It happens more often than you'd think. A freelancer goes quiet. An agency folds. The one developer who understood everything moves on. Suddenly the software your business runs on has no one behind it, and you don't even know where it lives.
The panic is understandable. The good news: this is almost always recoverable, and it's a big part of what I do.
First, take stock of what you have
Before anything else, track down the keys to your own house:
- Where does the code live? GitHub, GitLab, a hard drive, a hosting account, ask everyone who might know.
- Who controls the domain, hosting, and accounts? These are yours; get the logins back or reset them.
- Is anything still running? A live site or app is a working reference, even if you can't change it.
You almost always own more than you think you do. The trick is finding it before you rebuild anything.
Then bring someone in to map it
Once the assets are in hand, a fresh developer can read the code, figure out how it works, and tell you honestly what shape it's in, what's salvageable, what's risky, and what it'll take to move forward.
That assessment is the whole game. With it, you go from "we're stuck and scared" to "here's the plan." Without it, every next step is a guess. Most projects don't need to be thrown away; they need someone to pick up where the last person left off.
