How to Prepare to Die
Zack Greenfield • October 20, 2022
In this video we're gonna talk about kind of a twisted topic here. How to get all of your stuff ready to die. Now, wait, let me rephrase that. How to get ready to die and make sure you don't leave a mass online. Something you really need to think about.
All right, so one of the things that can be really tricky in our line of work is, well, a couple of things can happen. There can be a big events that transi, I would just call them transitional events. So your company may sell and there's a transition of ownership, but sometimes tragedy strikes and there's a mess to clean up. And that's what we're gonna talk about today. But in general, it's really important to think about all of your digital assets and digital real estate and frame it in a way that there is some sort of continuity plan. And I only know how ugly this can get, cuz we've had to help some people do some cleanups when things weren't well organized. And I'm sure many of you watching this may suddenly realize, thinking just for a minute now, what would happen if, you know, you were sort of taken outta the game here in some sort of tragedy?
Do people have access to your accounts? Do people, could people get into your profiles, your website, your cloud folders, your social media accounts, and all these things? Like how would anybody deal with that? Right? That's a tricky one. And for some of us that can be, you know, hundreds of items, right? Slack accounts, chat accounts, Gmail, multiple email accounts, multiple social media platforms, YouTube channels, bank accounts, you know, logins, logins, logins and passwords. So it can be tricky and you know, we have some tools that can make it a little bit easier. Like, you know, depending on where you're at with security and things, you may have passwords stored in your browser. You may have passwords stored in your iCloud account, that's another thing. But how would somebody get into that, right? Could they use face on lock or could they get into your, you know, get into those things.
So it's a little tricky, but here's the rule of thumb that we like to use from a professional standpoint. So as it relates to business assets, and that's where we're gonna kind of try to keep this conversation today. It's my belief that there should be triple coverage on all critical business digital assets. So that would include the businesses, social media accounts, website, access, cloud folders, and, you know, and relevant documents and all of those things. There should be triple, triple access. So usually the way that looks for us is the owner of the company, some sort of designated person that's on their side of the fence, could be spouse, relative, significant other business partner, whatever, somebody like that. And then kind of a neutral third party. And we act this way for many clients where on our agency side, we also have access to a lot of those things and could unlock them or help in transition, right?
So almost like a fiduciary role as it relates to those, you know, to those assets. So th those are things to think about. Now there's some cool tools you can use to help with some of that. Like in Google Workspace there are groups which we use oftentimes as a collaborative inbox and set those as the, uh, identity emails for a lot of accounts so that multiple people can be part of those groups and recover passwords, right? Password recovery is so important, but how do you do it if you can't even get into the email that the password is being sent to? And I know some of you have been in that situation before, cause I hear about all the time. So collaborative inboxes is a great tool. You can put three people on the, on the ownership side of that inbox. If one of 'em, you know, is out of the game for whatever reason, sickness illness or something like that, or just on vacation, the other two could recover a password very easily because they have access to that inbox, right?
So that could read something like social@zackgreenfield.com and I could use that email for all my social media accounts and then I could put, you know, my partner, my, my team on that group. Something happens to me easy for them to recover the password, get access to the accounts. And you know, again, it's all about continuity, right? It's, you know, does the business go on or what is the succession plan that you have? So these are real concerns. The, on a most basic level, at least put together a spreadsheet or some sort of document that's in a safe or that another, you know, trusted party has access to that's updated and current so that if anything happens to you, your business doesn't go dark because everything is locked up for weeks. And some of these can be very difficult to recover without, you know, a lot of legal work and, and other expenses and frankly, just time lags.
You know, where customers and other people may be waiting for updates and communication and the whole thing is just, you know, kind of cycling down. So avoid that by getting ready to die now. And let me tell you something, you will feel at peace and you will sleep really great knowing that that kind of, you're not leaving a mess for anyone as nobody likes that. You know, the best thing to do is leave everybody organized with clear instructions. So go ahead and think about that as you build out your business. Digital assets, make sure that you've got yourself covered. If anything tragic happens or you know, might not be that big of a deal, but it just is worth the effort with all the money you're spending in the investment time that you're making to be prepared and make sure that somebody is there to pick up where you left off in the case that something happens. So not the brightest topic today, but just as important as a lot of our other stuff. Go ahead and like the video because it's probably something we all could do a better job with keeping our house in order. Subscribe to the channel and we will see you on the next one.
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