TL;DR
- A spare pool is sized for the hiring plan. When the plan stops, the pool becomes inventory, and inventory depreciates whether or not anybody is looking at it.
- Orders in flight are the first decision and the most time-limited. Cancellation windows close quickly and the cost of taking unwanted delivery compounds from there.
- Leavers do not stop during a freeze. They often accelerate, which means your pool grows at exactly the moment you stopped needing it, and the growth is invisible because nobody is tracking inbound.
- The refresh cycle is the easiest thing to defer and one of the more expensive. Deferring once is prudent. Deferring twice creates a replacement wave that lands in the same quarter hiring resumes.
- Selling into a freeze recovers real value. Selling everything leaves you buying back at a worse price in nine months, because a freeze ends faster than a procurement cycle starts.
- The restart is the part nobody plans. Freezes lift suddenly and equipment lead times do not shorten to match, so whatever you decide now should be judged against how quickly you could rebuild.
The pool that was a buffer and became a cost
A 400-person company paused hiring in a quarter where the plan had been 90 joiners. The headcount decision was made in a week and communicated well. The equipment consequences took eleven months to fully surface.
At the point of the freeze there were 34 machines on a shelf, sized for the next two months of onboarding. There were 60 more on order against the rest of the plan, in three tranches, with the first already shipped. The refresh programme was due to replace 70 machines over the following two quarters. And the company was running a storage arrangement sized for the buffer it had been carrying.
Nobody made a bad decision. What happened was that three separate things each got deferred by somebody reasonable, and the combined effect was never looked at. The orders arrived because cancelling felt like a conversation somebody else should have. The refresh was postponed because it was obviously postponable. The storage carried on because it was a small monthly number attached to a decision made eighteen months earlier.
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Eleven months later the freeze lifted, and the company had 94 machines in storage, most of them a generation behind, a refresh backlog of 70 that was now urgent, and a storage bill it had paid for a year. The equipment nobody needed had cost more than the equipment they did.
When a freeze does not create this problem
Your pool is small because your onboarding is just-in-time. Companies that order against confirmed start dates rather than against a plan hold almost no buffer. A freeze stops the ordering and that is the whole adjustment. If this is you, read the refresh section and skip the rest.
The freeze is short and announced as short. A six-week pause before a funding close is not the situation described here. The decisions below are about freezes with no stated end date, because those are the ones where deferral compounds.
You lease rather than buy. If your devices are on a lease or a device-as-a-service arrangement, your exposure is contractual rather than physical, and the question is about minimums and term rather than about shelf space. Read the vendor contract section and ignore the inventory sections.
You are freezing hiring but not freezing attrition backfill. A freeze on net new roles while continuing to replace leavers keeps the equipment flow roughly in balance. The problem described here is specific to a full stop with ongoing attrition.
The first week: three decisions with closing windows
Two of these have deadlines that pass quietly, which is why they come first.
Orders in flight. Find every outstanding purchase order for equipment and establish, per order, whether it can be cancelled, what the cancellation cost is, and when that window closes. Suppliers vary enormously and the terms are frequently better than people assume, particularly before an order has been picked. What makes this urgent is that the window is usually measured in days and it is nobody's job to check. The default, which is that the order arrives because nobody stopped it, is the most expensive outcome available and the easiest one to reach.
Anything already in transit. Separate these from the orders above, because the decision is different. A shipment in the air cannot usually be stopped, but it can sometimes be redirected, and if it is heading to a market where you now have no imminent need, redirecting it to your main holding location is cheaper than receiving it somewhere you will later ship it out of. The worst version of this is a device clearing customs into a country where you have one employee and no storage, which converts a cancellable order into an asset that is expensive to move and awkward to hold. Check the destination of every in-flight shipment, not just the quantity.
The storage arrangement. Whatever you are paying to hold equipment was sized against the hiring plan that just stopped. That does not mean cancel it, because you are about to have more inventory rather than less. It means look at it deliberately now, with a quantity and an end date, rather than letting it continue as a line nobody reviews. This is the decision that defaults worst, because the monthly number is small enough to not trigger attention and large enough to matter over a year.
Leavers keep arriving, and the pool grows while you are not watching
This is the dynamic most companies miss, and it is the reason inventory climbs during a period when everybody assumes it is static.
