The Oh Shit Document

If you were suddenly out of the picture tomorrow, with no notice and no handover, could anyone else keep your agency alive until you were back? Not run it well. Just keep the lights on: pay people, chase the money, stop clients walking. For most owners the honest answer is no, and the fix is smaller than you’d think. It’s a single file I call the Oh Shit Document.

I’ve mentioned it for years, in emails, on podcasts, even in What breaks first, but never actually given it a home here. Which is a bit embarrassing for a document whose whole point is that the important stuff shouldn’t only live in your head. So here it is.

What is an Oh Shit Document?

The Oh Shit Document is a single file that one or two trusted people know about and can access if you’re suddenly out of the picture. Not a will, not a shareholders’ agreement, not a business continuity plan with an ISO number. Just the practical stuff someone would need to keep the lights on if you went incommunicado tomorrow: illness, accident, family crisis, or anything else life throws without an appointment.

Regular readers will know why this one isn’t theoretical for me. The full story is in What breaks first. The short version: when the worst arrives, it arrives with zero notice, and whatever isn’t written down and findable simply doesn’t exist.

Why you probably need one

In the last Agency Loop, we asked owners how confident they were that their agency could run without them for three months. Nearly half, 47%, said they weren’t. Only 22% felt confident.

And that wasn’t a one-off reading. It’s the third time in a year the same picture has surfaced through a different question: in mid-2025, half of owners weren’t confident in their long-term finances without a sale; at the end of 2025, roughly 1 in 5 were still personally delivering most of their agency’s revenue; and now nearly half say the business couldn’t run without them for a quarter. Different measures, but with the same structure underneath. Founder dependency is just how most small agencies are built.

The full fix for that, building a business that runs without you, takes years. It’s the deepest work I do with founders, and there’s no shortcut. But there’s a difference between the business can’t run without me and nobody can even keep it alive without me. The first is a structural problem you chip away at over time. The second is a single afternoon’s work you’ve been putting off. The Oh Shit Document fixes the second one.

What goes in it

The honest answer is: it depends on the size and shape of your business. That’s not a dodge. The data draws the line clearly. At one or two people, the founder essentially is the agency; by three to six, delivery starts moving to the team but the plumbing usually hasn’t. What breaks first is different at each stage, so the document is too.

If it’s just you, or nearly: this is mostly about money and access. Where the business accounts are and who can get into them. How your spouse or partner accesses funds if you can’t sign anything. Your password manager’s emergency access. Who to call, and what to tell them: accountant, biggest client, key supplier. What’s invoiced, what’s owed, what’s due out. Domain, hosting and email access so the business doesn’t go dark while you’re gone.

If you’ve got a small team: all of the above, plus the operational plumbing. Who runs payroll and how. This is the one I see fail first. Whether anyone else has signing authority on the bank account, and if not, why not? A short map of clients: who owns each relationship, what’s live, what’s promised. And a line on what the team gets told, and by whom, so nobody’s improvising a message while worrying about you.

If you’re bigger: the questions get more formal. Who acts as MD in your absence, and do they know it. Banking mandates. Whether any client contracts have key-person clauses that your absence would trigger. Shareholder and Companies House obligations that won’t pause for your circumstances. A basic line on external comms if the absence becomes visible.

The common thread across every size: someone else has to know the document exists and where to find it. The best document in the world is useless if it’s locked on a laptop only you can open. The test isn’t “have I written this down?”. It’s “could the right person find it and act on it within an hour, without me around?”.

Where the document lives

Somewhere secure but reachable. A shared drive folder with named access, a password manager’s secure notes with emergency access configured, or, old-fashioned but reliable, a sealed envelope with your accountant or solicitor. When I ran an agency, ours was in a locked safe with the password inside a tamper-evident envelope.

What matters less is the medium and more that exactly the right one or two people know it’s there. I hold versions of this for a few of the founders I work with, which tells you something about how rarely there’s an obvious person inside the business.

Version 1 can be done in a lunch break

This isn’t a project. The first version is less than an hour. A rough version that exists beats a thorough one you’ll write “when things calm down.” Things don’t calm down. That’s rather the point.

Start with one question: what breaks first? If you vanished today, what stops moving soonest? For most agencies it’s money: payments, payroll, invoicing. Write that section first. Everything else is refinement.

Then tell someone where it is.