Plenty of small companies have a person who was never hired to do IT and who everybody goes to with computer problems anyway.
Sometimes it’s the controller who set up the accounting server years ago because he was the only one who read the manual. Sometimes it’s the office manager who keeps every password in a spreadsheet, because somebody had to keep them somewhere. At a manufacturer it’s often the engineer who pulled the cable out to the floor himself and has been the reason the wireless works out there ever since.
Nobody assigned this; it accumulated. One person fixed a printer years ago and word got around. It’s one of the most common versions of small business IT support you’ll find, and it isn’t really IT support at all. It’s a favor that never ended.
The reason it persists is that it looks free. Nobody sends an invoice for it. There’s no line item on the books that says IT. So when an owner compares this arrangement to paying for managed IT services, he’s comparing a real number to zero, and zero wins every time.
It isn’t zero; it’s just paid in a currency nobody tracks.
The hours
Start with the simplest cost, which is time.
Ask the person how many hours a week they spend on computer problems. Most of them undercount, because the ten-minute interruptions don’t feel like work. Then look at what that person was actually hired to do.
An engineer spending six hours a week on IT is an engineer not engineering for six hours. A controller doing password resets during a month-end close is doing real damage to the company, and it isn’t his fault, because he’s the one people call. That time isn’t recovered later. It comes out of the work you’re paying them for.
That’s the first thing proper IT support for small businesses buys back. Not better computers, but the employee’s week back.
It’s never the priority
The second cost is harder to see, because it shows up as things that didn’t happen.
The de facto IT guy has a real job with real deadlines. IT sits underneath all of it. So the urgent stuff gets handled, the printer gets fixed, the new hire gets a laptop, and everything that isn’t on fire waits.
Security patches don’t get applied because nobody had a Tuesday afternoon free. The backup that stopped running in March isn’t noticed until somebody needs a file in September. The server that’s been out of warranty for two years keeps running, right up until it doesn’t. Nobody made a decision to let any of that slide. It slid because a person with two jobs will always finish the one they’re evaluated on.
An outside team has one job at your company. The maintenance that always waits is the work they’re there to do.
Nobody is staying current
The third cost is the one owners almost never account for.
Your de facto IT guy is smart and mechanically minded, and he learned what he knows by solving your problems as they came up. That’s a real skill. But he isn’t in training, he isn’t sitting for certifications, and he isn’t watching what changed in security this year, because his employer is paying him to do accounting or engineering.
So the network gets built out of whatever he knew at the time. The security setup reflects the advice that was current when he set it up, often built around a single safeguard like a password policy rather than the layered approach that modern account security actually calls for now. He’s answering the cyber insurance questionnaire by guessing at what the questions mean, because nobody ever taught him.
None of that is a knock on him. It’s the arrangement. He was never given the time or the budget to stay current, and then he was made responsible for decisions that require being current.
The practical result is that nothing is strategic. There’s no plan for what gets replaced next year, no view of what the business will need in three years, no one asking whether the way things are set up still fits the way the company operates now. There’s just a series of fixes.
What it adds up to
Put those three costs next to each other and the arrangement stops looking free. You’re paying a salaried employee to do a job you didn’t hire them for, at the expense of the job you did. You’re accepting that maintenance happens when somebody has a spare afternoon. And you’re making decisions about security and equipment based on what one person happened to learn a few years ago.
The comparison most owners make is outsourced IT support against zero. The honest comparison is IT support for small businesses against the salary hours you’re already spending, plus the projects that didn’t get finished, plus the equipment that ran years past when it should have been replaced, plus what it costs you the week the server actually goes down and there’s no one to call.
Owners who add that up usually find the plan is the cheaper side of the ledger. Some don’t, and that’s worth knowing too. Either way you’re looking at two real numbers instead of one real number and an imaginary zero.
What changes
The employee gets their week back and goes back to the job you hired them for. The maintenance that always waited gets done on a schedule. Somebody is responsible for knowing what changed this year and what your setup should look like next year. And when something breaks at 4:30 on a Friday, it isn’t one person’s problem to solve alone.
The person who has been filling this role usually did the company a favor for a long time without being asked. Moving the work off their plate isn’t a comment on how they handled it. It’s an acknowledgment that it outgrew a favor. This is the kind of shift we help small and mid-sized businesses make every day, and it usually starts with an honest look at where the hours are actually going.
If you want to know what that math looks like for your company, get in touch with ATP and we’ll go through your numbers with you.