A freeze does not stop attrition. It frequently increases it, because a hiring pause is a visible signal about the company's position and some people respond to it by looking elsewhere. Whatever your normal departure rate is, assume it holds and plan for it to be higher.
Every one of those departures produces a device coming back. Under normal conditions that device goes straight back out to a joiner within weeks, which is why it never feels like inventory. During a freeze there is no joiner, so it stops. Nobody records this as inventory growth because the mental model is still "returns feed onboarding", and the returns arrive one at a time over months rather than as a visible pile.
The practical consequence is that your pool is growing from two directions at once, inbound returns and any orders you failed to cancel, at exactly the point its purpose has disappeared. Count it monthly during a freeze rather than quarterly, because the number moves faster than anybody expects and the decisions below all depend on knowing it.
| Source | Normal state | During a freeze |
|---|---|---|
| New orders | Consumed by joiners within weeks | Pure inventory unless cancelled |
| Leaver returns | Redeployed to next joiner | Accumulate with no outlet |
| Refresh replacements | Old device retired or resold | Often deferred, creating later backlog |
| Spare buffer | Sized to onboarding rate | Sized to a rate that is now zero |
The refresh decision, which is the one that bites later
Deferring the refresh programme is the most natural saving available during a freeze. The machines still work, nobody is complaining loudly, and the money saved is immediate and visible. It is also the decision most likely to cost more than it saved, and the reason is about timing rather than about money.
Deferring one cycle is usually fine and frequently correct. Hardware lasts longer than refresh schedules assume, the schedule has slack in it, and a company managing cash should take that slack.
Deferring two cycles creates a wave. The machines you did not replace last year join the machines due this year, and the combined replacement lands in a single quarter. That quarter is very often the quarter hiring resumes, because both events follow the same improvement in the company's position. So you get a refresh backlog and an onboarding surge arriving together, competing for the same budget, the same procurement attention and the same supplier lead times.
There is also a support cost that accumulates quietly. Older machines generate more tickets, more battery replacements and more failures, and in a company that has also paused hiring the IT team absorbing those tickets is probably not growing either. The saving appears in a hardware line and the cost appears in a support function, which is why it is rarely attributed correctly.
The workable middle position is to defer the schedule but not the exceptions. Keep replacing machines that actually fail, keep replacing anything where the support burden is demonstrably high, and let the calendar-driven replacements wait. That keeps the wave smaller and the support cost contained, while still taking most of the cash saving.
Redeploy before you buy anything, and make that a rule
During a freeze the hiring is not quite zero. There are backfills for critical roles, internal moves, machines that fail and the occasional exception that gets approved. Each of those is a request for a device.
The rule worth adopting for the duration is that nothing gets ordered until the pool has been checked. That sounds obvious and it is routinely not what happens, because ordering is a two-minute task with a known outcome and checking the pool means asking somebody what is on the shelf and whether it is in a usable state.
Making it work needs two things. The pool has to be visible to whoever handles requests, which means a list somebody trusts rather than a cupboard somebody remembers. And returned machines have to be processed on arrival rather than stacked, because a device that has not been wiped, checked and recorded is not available even though it is physically present.
This is also the moment where the quality of your asset data stops being an abstract concern. A company that can answer "what do we have and is it usable" in five minutes will redeploy during a freeze. A company that cannot will keep buying, because buying is the path of least resistance when the alternative is an afternoon of investigation.
Sell, hold or store, and the arithmetic for each
Three destinations for genuine surplus, and the mistake is treating it as one decision for the whole pool rather than a decision per cohort.
Sell the oldest cohort. Machines approaching the end of their useful life have residual value now that they will not have in a year, and they are the least likely to be wanted when hiring resumes because they will by then be two generations behind. This is the clearest decision in the whole article and it is usually the one deferred longest, because selling feels irreversible in a way that storing does not.
Hold the middle cohort against the restart. Machines with most of their life remaining are what you will issue to the first wave of joiners when the freeze lifts. Holding these is not a failure to decide, it is the correct decision, and it should be recorded as a deliberate choice with a quantity attached.
Store rather than scatter. If you are holding, hold it in one place with a record, not distributed across whoever had space. Equipment held in three locations by three people who left during the freeze is equipment you will spend a week finding. This happens more during freezes than at any other time, because the usual holding location fills up, somebody takes a few machines home to clear space, and that arrangement was never meant to last a year. Decide the location deliberately and write it down, even if the answer is a particular cupboard in a particular office.
