People & HR

How to offboard a departing employee as DTC Brand Founders

People & HRFor DTC Brand Founders3 apps12 steps~24 min to set up

When someone on your small DTC team leaves — a customer service rep, a fulfillment coordinator, a performance marketing hire — you're the one who ends up holding the bag. Their Shopify admin access is still live a week later. Their Klaviyo login is somewhere in a LastPass vault you don't have the master password to. The Google Sheet with the reorder formulas lives in their personal Drive. You find out your return portal password was only in their head when a customer escalates and nobody can log in. Offboarding at a 10-person DTC brand isn't HR process — it's founder firefighting, usually discovered after something breaks.

Build this on Starch → See the apps used

People & HRFor DTC Brand Founders3 apps12 steps~24 min to set up

Outcome

What you'll set up

A checklist-driven offboarding workflow that tracks every access revocation, asset handoff, and knowledge-capture task in one place — so you don't miss the Klaviyo login or the Shopify staff account

A knowledge handoff process that pulls the departing employee's docs, SOPs, and tribal knowledge into your team wiki before their last day, so you stop being the fallback answer for everything they knew

An automated task queue that assigns follow-up items (password resets, seat cancellations, supplier introductions) to the right person and sends you overdue alerts when anything slips

The Starch recipe

Apps, data, and prompts

The combination of Starch apps, the data sources they pull from, and the prompts you use to drive them.

Apps used

Knowledge Management Task Manager Email Agent

Data sources & config

Knowledge Management connects to Notion via Starch's scheduled sync, so any SOPs or docs the departing employee kept in your shared Notion workspace are already indexed and searchable before you start the offboarding doc. Task Manager runs standalone with no external sync required — you clone the offboarding template and assign tasks manually or via chat. Email Agent connects to Gmail via Starch's scheduled sync, reading existing threads with suppliers and vendors so it can draft contextually accurate handoff emails without you rewriting from scratch.

Prompts to copy

Build me an offboarding knowledge capture workflow. When someone leaves, I want to create a structured doc in our wiki for their role with sections for: tools they owned with login info, recurring tasks they ran, supplier and vendor contacts they managed, and any SOPs they kept in their head. Let me fill it in during their final week and flag items that are still incomplete.

Create an offboarding task list template I can clone each time someone leaves. Tasks should include: revoke Shopify staff access, remove from Klaviyo account, cancel their Gorgias seat, transfer Google Drive files, update the supplier contact sheet, and introduce me or their replacement to any external contacts via email. Each task gets an owner and a due date, with P1 priority for anything involving active system access.

Help me draft offboarding emails. I need a template for: (1) an internal announcement to the team, (2) an intro email from the departing employee to their key supplier contacts handing off to me or their replacement, and (3) a note to our 3PL contact updating them on the new point of contact. Pull their name and role from context and let me fill in the replacement info.

Run these in Starch → or paste them into your favorite agent

Walkthrough

Step-by-step

1 Two weeks before the last day, open Knowledge Management and create a new offboarding capture doc for the role. Prompt Starch: 'Create a wiki page for [Name]'s offboarding. Sections: tools and logins they owned, recurring weekly tasks, external contacts they managed, and open projects with current status.' Share it with the departing employee to fill in during their notice period.

2 Clone the offboarding task list template in Task Manager. Assign P1 tasks (Shopify staff access revocation, Klaviyo seat removal, Gorgias account deactivation) with due dates on or before the last day. Assign P2 tasks (Google Drive transfer, supplier intro emails, reorder sheet handoff) for the week following departure.

3 Have the departing employee walk through every tool they log into and add the credential or access path to the wiki. If it's a shared password in their personal password manager, get it into your team vault now — Task Manager item, P1, due before their last day.

4 Use Email Agent to surface all active supplier and vendor threads the departing employee owns. Prompt Starch: 'Find all email threads in Gmail where [employee email] is the primary contact with an external vendor or supplier, and summarize the status of each.' Review the list and identify who needs a formal handoff introduction.

5 Draft handoff emails via Email Agent. Prompt: 'Draft a handoff email from [Name] to [Supplier Contact] introducing [Replacement] as the new point of contact for purchase orders and restock coordination. Keep it warm and specific to the relationship.' Send each one from your account or the departing employee's in their final days.

6 Audit Shopify: go to Settings > Users and check every staff account. Remove the departing employee's access on their last day, not the day after. Add this as a P1 task with a hard due date so Task Manager sends you an overdue alert if it slips.

7 Check your ad platforms — Meta Ads Manager and Google Ads — for any ad accounts where the departing employee has admin or editor access. Remove them and verify your own access is intact. Browser automation through Starch can flag logged-in sessions if you describe the workflow, but for Meta and Google you'll want to do this manually as a one-time step.

8 For Klaviyo, cancel or reassign the departing employee's seat. If they owned any active flows or campaigns, make sure those are reassigned to an active team member before their access is cut — a broken flow owner can silently stop emails from sending.

9 Update your 3PL contact sheet and any supplier spreadsheets that reference the departing employee's name or email as the point of contact. Task Manager item: 'Update supplier contact sheet with new POC for [departing employee's accounts]' — assign to whoever is taking over, P2, due within 5 days of departure.

10 One week after departure, run a knowledge gap check. Open Knowledge Management and prompt: 'What questions has the team asked this week that I had to answer myself, and do we have a doc that covers them?' If the answer is no, create a stub article and fill it in while the context is fresh.

11 Send yourself a 30-day reminder (Task Manager: 'Check: any recurring tasks [Name] owned that haven't been picked up yet?'). At a small DTC brand, monthly or quarterly tasks — like updating the reorder model or pulling a specific ad report — often fall through the cracks because nobody realizes they were owned by the person who just left.

