The Accidental IT Guy
Your most technical employee became your IT department by accident
What is actually going on
Nobody hired them to run IT. They were the one who could fix the printer, so they got the password, then the router, then the backups. It works, right up until it doesn't, and the business discovers how much was resting on one person's goodwill and spare time.
The job they weren't hired for
Every hour spent resetting accounts and chasing a vendor is an hour not spent on the role you actually pay for. The cost is invisible because it never appears on an invoice.
Knowledge with no copy
Passwords, license keys, how the VPN was configured and why the server was set up that way tend to live in one person's memory. None of it is written down until it is urgently needed.
Fixes made under pressure
Problems get solved fast because something is broken and people are waiting. Fast fixes accumulate, and the setup drifts further from anything anyone would have designed.
No cover
Holidays, illness and resignations stop being personnel matters and become operational risk. If one person is unreachable, nothing moves.
What it costs
The real cost is concentration. A capable employee is quietly doing two jobs badly instead of one job well, the business has no record of how its own systems work, and the day that person leaves, everything they knew leaves with them.
What we would do about it
What changes
Your most technical employee goes back to the job you hired them for. The systems they were quietly holding together are documented, monitored and supported, and a vacation or a resignation stops being an operational risk.
Whether it pays
The return shows up as recovered capacity in the role you were already paying for, and as risk removed from a business that had been depending on one person's spare time.