The arithmetic that decides the split is the depreciation rate against the storage cost against the probability of needing them within the holding period. You will not know that probability precisely, but you will know whether your freeze is six weeks or indefinite, and that is enough to make the call. What you should not do is hold everything because deciding is hard, which is the outcome the storage section above warns about.
| Cohort | Typical action | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Oldest third | Sell now | Residual value falls fastest, least likely to be wanted later |
| Middle third | Hold, with a recorded quantity and review date | This is what the restart will be issued |
| Newest third | Hold, and use for any approved exceptions first | Best machines should go to actual need, not to storage |
| Anything faulty | Repair or dispose now, do not store | Faults do not improve on a shelf and storage cost applies regardless |
What happens to machines while they sit
Stored equipment is not inert. Three clocks run on it and all three argue for holding less rather than more.
The warranty clock does not pause. A machine bought eleven months before a freeze and stored for a year emerges with about half its coverage gone and zero use to show for it. You have consumed the most valuable part of the warranty period while the device was on a shelf, and the person who eventually receives it gets a machine with noticeably less protection than a new one. If a meaningful part of your pool is under warranty, that alone is an argument for issuing rather than storing.
Batteries degrade in storage, and badly at the wrong charge level. Lithium cells held at full charge for months lose capacity faster than cells held partially charged, and cells allowed to fully discharge can become difficult to recover at all. The practical consequence is that a pool stored without any thought arrives at the restart with a proportion of machines needing battery replacement, which is a cost you pay at exactly the moment you are trying to equip people quickly. If you are holding for more than a few months, charge the pool to somewhere in the middle rather than full, and check it periodically rather than never.
Operating system support moves underneath you. A machine stored for a year arrives needing a substantial update before anybody can use it, and in some cases arrives on a version that is no longer receiving security updates. That is not fatal but it is time, and it is time spent on the day somebody is waiting for their first laptop. Factor an hour per machine into your restart planning rather than discovering it during it.
Together these are the reason the cohort split earlier in this article matters. The arithmetic is not just storage cost against residual value. It is storage cost, plus warranty consumed, plus battery degradation, plus restart preparation time, against residual value. That full comparison usually says sell more and hold less than instinct suggests.
Defending the equipment line in a cost review
A hiring freeze almost always arrives alongside a budget review, and the equipment line is an obvious target because it looks discretionary and the saving is immediate.
Some of that scrutiny is correct and you should accept it. The orders against a dead plan should be cancelled, the buffer should shrink, and the refresh schedule should slip. Arguing against those is arguing against the freeze itself.
What is worth defending is the part that costs more later. The most useful framing is not that equipment is important but that specific cuts create specific future costs, with the timing named. Deferring the refresh twice creates a replacement wave in the quarter hiring resumes. Cancelling the entire pool means buying at list price under time pressure in nine months. Dropping a vendor arrangement to save a monthly fee means rebuilding the relationship and the terms from scratch.
Bring one number rather than three arguments. The most persuasive is usually the restart cost: what it would cost to equip the first thirty joiners from nothing, at current prices, with current lead times, compared with what it costs to hold enough of the middle cohort to cover them. That comparison is concrete, it is checkable, and it reframes holding inventory as insurance with a price rather than as waste.
And be willing to lose some of it. A cost review where you defend every line is a cost review where nobody believes your priorities. Concede the refresh schedule and the buffer size, hold the ground on the restart cover and the vendor relationship, and the conversation goes better than treating all four as equally important.
If the freeze becomes a reduction
Some freezes are a pause and some are the first stage of something larger. The equipment consequences differ enough that it is worth knowing which you are in, and the honest position is that you often will not be told.
The relevant difference is direction. A freeze produces returns slowly from ordinary attrition. A reduction produces a large number of returns in a compressed window, from people who are leaving involuntarily, which is a materially different retrieval problem with a different tone and different timing. The decisions in this article about selling the oldest cohort and holding the middle still apply, but the volume and the urgency change completely.
What that means practically is to avoid decisions that would be expensive to reverse in either direction. Do not dismantle your retrieval arrangement to save a fee during a freeze, because that is the capability a reduction would need most and at short notice. Do not sell so deep into the pool that a restart leaves you buying under pressure. And keep the asset record current through the freeze, because a reduction run against a stale register is considerably harder than one run against an accurate one.
