Who administers your Salesforce org? If the answer is 'they left', read this.

Audit your administrators

In Setup → Users, filter by profile: who holds System Administrator? Salesforce's explicit recommendation is to keep more than one active system administrator at all times — the entire recovery ladder below exists for businesses that didn't.

The three recovery paths, in order

1. 1
   Another active admin exists

   Easy: they open Setup → Users, deactivate or edit the departed admin's user record, and grant System Administrator to a current employee. Do the full offboarding sweep while you're there.
2. 2
   No admin, but the departed admin's email was corporate

   If your IT team controls the email domain, Salesforce Support can reset the admin password to that address — your team intercepts the reset and hands the org to a current employee. This is the strongest argument for never letting admins register personal emails.
3. 3
   No admin, no email access

   The formal path: Salesforce Customer Support will change the previous administrator's email address — but the request must come as a signed letter from a C-level executive (CEO, CFO, CIO, or the business owner). It works; it just takes exactly as long as it sounds.

Set it up properly

• Two or more active System Administrators, on corporate email addresses, at all times — Salesforce's own best practice, and it collapses the whole recovery ladder into a non-event.
• Consultants and implementation partners get their own admin users you can deactivate — never the only ones, and never on personal addresses.
• When an admin leaves, deactivate the user and reassign their records, but don't delete-in-haste — ownership chains and automations reference them.
• Record the admin list in your asset register and re-check it on every departure — the CRM holds your revenue history; treat its keys accordingly.