What "we have a guy" costs when the guy is on vacation

Ask a small business who takes care of their IT and the most common answer isn't a company or a contract. It's a person. "We have a guy." A cousin who works in software, a friend who built the website years ago, the one employee who's good with computers and somehow became responsible for all of them.

To be clear: this post is not against the guy. He's usually doing solid work, often outside his actual job, often for free or nearly free. The problem isn't his competence. The problem is the arrangement — and the arrangement shows its true cost at exactly one time of year: when he's on a beach with his phone on silent.

The August test

Summer is when the "we have a guy" model gets audited, whether anyone planned it or not. The email stops syncing, the invoicing program refuses to open, the router dies after a storm — and the person who knows how everything is wired together is unreachable for two weeks. What follows is a small ritual: someone tries to remember a password, someone calls a brother-in-law, someone drives to a shop with the computer on the back seat. Work stands still, and nobody in the building can say how long that will last.

If some version of this happened to you this summer, you already know the real price of the arrangement. It isn't what you pay the guy. It's what you pay when he isn't there.

The knowledge lives in one head

The deeper issue isn't availability — it's documentation. In the typical "guy" setup, nothing is written down. Which passwords exist and where, how the backup is supposed to work, why the printer is configured the way it is, which licence renews in October: all of it lives in one person's memory. That's not because he's secretive. Nobody ever asked him to write it down, and nobody pays him for the hours that would take.

A business in that position doesn't just depend on a person. It depends on a person's memory, health, goodwill and holiday schedule — four things no company can plan around. And if the relationship ever ends, badly or amicably, the knowledge leaves with it.

What the grown-up version looks like

Moving past "we have a guy" doesn't have to mean firing anyone or hiring an IT department. It means three things, whoever provides them.

Everything documented: accounts, passwords in a proper password manager, network layout, what runs where, what renews when — written down and owned by the business, not by a helper. A second pair of eyes: at least one other person or partner who can step in and find their way without an archaeology project. And an actual response commitment: when something breaks, you know who answers, in what time, also in August.

Sometimes the right move is simply to formalise the guy — pay him properly, give him time to document, agree what happens when he's away. Sometimes it's to bring in a partner alongside him. What doesn't work is the silent assumption that he'll always pick up.

This is the everyday shape of something we've written about before: technology nobody officially owns. Our IT support work usually begins with exactly the list above — writing down what exists, so your business stops depending on any single memory, ours included.

If your only IT documentation is one person's phone number, get in touch — the first review is free, and it stays useful even if you never work with us again.