When someone leaves
The processes live in one person's head. When that person leaves, the company loses years of knowledge overnight. The contacts. The mail. The reason a deal was structured the way it was. None of it is written down anywhere you can reach.
You do not need that person to stay. You need what they know to stop being tied to them.
§1 Why the obvious fix fails
A leaving-day walkthrough captures what the person remembers to say. It misses everything they do without thinking, and every client detail that only mattered once. Two weeks later you find the gap, and there is no one left to ask.
Google's own documentation says it plainly: transferring ownership of a Drive folder does not transfer the files inside it. Do it the intuitive way and a whole batch stays owned by the person who left. The same trap sits under email. A company domain is not an admin console, and without one there is no clean export.
§2 How I do it
The rescue comes first and it is urgent, because it has a deadline the rest of the work does not: the person's last day. Their contacts, mail, and negotiation history get frozen safely while they are still reachable. A few thousand files and a few hundred contacts is a normal size. I do not try to organise it early. Organising it badly is worse than organising it late. Freeze it first; file it once we know what it is.
Then the build: the frozen material becomes plain files you own, on your own drive, that AI can read and answer questions from. The knowledge stops living in a head and starts living somewhere the whole team can reach.
The bottleneck is usually approval, and approval is slow. The departing person's calendar is not. So the rescue is scoped small enough to approve on its own, without waiting for the rest of the plan to be signed off. The work that has to happen before someone leaves should never be blocked by the work that can wait until after.
§3 What this is not
Your email system stays where it is. The rescue touches only the leaving person's material, and your domains and hosting do not move.
You get plain files you can open and read yourself, with no vendor lock-in. The day you want to change tools, you take the whole folder with you.
And you are not tied to me. Every build ships with a written guide and a full handover, so the team can run it after I am gone.
§4 To start
Tell me who is leaving, roughly what they hold, and when their last day is. I will tell you what can be rescued, what is at risk, and what the first small step costs.