The Accidental IT Person: What It Costs When Nobody Owns IT

Article by Taylor Willis | Posted on September 28, 2026

We see this a lot at small businesses that have no IT staff and no outside IT provider: one employee has quietly become the IT department. Usually it’s the office manager, the bookkeeper, or whoever set up the Wi-Fi when the business moved in. Nobody hired them for it and nobody assigned it. It became theirs one favor at a time.

In IT, this person is often called the accidental IT person. The arrangement feels free because there’s no IT salary and no monthly bill. The cost is still there. It gets paid in that person’s time and in problems nobody is watching for.

How a Business Ends Up With an Accidental IT Person

It Starts With Small Favors

It almost never starts as a decision. Whoever set up the last new laptop gets asked to set up the next one, and each fix makes them the obvious person to ask next time. A few years later, they’re the only one who knows the Microsoft 365 admin login or which vendor to call when the phones go down.

Why It Keeps Going

It keeps going because it mostly works. Problems get fixed, usually the same day, and the person fixing them is often good at it. Most accidental IT people do solid work with the hours they have. They just don’t have many hours for it, because they already have a full-time job. What gets squeezed out is the work nobody notices until it’s missing: maintenance, documentation, and security checks.

Time Taken From Their Real Job

Say your office manager spends four hours a week on computer problems, password resets, and vendor calls. That’s about 200 hours a year, or five full work weeks, taken from the job you hired them for. Use your own person’s hours to get your number. Those hours also come in pieces. A 20-minute printer problem in the middle of payroll costs more than 20 minutes, because they have to find their place again.

We see the same thing with businesses that come to us. One company reached out because its product manager had also become its IT person, and IT problems were taking time from product work every week.

Decisions Nobody Wrote Down

When IT gets squeezed in between other work, the quickest fix wins and nobody writes it down. That’s how a software subscription ends up on someone’s personal credit card, or the company’s web domain ends up registered to a former employee’s personal email. A year later, nobody can say for sure what the business pays for or who can log into what.

Security and Backup Work That Doesn’t Get Done

When IT is a side job, the work that protects the business gets pushed back, because nothing is broken yet. These are the gaps we find most often:

• Backups that run every night but have never been tested with a restore
• Former employees whose email and software accounts are still active
• Multi-factor authentication turned on for some accounts and not others
• Firewall and server updates that haven’t been installed in a long time
• Admin passwords that only one person knows

Each of these is easy to fix once someone looks. Left alone, they can turn a lost laptop or one phished password into a week of downtime.

When That Person Is Out, or Leaves

Vacations, sick days, and resignations all expose the same problem: how everything is set up lives in one person’s head. If they’re out for two weeks, IT problems wait until they’re back. A resignation is harder: the business can lose the only record of its passwords, vendor contacts, and network setup, and whoever comes next has to piece it back together.

Are You Running on Accidental IT?

What to Do About It

Start With What You Can Do This Week

You don’t need to hire anyone to reduce the risk. These steps take a few hours and help no matter what you decide later:

1. List every account and system the business depends on, and who has the admin login for each.
2. Move those admin logins into a shared password manager that the owner can also access.
3. Ask whoever handles backups to restore one test file, and write down the date it worked.
4. Write a short checklist for when an employee leaves: which accounts to shut off, and who does it.
5. Ask your accidental IT person how many hours a week IT takes, and what they’d hand off first if they could.

Decide Who Owns IT From Here

A list helps, but someone still has to keep it current, test the backups again next quarter, and handle the next problem. That’s the decision the accidental setup skips. Most small businesses have three options: formally give IT to an employee with time set aside for it, hire an IT person, or bring in an outside provider. Before you pick one, it helps to spend a few minutes comparing an in-house hire against a managed IT partner. For many small businesses, a full-time hire is more cost than the amount of IT work justifies.

What Remote IT Covers

Remote IT is Micro Solutions’ IT support for businesses with no IT staff, and for businesses whose IT person needs backup. It covers help desk support for your staff, day-to-day management of your systems, a cybersecurity foundation, email security, Microsoft 365 administration, and backup management, for a recurring flat rate. It’s mostly remote, and onsite help depends on your location and the problem. Your accidental IT person gets their time back for the job you hired them for. For the full scope, see what a managed IT provider actually takes off your plate.