Just like every business should have control over their own marketing, your business should also have control over your own assets.
Over the last few years, we’ve hired a website developer named Josh Healey to help us build projects.
For example, for the last few years we’ve been at a standstill trying to get our BuddyBoss app up to help with personal branding for clients. And as you can see, almost nothing has been completed.

Even though we’ve spent +$10k with Josh and have almost nothing to show for it, we believe he’s still a bright person and can put his mind to getting things done if he really wants to.
You can see Parker Nathans giving a similar assessment to the situation we’ve been dealing with for years now.
Unfortunately, after so much delay we were forced to let Josh go as a contractor since nothing was being completed as you can see through these email chains.
When our website developer Felix tried to get something similar up himself – he was unable to do so since the setup was originally done in Josh’s name, which directly violates our SOPs.
In this article – we want to do two things:
- Kindly request that Josh Healey stops holding our app hostage so we can develop a tool to help our friends and clients.
- Show the importance of why business assets should almost never be in the hands of a single person.
Josh, if you’re reading this it’s not too late to step up and do the right thing for our other team-members, who’ve been at a standstill on this project.
As for the importance of why business assets should never be in the hands of a single person – it’s not so that another can recover if there’s an unexplained absence or excuse. Rather, it’s so A players can co-ordinate quickly and get projects completed.
For example, had we followed our SOPs from the beginning, Felix and the rest of our team could’ve built the app in a few weeks and already launched a prototype since one person doesn’t control everything – regardless if they’re working or not.
Ideally, unexplained absences should rarely occur if ever if we’re hiring a team of A Players. But when it does happen, you can see the result in our attempts to reach Josh Healey on multiple channels like Felix attempted to do last month.
What are things you can do to prevent this from happening in your business?
First and foremost, maintaining a centralized code repository, such as GitHub, Bitbucket, or GitLab, is essential. This ensures that the codebase is accessible to more than just the primary developer and provides a secure backup of all work done.
Coupled with this, enforcing the creation of thorough documentation for all projects is necessary. Detailed documentation will cover explanations of the codebase, system architecture, and any third-party services or APIs integrated into your projects. This is invaluable for quickly bringing new developers up to speed if the original developer becomes unavailable.
Another critical measure is to implement robust access controls. Ensure that no single individual holds all administrative access. Implementing role-based access controls and sharing critical credentials with a trusted superadmin or storing them securely where they can be accessed by authorized personnel when needed, can prevent single points of failure.
This includes regular backups of all data with frequent testing of these backups to ensure data integrity and quick restoration capabilities in emergencies.
We’ve seen similar situations happen across the many local service businesses we help. Usually from issues related to access from their last agency for their website or ads accounts.
Having one point of failure (whether it’s a company or a person) always spells disaster on a long enough time frame.
There’s a famous Navy SEAL saying, which is “one is none, two is one”, which means that there’s always a risk of failure without backups. As a business owner, that also means having access to everything and having at-least two people work on large projects.
When that fails to happen, you get situations like you see here when a single person holds projects hostage.