Your only marketer quit: the first two weeks

The resignation lands on a Tuesday, and the ads, website and email all sit behind one person's logins. Here is what to do over the next two weeks, in order.

Tuesday: keep the handover friendly and short

Picture the owner of a small landscape design firm. On a Tuesday morning her only marketer, who has run the website, the Google Ads account, the Instagram page and the monthly newsletter for years, hands in a resignation letter. The owner's first thought is about the spring campaign. Her second is quieter: she does not know who the admin is on the Google Business Profile, and she has never logged in to the ad account.

Before anything else, thank the person and ask for a written handover plan that covers the notice period. The goal of that first conversation is cooperation. A marketer who feels respected on the way out will walk you through every login. One who feels ambushed will do the minimum. Everything below depends on that goodwill, so do the account work in a way that reads as routine housekeeping.

Days one to three: get ownership of every account

The most common mess is an account that lives under the marketer's personal email. Ad accounts, the domain, the analytics property and the social pages are often registered to whoever set them up. The company pays the bills and has no practical control.

Make a list and check each item for two things: who is the owner or admin, and where the two-factor codes go. If the codes go to the marketer's phone, you are locked out the moment they leave.

• Domain registrar and DNS, which control your website address and your email delivery
• Website host and CMS, including plugin and theme licenses
• Google Ads, Google Analytics, Search Console and Tag Manager
• Google Business Profile, which often has a former employee as its only owner
• Meta Business Manager, the Facebook page and the Instagram login
• Email marketing platform, CRM, and any form or call-tracking tools
• Payment cards attached to ad platforms and software subscriptions
• The shared password manager, if one exists, and the recovery email behind each account

Add yourself, or a second trusted person, as owner on each account while the marketer is still there. Do not remove them yet. Remove their access on the last day, then change shared passwords and move two-factor codes to a device the company controls. If there is no password manager, set one up this week. It is the single most useful fix on this list.

What to pause and what to keep running

Pausing everything feels careful and usually costs the most. A Google Ads campaign on branded and high-intent searches that has been bringing in calls for a year should keep running, with a daily budget cap you can see. So should review replies and any automated email that follows up on quotes.

Pause whatever depends on a human adjusting it each week: experiments, half-built campaigns, landing page tests, paid social aimed at cold audiences, and anything whose tracking you cannot verify. Money spent on a campaign nobody is watching turns a quiet month into a wasteful one.

Then test the plumbing. Submit your own contact form, call the tracked phone number, and confirm the lead lands in an inbox a living person reads. Marketers often route form notifications to their own address, and once they leave, enquiries pile up unseen.

Hold off on large changes during the handover. Redesigns and agency switches can wait until you understand what you have.

Who owns which vendor

A one-person marketing function usually has a small crowd behind it: a freelance copywriter, a photographer, a print shop, an SEO contractor, perhaps an agency running a single channel. The marketer is the only person who knows their names. Go through the last several months of card and bank statements and list every recurring charge. Some will be tools nobody remembers adopting.

For each vendor write down four things: the contact, who pays, what is in progress, and who receives the finished work. Then have the marketer send a short introduction email to each one, copying you, and naming you or another person as the new point of contact. Do this before the last day, because vendors respond best to a handoff from someone they already trust.

Check contracts for auto-renewal dates and notice terms. A retainer that nobody is directing is still billing.

Capture what lives in their head

Documents rarely hold the useful knowledge. Ask for a recorded screen walkthrough of each platform, with the marketer talking through what they check and when. Video is faster for them to produce than a written manual, so it is more likely to get finished.

Then ask direct questions and write the answers down:

• Which campaigns produce booked jobs, as opposed to clicks or form fills that go nowhere?
• What do the people who answer the phone say about lead quality?
• Which seasonal deadlines matter, and how early must work start to be ready?
• What was tried and abandoned, and why?
• What is promised to vendors, partners or clients that is still outstanding?
• What is the weekly routine, step by step?

Put all of it in one shared folder that the owner controls. The test is whether a stranger could keep things running for a month using only what is in that folder.

Week two: hire, outside lead or nothing yet

By now you know what exists. Only then decide how to fill the gap. All three options are defensible. The usual mistake is defaulting to whichever one feels most like the old arrangement.

Hire a replacement

A hire fits when there is enough steady marketing work to fill a full-time role and the owner can judge the output. Hiring one person again recreates the same single point of failure, so require documentation and shared account ownership from day one. Searching and ramping up take time, so plan for a gap anyway.

Bring in an outside lead

Many small service firms need direction more than hours: which channels to fund and how to read the numbers. An outside or fractional marketing lead covers that, and a freelancer or part-timer can handle production. FracMO is built for this case, giving small service firms a fractional-CMO function as software. The tradeoff is that someone outside has less feel for your day-to-day, so the handover notes you collected matter more.

Do nothing yet

If most of your work comes from referrals and the campaigns you kept are running, waiting two to four weeks is a legitimate choice. It works only if one named person checks leads and spend every week and the decision date is written down. Without that, nothing yet drifts into nothing at all.

Keep reading

• What is a fractional CMO? — the plain-English 2026 guide
• Fractional CMO cost in 2026 — real numbers, including ours
• AI CMO vs fractional CMO — how the models actually differ
• Compare Fracmo to agencies, in-house hires and DIY tools
• All Fracmo blog guides