Handling the equipment side of an actual reduction is its own subject with its own sensitivities and is not what this article is about. The point here is narrower: the choices you make during a freeze should leave both doors open, because you may not get advance notice of which one you are walking through.
Your vendor contracts during a freeze
Whatever arrangement you have with suppliers was almost certainly sized against the plan that just stopped, and the terms deserve a read rather than an assumption.
Ask about minimums first. Many arrangements in this category carry a volume commitment, and the question is what happens when you fall below it. Some have a tolerance, some have a true-up, some simply reprice. Knowing which you have changes whether a freeze is a cost or a non-event.
Then ask about the term and what flexibility exists within it. Vendors are generally more accommodating about pausing or restructuring than people expect, particularly where the alternative is losing the relationship, and the conversation is considerably easier while you are in good standing than after you have missed a commitment.
And ask about holding. If a vendor warehouses on your behalf, establish what you pay to hold inventory that is not moving and whether that changes at lower volumes. This is the line that quietly grows during a freeze because the inventory grows while the outbound movement stops.
One thing worth saying directly to the vendor: that you are in a freeze, roughly how long you expect it, and that you want to keep the relationship intact through it. That is a more productive conversation than going quiet, and going quiet is what most companies do.
What the pool says to the people still here
A visible stack of unused laptops during a hiring freeze is a signal, and it will be read whether or not you intended to send it.
Some people will read it as waste, particularly if the freeze was explained in terms of cost discipline. Others will read it as evidence that hiring is about to resume, which creates its own expectations. Neither interpretation is necessarily right and both will circulate.
The useful response is not to hide the equipment but to be ordinary about it. If somebody asks, the honest answer is usually that the machines were ordered against a plan that changed, that the oldest are being sold, and that the rest will be issued when hiring resumes. That is a straightforward explanation and it is better than a rumour.
What genuinely does cause damage is refusing equipment requests from existing staff while sitting on an unused pool. Somebody whose machine is failing, who is told there is no budget, who then sees a shelf of new laptops, will draw a conclusion that is hard to correct. Use the pool for the people you have. That is both the right call operationally and the one that costs you nothing in credibility.
Planning the restart before it happens
Freezes end abruptly. The decision to resume hiring is usually made quickly, often by people who are not thinking about equipment lead times, and the expectation is that onboarding restarts immediately.
Equipment does not restart immediately. Supplier lead times are whatever they are, your procurement process still takes its usual time, and anything you sold has to be bought again at current prices rather than at the price you sold it for. The gap between the hiring decision and the ability to equip people is the thing to plan for now, while there is time.
Three things make the restart survivable. Know your rebuild time, which means knowing roughly how long it takes to go from a decision to a device in somebody's hands, including procurement approval. Keep enough of the middle cohort to cover the first wave of joiners, so the restart does not begin with a wait. And keep the vendor relationship warm, because a supplier you have spoken to through the freeze will prioritise you over one who went silent for a year.
The question to carry through every decision above is simple: if hiring resumed in six weeks, what would I wish I had not done. That question would have prevented most of the eleven-month story at the start of this article.
The asset record during a freeze, which is when it quietly rots
A freeze is the worst period for register accuracy and the one where nobody expects drift, because the assumption is that nothing is happening.
Plenty is happening. Returns arrive and get stacked rather than recorded. Machines move between the pool and approved exceptions without a note. People leave and their devices are received by somebody who is themselves leaving a month later. The storage location changes because somebody needed the cupboard. Each of these is small and none of them trigger a process, because the processes that exist are built around onboarding and onboarding has stopped.
The compounding problem is that the people who hold the undocumented knowledge are disproportionately likely to depart during a freeze. The person who knows which shelf holds the machines with the cracked hinges is not necessarily going to be there when the restart arrives, and their knowledge was never written down because it never needed to be.
Three cheap controls hold it together. Record returns on arrival rather than on redeployment, because the redeployment that used to trigger the record is not happening. Count physically once a quarter during a freeze, which takes an hour and is the only thing that catches drift before it accumulates. And write down the location, specifically, rather than relying on somebody remembering which room.
