It wasn't a people problem. It was a systems problem.

We had someone leave the team a while back. It was unexpected, yet there were no hard feelings. We figured we'd split up the work until someone new came in.

Then we realized how much of the business lived inside one person's head.

Nobody knew where certain files were. A few conversations had no notes. Some follow-ups only existed because one person remembered them.

That was on us. We'd built a business that depended too much on memory and not enough on process.

Since then, we've documented more, shared more, and made sure no task belongs to just one person.

Losing a team member shouldn't mean losing part of your business.

Has something similar ever happened to you?