A company lost its only technical person in a way that had nothing dramatic about it: he found a better job and left politely, with two weeks' notice.
Frozen is worse than broken
What he left behind was a website and an admin panel that worked perfectly and that nobody else could safely touch. There was no documentation. There were no access details in a shared place — the hosting login existed in his head and in one old message. There was no staging environment, so any change had to be made on the live site and hoped for. And there were two automated processes nobody knew about, which is how the company discovered, three weeks later, why some emails had quietly stopped going out.
The business was not in crisis. It was in a worse state: frozen. Every improvement was postponed until someone "who understands it" could be found.
Start with an inventory, not a rebuild
We began with an inventory rather than a rebuild — the unglamorous work of finding out what actually exists. Every service the site depends on, every account, every scheduled task, every external integration, all written down in one place the owner can read. Access was moved from personal accounts to company ones, with recovery options that do not depend on a former employee's phone number.
Then the code itself: put under version control, so changes are visible and reversible, with a short document explaining how to start it locally and how to deploy it. Not a novel. One page, written for the next person rather than for the author.
Plan for the day the developer leaves
The most useful outcome was not technical at all. The owner can now hand the project to any developer and expect work to start in days instead of weeks, and no single person's departure can freeze the business.
Everyone plans for the day the developer finishes the project. Almost nobody plans for the day the developer leaves — and that is the day that decides what the project was actually worth.