The reason this matters more than it sounds: every decision in this article depends on knowing what you have. The cohort split, the sell-or-hold arithmetic, the restart cover, the redeploy-before-buying rule all assume an accurate count. A freeze run on a register that drifted for eleven months produces decisions made on fiction, and the fiction is usually optimistic.
Where the vendors fit
Doing nothing and absorbing it. Entirely viable for a short freeze with a small pool. It struggles when the freeze extends, because the decisions that needed making in week one have by then passed their windows.
A buyback specialist. The route for the oldest cohort, quoting per lot and collecting. They struggle on small volumes where the per-collection economics are poor, and they do nothing about the holding question for what you keep.
Storage with an equipment platform. Warehousing with a record attached, which is better than a self-storage unit precisely because the record exists and the machines come back out as known units. They struggle where your freeze is short enough that the arrangement overhead exceeds the benefit.
RemoAsset is our own product and that is disclosure rather than a footnote. It covers procurement and retrieval across 80+ countries, publishes a Subscription tier from $1,499 a year, and includes device buy-back and a local storage option as part of the arrangement, which is the relevant combination during a freeze because the sell-some-hold-some split is the actual decision. Three limits, stated because a freeze plan built on a wrong assumption is expensive: it enrols devices but is not an MDM in its own right; it wipes devices but is not a certified ITAD, so formal disposal certificates for the cohort you retire are a separate arrangement; and coverage and lead times vary by market, which matters most when the restart comes and you need volume quickly.
The decision table
| Situation | Scale | Setup | Primary Pain | Recommended Starting Point |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Short announced freeze | Any | Just-in-time ordering | Almost none | Cancel open orders, carry on |
| Indefinite freeze, growing pool | 100 to 400 | Buffer sized to a dead plan | Inventory from two directions | Count monthly, split the pool by cohort |
| Freeze with high attrition | Any | Returns with no outlet | Pool grows invisibly | Process returns on arrival, redeploy before buying |
| Freeze plus deferred refresh | 200 plus | Refresh postponed once already | A wave landing at restart | Defer the schedule, keep the exceptions |
| Leased or DaaS fleet | Any | Contractual rather than physical | Minimums and term | Read the contract, call the vendor early |
| Freeze ending soon | Any | Pool partly sold | Rebuild time against hiring expectation | Keep the middle cohort, warm the vendor |
What getting this wrong actually costs
The visible cost is the storage bill, and it is the one people cite afterwards because it arrives monthly and has a number attached.
The larger cost is the residual value curve. Equipment loses value steadily and a freeze is precisely the period when it sits still. A machine sold at the start of a freeze and a machine sold eleven months later are different amounts of money, and the difference is not recoverable. For a pool of ninety machines that difference is usually larger than the storage bill that drew attention to it.
The cost that does the most operational damage is the restart collision. A refresh backlog and a hiring surge arriving in the same quarter will exceed whatever procurement capacity you have, and the result is that new joiners wait and existing staff keep machines that should have been replaced. Both groups notice, and the company has effectively paid for a freeze twice: once in the deferred spending and once in the disruption when it unwinds.
So the question is not how much the pool costs to hold. It is which of your freeze decisions you would have to reverse if hiring resumed next month, and what reversing each one would cost.
When the pool stops being a pool
For most companies a spare pool is a working buffer: a handful of machines, replenished from returns, consumed by joiners, never really counted because it never gets large enough to matter.
A freeze is the event that converts it into inventory, and inventory is a different thing with different requirements. It needs a count, an owner, a location, a condition record and a review date. None of those are needed when the buffer turns over every three weeks and all of them are needed when it sits for a year.
If you recognise that your pool crossed that line during this freeze, the useful response is not to shrink it back but to manage it as what it now is. Count it, split it by cohort, decide per cohort rather than in aggregate, and put a review date on whatever you keep.
The companies that come out of a freeze in reasonable shape are the ones that made those decisions in the first month. The companies that come out badly are the ones where every individual deferral was defensible and nobody ever looked at the total.
Frequently asked questions
Should we cancel equipment orders as soon as a freeze is announced?
Establish the position on every open order in the first week, which is not the same as cancelling everything. Find out per order whether cancellation is possible, what it costs and when the window closes, because those windows are frequently measured in days and nobody owns checking them. Suppliers are often more flexible than expected, particularly before an order has been picked. What costs money is the default outcome, where orders arrive simply because no one stopped them, and that is the easiest outcome to reach.
