Notice comes on a Tuesday. Two weeks. By Wednesday you are working out how much of that desk has to be taught to somebody else. The schedule that gets rearranged twice before ten. The permit renewal that goes in every March. The supplier who has to be phoned, never emailed. A spreadsheet with somebody's initials in the filename that half the week depends on.
The reflex is to find someone like them, fast, before the wheels come off.
There is another option now that was not there before. Hire somebody fluent with AI and automation who has barely worked in an office, and let them build the job back up from the ground. What is there got built around what one person could carry. That was the only way to build it. Not anymore.
Rebuilding a back office used to mean a consultant or a senior hire, and it cost enough that almost nobody did it on purpose. That price came down. Somebody who has never run an office can now build one that works better than what was there.
What stops the thought is Wednesday. Some of what sits in that chair does not come back.
A landscaping company in central Illinois settled the same question out on the properties. Autonomous mowers live at the customer's place full time and cut on their own, with nobody driving them out. Every week or two somebody comes for the edging and the pruning, in a truck that works more like a command centre than a landscape trailer. The routine hours went to the machines. What needed a person kept one, and the people minding that fleet had never worked in landscaping.
Your operation has the same two kinds of work in it. The invoicing, the scheduling, the permit that goes in every March: somebody sharp rebuilds that inside a month and builds it better than it was. The customer who will only deal with that person, and the supplier who fixes the mistake because of who called: that does not come back. Losing it might still be the right trade.
Most owners never separate the two. The seat gets refilled with whoever comes closest, and the office carries on as built.
THE VERDICT
The question is whether the job gets refilled or rebuilt. Not who replaces them.
Work out what you would lose, then look at what you could build instead. The upside is growing, and making the right choice is most challenging when the chair is empty.