IT for your first 10 hires
Before headcount ten, it's worth deciding how new starters get set up — and how access gets switched off cleanly when someone leaves.
In the first few hires, IT tends to happen ad hoc: someone buys a laptop, sets up an email account, and shares a password over Slack. It works, right up until the fifth or sixth person joins and nobody quite remembers what everyone has access to.
The fix isn't complicated. Decide, once, how a new starter gets a device, a business email account, and access to the handful of tools your team actually uses — and write it down somewhere, even if it's a single page. That page becomes your onboarding checklist for hire eleven, twelve and fifty.
The other half of this is offboarding, and it matters more than it gets credit for. When someone leaves, their access to email, shared drives, customer systems and anything else should come off the same day — not "at some point". A departing employee with lingering access isn't usually malicious, but it's an unnecessary risk sitting there for no reason.
None of this needs an IT department. It needs one person to own it, a simple checklist, and the discipline to run through it every time — in both directions.