Right now a freelance designer is refreshing a Slack channel that has gone quiet. Her last message, a mockup and a question about the onboarding screen, has gone unread for nine days. She has written a polite follow-up and deleted it twice. Maybe the client is busy. Maybe she did something wrong. Maybe she's been dropped without a word, the way freelancers sometimes are. She doesn't know the person who would answer died last Tuesday. Nobody told her, because the only person who knew she existed was the person who died.

If you run a business alone, "solo" is a bit of a lie. Most solo founders have a small ring of people around them: a part-time developer, a virtual assistant, a bookkeeper, a copywriter on retainer, someone overseas who handles support tickets overnight. They aren't employees. They aren't on payroll. Often they aren't written down anywhere except in your inbox, your invoicing tool and your memory.

That is the problem this article is about. Your family will eventually find the bank account and the domain registrar. They'll almost never find the people.

The org chart that only exists in your head

A company with employees has an HR system, a payroll provider and a manager who notices when someone stops showing up. When a founder dies, all of that keeps working. Somebody sends the all-hands email.

A one-person business with five contractors has none of it. The relationships are real, sometimes years deep, but the way they're held together is personal. You know that Priya invoices on the first of the month, that Marco has admin access to the production database, and that the support contractor answers to a shared inbox only you check. None of that is written down. It's all in your head.

Your executor, usually a grieving spouse, sibling or friend, inherits the business with no map of who works on it. They may see recurring payments to names they don't recognize and stop them out of caution. They may never see the payments, because the contractor is paid through a platform they can't log into. Either way, the people who helped you build the thing get the same notice: nothing.

Ambiguous loss: why silence is the cruelest notice

The family therapist and researcher Pauline Boss spent decades studying what she named ambiguous loss: a loss with no clear facts and no closure. Her work started with families of soldiers missing in action and later covered dementia, disappearances and other situations where someone is gone in one sense but not another. Her central finding is that ambiguity itself does the damage. Without facts, people can't grieve, can't move on and can't stop wondering. They freeze.

A contractor ghosted by a dead client lives a small, real version of this. They don't know whether they've lost a client, a paycheck or someone they liked. Many of them did like you. A developer who has worked with you for three years knows your jokes, your bad habits and your kid's name. When they find out months later from a LinkedIn post or a bounced email, the first feeling is often guilt for the irritated follow-ups they sent while you were already gone.

You can't stop people grieving you. You can make sure they get the truth quickly, from a person, with what they need to close the loop. That kindness costs you about an hour now.

What generally happens to the work and the money

The law varies by country and state, and a local attorney is the only real authority on your situation. Some broad patterns still hold widely enough to plan around.

Contracts don't simply evaporate. A contract for personal services, where you specifically were supposed to perform, often ends with your death. But if your contractor is owed money for work they already did, that debt usually doesn't vanish. It typically becomes a claim against your estate or your business entity, handled with the other creditors during probate or winding down. That process can take a long time, and contractors are often small creditors at the back of the line.

Your business entity may outlive you, briefly. If you operate through an LLC or corporation, the contracts may belong to the company, not you personally. Someone with legal authority has to act for the company to pay, renew or end those agreements. Until that person exists and can prove their authority, the work sits in limbo.

Freelancers on platforms are in a strange spot. If you pay someone through a marketplace or an escrow-style platform, milestones and disputes follow that platform's rules. Those rules were written for clients who go silent, not clients who die.

None of this is a reason for despair. It's a reason to make sure the person settling your affairs knows who is owed what, under which agreement and through which channel, so legitimate invoices can be paid without detective work.

The access you forgot you handed out

There's a less sentimental side to this. Contractors usually hold keys: a developer with deploy rights, a VA with access to your email or calendar, a marketer logged into your ad accounts with your card on file, a bookkeeper who can see every bank transaction.

While you're alive, that access rests on trust and an ongoing relationship. After you die, the relationship is gone but the access isn't. Most contractors are decent people who will step back respectfully. A few will keep doing the work because nobody told them to stop, and run up charges nobody approved. And now and then an account is quietly compromised, because a former contractor's own credentials leaked and nobody was watching.

Security people call this offboarding, and in companies it's a checklist triggered by HR. In a solo business there's no trigger. Your executor needs a written list of who has access to what, so they can decide what to revoke, what to keep and who to ask for help. Some contractors know your systems better than anyone alive. The developer you're tempted to cut off may be the only person who can keep the product running long enough to sell it.

The contractor page: one document, one hour

What replaces the missing HR department is one page, written by you, for someone in shock. For each person who works for you regularly, it says:

  • Who they are and how to reach them: name, email, phone and time zone, outside of any platform your executor can't open.
  • What they do and what they cost: the role in one plain sentence, the rate, the billing schedule and where the agreement lives.
  • What they can touch: every system they have access to, and at what level.
  • What you'd want: keep them on to help with a sale or shutdown, pay them out and part kindly, or, rarely, revoke access right away.
  • A sentence for them: optional, but it matters. A line you'd want passed on. "She made the product beautiful. Tell her that."

That last line isn't sentimental padding. Boss's research suggests people cope with ambiguous loss partly by building meaning: a story about what the relationship was. A sentence from you, passed on by your executor, gives them something to build with.

Your next moves

  • Pull your last 12 months of outgoing payments today from your bank, invoicing tool and any freelance platforms, and write down every person paid more than once. That's your real org chart.
  • For each person, list every system they can log into. Check the user and team settings in your hosting, code repository, email workspace, ad accounts and accounting software. Remove anyone who no longer works with you while you're there.
  • Write one line per contractor saying what you'd want to happen: keep, pay out or revoke. Then add their direct contact details somewhere your executor can actually reach.
  • Draft a short notification message your executor can send as is: two or three sentences saying you've died, who to contact about final invoices and what happens to their access. Grieving people shouldn't have to find the words for an email to a stranger.
  • Tell one contractor you trust that this plan exists. Ideally pick the one who knows your systems best. If something happens, they're the most likely to notice the silence first, and now they'll know who to call.

Where Heirloom fits

We built Heirloom because the binder most founders picture is accounts and passwords, and that leaves out the people. In Heirloom, contractors can live next to the systems they touch: who they are, what they're owed, what they can access and what you'd want done. All of it gets handed to the executor you choose, when it's needed, along with the message you've already written. Do the five steps above with a notebook or a spreadsheet and you've already done the important part. If you'd like it kept in one place your family can actually open, Heirloom is at heirloom.lumenlabs.works.