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Boardroom Answers · People & Operations · Operational Excellence

You are a one-person company. If you get hit by a bus, sign with a competitor, or simply burn out, my organisation has built board processes on a dead product. Why would I ever accept that risk?

The question a Chief Procurement Officer (CPO-P) asks.

The short answer

The risk is real, so it is fenced structurally: full data export in standard formats, source-code escrow for enterprise deals — and escrowed code that is actually operable, with CI, tests and documented invariants — plus contracted milestones.

The full executive answer

Because the risk is real, and we mitigate it the way procurement actually mitigates key-person risk — with structural protections, not personality assurances. First, continuity of your data and processes: everything your organisation creates is exportable — board reports and packs render to PDF, your data lives in standard Postgres with documented structure and portable migrations, and there is no proprietary data format holding you hostage. If Vouli IQ vanished tomorrow, your artefacts and your data survive it.

Second, source-code escrow: for enterprise agreements I will put the codebase in escrow with standard release triggers — insolvency, abandonment, failure to support. And this is where being a governed, test-disciplined codebase matters commercially: escrow is only worth anything if the escrowed code is operable, and this one comes with a full CI pipeline, 344 test suites, idempotent database migrations, and documented architecture invariants in the repository itself. An escrow of spaghetti is a placebo; an escrow of this is a genuine continuity plan.

Third, honest scale framing: the price points reflect the stage. You are not committing the enterprise to a decade — you are running founding-customer economics with exit ramps: your data exportable at will, escrow behind an enterprise agreement, and contractual roadmap milestones for the team build-out. The bus-factor risk is priced in and fenced; what you get in exchange is a level of product influence and founder attention that no thousand-person vendor can sell you at any price.

Grounded in: Standard third-party risk management: exit-plan and escrow provisions per ITIL 4 supplier management; the continuity posture mirrors what regulators ask of outsourcing-dependent firms.

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