Your preparation
0 of 0 safeguards readyIncident worksheet
Make the next decision with evidence
Keep essential service, money, customer, and security decisions moving while respecting limits on what a temporary operator may change.
Evidence→Decision→Action→Proof
Capture before evidence disappears
- List founder-only accounts, approvals, recovery methods, legal authorities, bank roles, signing keys, domain control, customer promises, and undocumented scheduled work.
- Record current incidents, cash commitments, renewals, payroll, launches, support escalations, vendor deadlines, and regulatory dates for the absence window.
- Confirm the founder's availability boundary and emergency contact through an authorized personal channel without exposing private health details.
Decisions that change the response
| Question | Act when | Action |
|---|---|---|
| What may the team change? | A decision affects security, availability, money, customers, or reversibility. | Use the written authority matrix; prefer reversible containment and defer strategic commitments. |
| Activate formal authority? | Banking, legal, payroll, contracts, or ownership actions require it. | Use documented officers, powers, board routes, or professional advisers—never shared credentials. |
Proof that recovery worked
- A second person can access monitoring, support, cloud, registrar, payments, banking contacts, and incident records.
- Critical bills, payroll, certificates, domains, backups, and customer commitments have owners through the absence.
- Decisions, exceptions, and changes are logged for a clean handback.
Controls to put in place
- Maintain two named administrators for critical systems with separate recovery methods.
- Write a two-week operating brief covering authority, cash, incidents, support, releases, and stop conditions.
- Test founder absence annually without sharing passwords or bypassing provider controls.
Tabletop drill
The founder becomes unreachable for 14 days. The backup operator must handle a failed payment, a customer escalation, a deploy rollback, and a domain alert, then produce a handback log.
Escalate when
Use legal, financial, board, insurer, or emergency contacts when personal welfare, formal authority, payroll, banking, ownership, or regulated decisions exceed the operating brief.
What this means
The incident is not the founder’s absence. It is the business depending on one person for decisions, credentials, money, customer promises, and technical recovery.
Protect the founder’s privacy. The continuity lead needs a clear duration estimate and business authority, not personal medical details.
Warning signs
- Only the founder can access banking, payroll, domain, cloud, or payment accounts.
- Customers, contractors, and vendors wait for the founder to approve routine work.
- Recovery codes and legal documents exist only on the founder’s device.
- Nobody else knows current cash, commitments, launches, renewals, or incidents.
- The business cannot publish a status update without the founder.
Recover now
First hour
- Confirm the continuity trigger. Establish that the founder is unavailable, the expected review date, and who can receive personal updates.
- Name one acting lead. Use existing company documents and delegations. Do not invent legal, banking, or employment authority.
- Freeze avoidable risk. Pause launches, large purchases, destructive migrations, hiring decisions, and nonessential deployments.
- List the next 14 days. Include payroll, tax, renewals, customer deadlines, support, cash needs, and active incidents.
- Open the continuity pack. Retrieve business-controlled credentials, contacts, current priorities, vendor details, and recovery instructions.
Today
- Tell the smallest necessary group who is acting lead and what decisions are paused.
- Contact customers only when delivery, support, billing, or security is affected. Give a new owner and realistic next update.
- Verify access to banking, payroll, payment processing, domain, email, source control, hosting, cloud, support, and accounting.
- Assign every essential responsibility to a named person. Defer everything else.
- Use legal and financial advisers for decisions outside existing authority.
- Keep a decision log so the founder can understand what changed on return.
Verify recovery
- Payroll, taxes, renewals, refunds, and critical vendors are covered.
- Every critical account has a reachable business-controlled administrator.
- Customers with affected commitments have an owner and update date.
- No one is impersonating the founder or using the founder’s personal account.
- Decisions, expenses, incidents, and deferred work are recorded.
Prepare now
Authority
- A written delegation names who can make operational and financial decisions.
- Banking, payroll, accounting, and contracts have a lawful backup path.
- The team knows what requires founder approval and what does not.
Access
- Critical services have at least two business-controlled administrators.
- Recovery methods do not depend on the founder’s phone or personal email.
- Emergency credentials and documents are stored securely and tested.
Continuity
- A one-page continuity pack lists cash, commitments, vendors, customers, systems, and contacts.
- Every critical responsibility has a backup owner.
- A return handover template records decisions made during the absence.
Practice
- The business has operated for one day without asking the founder for access or approval.
Common mistakes
- Sharing personal details widely. The team needs operational facts, not private information.
- Logging in as the founder. Use delegated business access and proper authority.
- Trying to continue every project. Protect essential operations and pause the rest.
- Assuming a spouse or contractor has authority. Access and legal authority are different.
- Keeping no decision log. The founder returns to hidden changes and new risks.
Sources
Last reviewed July 19, 2026Guidance changes. Confirm provider-specific actions in the linked official sources.