Business Continuity Documents Every Founder Should Revisit

Your cap table has a plan for key-person risk. Your insurer may ask about succession. Somewhere in Notion or Google Docs there is probably a list of “if I get hit by a bus” logins. That is all real continuity work — and it usually stops at the boundary of the company.

The personal layer is different: life policies, property deeds, the name of your executor, where the original will lives, and the instructions that do not belong in Slack. Founders often optimise for speed and defer this layer because it is emotional and easy to deprioritise. This article names the gap in plain language. It is not legal advice; use your solicitor for anything that touches probate or title.

What corporate continuity already covers

Typically: director powers, share transfers, escrow, maybe a handbook for the engineering team. Those mechanisms assume the business continues. They rarely include “how my partner finds the life insurance policy number” or “which solicitor holds the sealed will.”

The personal checklist (high level)

Think in three buckets: identity and authority (will, letters of wishes where appropriate, executor contact), money and cover (policies, pensions, key account numbers), and digital footprint (subscriptions, domains, recovery codes — without putting raw passwords in email). Your solicitor can tell you what must be original paper; everything else is about findability under stress.

• Location, not just possession. A document in a drawer nobody knows about might as well not exist.
• Separation from your day-to-day accounts. If family access depends on your phone and 2FA, you have a single point of failure. A Family Kit-style approach is designed so access does not require your Apple ID or password manager.
• Encryption for scans. Photos of passports in iCloud are convenient and risky. End-to-end encrypted storage on-device is a different trade-off; we cover the “why” in Why Encrypted Storage Matters.

Where After Me fits (and does not)

After Me is an encrypted local vault plus a printable QR and .afterme file for people you trust. It is a delivery layer for the documents and notes you choose to include — not a will, not probate authority. We wrote For founders to spell out positioning for operators who already have professional advisors.

If you only take one action after reading this, let it be: align your professional estate plan with a reachable copy of what your family will need, and test whether they could open it without borrowing your phone. Everything else builds from there.