody left without warning.