Why does the spare pool grow during a hiring freeze?
Because returns continue while the outlet for them disappears. Attrition does not stop during a freeze and frequently rises, since a hiring pause is a visible signal that some people respond to by looking elsewhere. Each departure produces a device coming back, and under normal conditions that device goes straight to a joiner within weeks so it never registers as inventory. With no joiners it accumulates, one machine at a time over months, which is slow enough that nobody notices until the total is large.
Is deferring the refresh cycle a mistake?
Deferring one cycle is usually sound and often correct, since hardware outlasts refresh schedules and a company managing cash should take that slack. Deferring two creates a wave: the machines skipped last year join those due this year, and the combined replacement lands in a single quarter which is very often the quarter hiring resumes. The workable position is to defer the calendar-driven replacements while continuing to replace anything that actually fails or generates a high support burden.
How do we decide what to sell and what to keep?
Split the pool by cohort rather than treating it as one decision. Sell the oldest third, because residual value falls fastest there and those machines are least likely to be wanted when hiring resumes. Keep the middle third, which is what you will issue to the first wave of joiners at restart. Use the newest machines for any approved exceptions during the freeze rather than storing them. Anything faulty should be repaired or disposed of now, since faults do not improve on a shelf while storage cost applies regardless.
What should we ask our equipment vendor during a freeze?
Three things, early and directly. What happens if you fall below any volume minimum in the arrangement, since some contracts carry a tolerance, some a true-up and some a reprice. What flexibility exists within the term, because vendors are generally more accommodating than expected when the alternative is losing the relationship. And what you pay to hold inventory that is not moving, since that line grows during a freeze as stock accumulates and outbound movement stops. Tell them you are in a freeze rather than going quiet.
How do we handle equipment requests from existing staff during a freeze?
Fulfil them from the pool, and treat that as the pool's primary purpose for the duration. Refusing a request from somebody whose machine is failing while holding a shelf of unused laptops is the single most damaging thing you can do here, because the person will eventually learn the stock exists and will draw a conclusion that is very hard to correct. Using the pool for existing staff is both operationally correct, since those machines should be working rather than depreciating, and costs nothing in credibility.
What happens when the freeze lifts?
Faster than your equipment supply chain can respond, which is the thing to plan for now. Hiring decisions get made quickly, often by people not thinking about lead times, and the expectation is that onboarding restarts immediately. Know roughly how long it takes you to go from a decision to a device in somebody's hands including procurement approval, keep enough of the middle cohort to cover the first wave, and keep the vendor relationship warm, because a supplier you have spoken to through the freeze will prioritise you over one who disappeared.
Should we tell employees what is happening with the equipment?
Be ordinary about it rather than secretive, because a visible stack of unused laptops during a freeze will be noticed and interpreted regardless. If asked, the straightforward explanation is usually enough: the machines were ordered against a plan that changed, the oldest are being sold, and the rest will be issued when hiring resumes. That is better than a rumour, and rumours in this situation tend toward either waste or imminent hiring, neither of which you want circulating uncorrected.
Where this leaves you
A freeze does not create an equipment problem. It exposes one, by removing the flow that was hiding it.
Deal with the closing windows in week one, because orders in flight and cancellation terms do not wait. Count the pool monthly rather than quarterly, since it grows from two directions while everybody assumes it is static. Split it by cohort and decide per cohort, selling the oldest and keeping the middle against the restart. Defer the refresh schedule but not the failures. And run every decision past one question, which is what you would wish you had not done if hiring resumed in six weeks.
The eleven-month story at the start of this article was not caused by a bad decision. It was caused by three reasonable deferrals that nobody ever added together.
If you want the shortest possible version of all of this, it is one meeting and one recurring task. The meeting happens in the first fortnight, includes whoever owns equipment, whoever owns the budget and whoever owns the vendor relationship, and settles five things: open orders, the storage arrangement, the refresh position, the cohort split and the restart cover. The recurring task is a monthly count of the pool with the number written somewhere all three of those people can see.
That is genuinely the whole discipline. Everything else in this article is reasoning you can reconstruct from first principles once those two things exist, and no amount of good reasoning substitutes for them if they do not.
