Signs your business has outgrown its IT person
Plenty of businesses start with one person who's good with computers. Sometimes it's a staff member who took it on, sometimes a technician who comes in when something breaks. At ten people that works well. At forty, the same arrangement is quietly holding the business back.
We've seen a five-person business, with one person called in for break-fix, grow into an 80-seat company that suddenly needed its IT structured and brought up to standard quickly.
That's not unusual. Growth adds people faster than anyone revisits how their accounts, laptops and data are set up.
The warning signs
Everything waits for one person
Holidays, sick days and busy weeks all mean a queue. Worse, the knowledge of how things are set up lives in one head. If that person left tomorrow, how long would it take to work out who has admin access?
New starters lose their first week
The laptop gets ordered late and set up by hand. Accounts are created from memory, and access to shared files arrives in pieces. Leavers are the reverse: accounts left open because nobody was told.
Security questions you can't answer
A larger client sends a questionnaire. Your insurer asks about multi-factor authentication, backups and patching. Each answer takes a phone call and some guesswork.
Spending you can't predict
Break-fix invoices that used to be occasional turn up every month. Licences are bought ad hoc, and nobody is sure which ones are still in use.
More locations
A second office, a warehouse or people working interstate put devices and networks out of easy reach.
Why it's a business risk
The real cost of the one-person model is concentration. Skills, availability and knowledge all sit in one place. Security needs someone watching alerts at night and at weekends, licensing needs attention, devices need a lifecycle, and suppliers need chasing. Asking one person to cover all of that alongside fixing whatever broke today means the planning never happens.
What to put in place next
Whoever does the work, a growing business needs a few foundations, roughly in this order:
- One named account per person, with multi-factor authentication enforced.
- Company laptops managed centrally, encrypted and patched on a schedule.
- A standard way to set up new starters, ideally with laptops that configure themselves at first sign-in.
- Independent backup of email and files, with restores tested.
- A written register of devices, admin accounts, licences and suppliers.
- Someone responsible for security alerts outside office hours.
Your options
Hire more people. A second or third IT hire spreads the load, but it's expensive, and a small team still has gaps in skills and cover.
Stay with break-fix. Under about five staff this usually costs less than a managed service, and we'll tell people that. Beyond that, the unpredictability and missing planning tend to cost more than they save.
Move to a managed provider. A team takes full ownership for a fee per user, with response targets, round-the-clock security monitoring and a plan that grows with the business.
How we handle it
Taking on fast-growing businesses is a large part of what we do. We take over the whole environment, put the foundations above in place during a three-week onboarding, and size things for where you're heading. Read more about IT for fast-growing businesses, or the older comparison of managed IT and in-house IT.