access, not ownership

There is a real difference between having access to something and owning it, and a lot of small business arrangements blur the two without anyone deciding to. Access is what lets me build a site, manage DNS records, or run an ad account. Ownership is a different, larger thing entirely: it is who the account actually belongs to, who is billed for it, and who has the final, unilateral power to remove anyone else, including me.

Access, not ownership is a simple rule I hold to across every account involved in a client’s work. Whatever I need to do the job, I have. Whatever makes the business the actual owner of its own online presence, that stays with the business, full stop.

Why it matters to you

The moment a contractor holds ownership rather than access, the business has handed over something it usually did not mean to. It becomes dependent on that one person’s continued availability and goodwill to get anything changed, transferred, or shut down. That dependency is exactly what shows up in the worst version of a vendor relationship: an unresponsive freelancer, a closed agency, an account nobody can quite get back.

Keeping ownership with the business, always, means none of that dependency exists. If the working relationship with me ends for any reason, the business simply removes my access. Nothing needs to be handed back, because nothing was ever handed over.

How I set it up

Every account gets created or held with the business as the owner, and I request whatever level of access below that actually lets me do the work: managing DNS, deploying code, adjusting an ad campaign. Where credentials need to be shared directly, that happens through a password manager rather than a password typed into an email, so access can be granted or revoked cleanly without either of us needing to change a password by hand.

On accounts that have a super admin tier above regular access, that role belongs to the business, not to me, as described under super admin. This is the same idea applied consistently across the whole relationship, not a one-off policy on a single account.

What it looks like in practice

If you check any account I work in, you will find me listed as a collaborator or a team member with a defined role, never as the owner. If you decide at any point that you want to make a change I am not involved in, remove my access, or bring someone else in instead, you can do all of that yourself, immediately, because the account was never structured to require my involvement to change it.