12 Archive the offboarding doc in Knowledge Management under a 'Team History' section. It becomes a reference for the next time you hire for this role — you'll have a clear picture of what the job actually involved, in practice, not just what the job description said.

See this running on Starch

Connect your tools, describe what you want, and the agent builds it. Closed beta is free.

Try it on Starch →

Worked example

Offboarding a Fulfillment Coordinator — February 2026

Sample numbers from a real run

Shopify staff access revoked	1
Gorgias seat cancelled (saves $35/mo)	35
Klaviyo seat reassigned (saves $0 — on team plan)	0
Supplier contacts handed off (3 vendors)	3
SOPs captured in wiki (reorder process, 3PL communication cadence, return processing)	3
Open tasks transferred to founder (7)	7

Your fulfillment coordinator gives two weeks' notice in early February. She owns the relationship with your 3PL, runs the weekly reorder check against Shopify inventory levels, and manages inbound customer emails about shipping delays through Gorgias. On day one of her notice, you open Knowledge Management and create her offboarding doc. By end of week one, she's filled in three SOPs — the reorder process (which you now see was entirely manual, pulling from a Google Sheet she maintained herself), the 3PL communication cadence (Tuesday check-ins, specific contact name, preferred format for PO submissions), and how she triages shipping delay emails in Gorgias. Email Agent surfaces 14 active threads with the 3PL and two suppliers where she's the named contact. You draft three handoff intro emails and send them by day eight. Her Shopify staff access is revoked on her last day — Task Manager flagged it as overdue at 9am when you hadn't checked it off yet. Three weeks later, your Task Manager 30-day reminder fires and you catch that nobody has been running the weekly reorder check. You spend an afternoon documenting it properly in the wiki and assigning it to yourself until you hire a replacement. Total firefighting time: under 4 hours. Previous offboarding (a marketing hire, 8 months earlier): two weeks of chaos, one supplier relationship that went cold, and a Klaviyo flow that stopped sending for 11 days before anyone noticed.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

Days from last day to full access revocation across all tools (target: 0 — same day)

% of departing employee's recurring tasks with a named owner within 7 days of departure

Supplier and vendor relationships with a completed handoff intro (target: 100% before last day)

Knowledge articles created or updated during offboarding (are the SOPs actually written down now?)

SaaS seat cost recovered within 30 days of departure (cancelled or reassigned seats)

Comparison

What this replaces

The other ways teams handle this today, and how the Starch version compares.

Notion + manual checklist

Most DTC teams already use Notion for docs, but the offboarding checklist lives in a template that gets copied and then ignored — there's no task assignment, no overdue alerts, and no connection to the email threads or tool access audit that actually matter.

Rippling or Gusto HR offboarding

Rippling automates IT deprovisioning for tools it manages, but if your stack includes Klaviyo, Gorgias, your 3PL portal, or any custom SaaS that Rippling doesn't have a connector for, you're still doing it manually — and those are exactly the tools a DTC fulfillment or marketing hire owns.

Google Sheets offboarding tracker

Fast to set up, already in your stack, and completely passive — no alerts when tasks are overdue, no connection to your wiki or email, and it breaks down the third time someone doesn't update their row.

Linear or Asana task management

Good for engineering or product teams running sprints; more setup than a 10-person DTC brand needs for an infrequent workflow, and neither one captures tribal knowledge or helps you draft the supplier handoff email.

On Starch RECOMMENDED

One platform — knowledge management, task manager, email agent all running on connected data. Setup in plain English; numbers stay current via scheduled syncs and live agent queries.

Try it on Starch →

FAQ

Frequently asked questions

We're on Shopify, Klaviyo, and Gorgias — does Starch connect to all of those?

Shopify, Klaviyo, and Gorgias are all reachable from Starch's integration catalog of 3,000+ apps; the agent queries them live when your workflow runs. For access revocation specifically, you'll still be clicking inside each platform — Starch helps you track what needs to happen and draft communications, not automate admin permission changes on your behalf.

What if the departing employee kept SOPs in their personal Google Drive, not the shared one?

That's the most common gap on small DTC teams. Starch's Knowledge Management connects to Notion via scheduled sync, so anything in your shared Notion workspace is indexed. For personal Drive docs, the offboarding process itself — captured in Task Manager — needs to include a step where the employee explicitly shares or transfers those files before their last day. The wiki doc you create during offboarding is where that transferred content lands permanently.

Is Starch SOC 2 certified? We're careful about what has access to our supplier contact data.

Starch is not SOC 2 Type II certified today. If that's a hard requirement for your team, it's worth knowing upfront. The knowledge docs and task lists you build in Starch are internal to your workspace; supplier email threads are read by the Email Agent via your Gmail connection, which uses OAuth.

The Task Manager app says it's in development — can I use it today?

Task Manager is currently in beta. You can request access, but if you need it immediately, the offboarding task list can also be built as a custom app in Starch — describe what you want and the agent builds it. Something like: 'Build me a task tracker for employee offboarding with fields for task name, owner, due date, priority (P1–P4), and completion status. Send me a daily summary of overdue P1 tasks via email.'

How long does it take to set this up the first time?

The first offboarding is the hardest because you're building the template as you go. Plan for 2–3 hours to wire the Gmail connection, create the wiki offboarding doc structure, and build the task list template. The second time, you clone the template and start filling it in — probably 30 minutes of setup before the actual work begins.

What about Meta Ads Manager — can Starch revoke the departing employee's ad account access automatically?

Meta Ads Manager is reachable through browser automation — Starch can automate actions on any site you can log into. However, removing a user from an ad account touches sensitive permissions, so this is a step most founders prefer to do manually. Starch can remind you it needs to happen (via Task Manager) and walk you to the right settings page, but the click is yours.