Keeping a bought-in content system running after the builder moved on

Who

A healthcare marketing agency serving specialty private practices, about twenty years in the business, now rebuilding its offer around AI.

Before

They had bought a content production system, an Airtable base plus a set of Make.com scenarios, from the person who built it. It worked when it was handed over. Then it was theirs, and nobody in the building had built it.

That is a specific and common position: you own something load-bearing that you cannot open up. When it breaks, you find out from a client.

What was done

• Folder nesting in Frame.io that was putting deliverables in the wrong place
• A full system outage, diagnosed and brought back up
• Slack alerts firing twice for some jobs and not at all for others, which is worse than no alerts, because people stop trusting them

Then a wider audit of the estate, because the fixes kept pointing at the same thing: nobody had a map. The audit found more live scenarios than anyone had accounted for, a hardcoded API key sitting in a blueprint, and error paths with no alerting on them at all.

What changed

The system is documented. When something breaks there is a place to look, and the alerts mean what they say.

The point

Most of this work isn't building. It's the position a business is in six months after someone else's build, when the person who made it isn't around and the system still has to run on Monday.