IT Administrators wear many hats. They provide helpdesk support, maintain IT infrastructure, manage cybersecurity, handle hardware and software assets, and more. Most organizations would struggle without them. Yet, many startups wait too long to hire an IT Admin, creating a massive backlog of issues for the new hire to tackle. Overwhelmed and overburdened, some don’t last long.

It’s crucial to recognize the warning signs that your company may need an IT Administrator. AccessOwl interviewed several IT experts about their current and previous roles to uncover why they were hired. Here are the key reasons:

Following a cybersecurity audit

Security gaps can lead to financially and reputationally damaging breaches. Airtower Networks IT Manager Derek McGee was hired after a cyber-insurance company required the organization to implement several steps as a prerequisite for coverage.

“What came out of that was there was a lot of stuff they needed but nobody knew how to do,” he says. “There was no MDM in place, no enterprise anti-malware, policies, procedures, or proper structures. I had to build everything from scratch and we’re still building.”

Certification with best practice standards/frameworks

Whether due to regulatory requirements or pressure from customers and partners, startups often reach a point where they must demonstrate adherence to industry best practices. That’s when an IT Administrator becomes essential. This was the case for Akash Gopani, IT Operations Lead at Reveal.

“The company had a goal to get ISO certified, but IT operations were not really organized,” he says. “So my first goal when joining was to map out how we improve the way information was structured and then policies, workflows and auditing.”

Onboarding at scale

Managing security risks during onboarding is critical—ensuring new employees have secure and managed access to the tools they need. Liam Williamson, IT Manager at TrueLayer, was hired because the company’s rapid growth outpaced its ability to manage onboarding efficiently.

“When I was interviewed, they said, ‘what's your experience of onboarding a scale?’ because they were most concerned about getting people the equipment and system access they need as quickly as possible,” he says. “What I wasn't quite prepared for was the lack of automation around the whole process. It was all very manual.”

No dedicated IT person or department

A clear sign that a startup needs an IT Administrator is the absence of a formal IT function, even as the company scales to 100 employees or more. Often, IT tasks are managed by C-suite executives or other staff until a dedicated hire is made. This was the case for Connexin when they hired IT Infrastructure and Security Manager Patryk Przepiórkowski.

“There was a relatively high IT competence throughout the business, but no function as such. It was more of a hodgepodge of platforms,” he says. “We were lucky to have a very talented CTO who was kind of the ‘tech stack’ for the majority of the company's existence.”

Maxio IT Senior Manager, Shane Fritts, says that in a former company it was the CSO, COO, head of engineering and even HR lead that were owning “individual little pieces” of IT.

“There was no tracking of anything and it was a nightmare,” he adds. “But I built the help desk, I built a ticketing system, I built the MDM, I implemented all these tools and processes and got it to where we had zero-touch deployment.”

Similarly, Jakub Łączak-Król, IT Asset Manager at XTB, was the first IT hire in a company of 150 employees. Before his arrival, IT responsibilities were split among various departments, including the DevOps team and the Office Manager.

“The responsibilities of the IT department had been split between a few people around the company, including the DevOps team and even the Office Manager,” he says. “The people who had been taking care of it did quite a good job considering that they needed to do it on top of their normal responsibilities, but obviously it was quite a mess.”

Picus Security IT Engineer Emre Kurt was in a similar position—joining a company of 150 people with IT in his case managed by the Information Security Director.

“Almost everyone at the company is tech-savvy, but there’s still a problem if there’s no IT team,” he says. “There’s no specific way things are handled or problems are solved. So when I joined I created rights, policies and processes such as for onboarding.”

Gearset IT Manager, Nathan Goodfellow, was also surrounded by smart, tech-savvy people when he arrived at the firm, but there was no formal IT infrastructure.

“They wanted someone with technical aptitude, but who also had the kind of managerial skills and ability to build a team and to bring a level of expertise to advise them in that area as well,” he says. “It kind of fell into the place as kind of a perfect opportunity.”

A need for hardware asset management

Felix Naepels, Head of Internal IT at Pigment, says that hardware is usually “a real mess” when joining a new company—hinting that a need to formalize hardware asset management (HAM) is a big driver for hiring IT talent.

“They purchase things here and there, order off Amazon and refurbished websites, and then send laptops to people in the US because they have no idea how to do it,” he says. “Usually, the more this has happened before they finally get an IT guy in, the harder it is to actually get things going when you get there.”

It’s a sentiment that Solidatus IT Support Manager Peter Fallowfield agrees with.

“I get the impression that companies bring in IT a lot later than they should. I always think if they had someone in IT earlier in the startup journey, it'd be so much easier to get them into a good place” he says. “When that doesn’t happen, you basically have someone doing damage control and trying to sort everything out, when it can be quite a complex state.”

A need to rein in spending

The cyclical nature of startup funding often pushes companies to monitor their expenses more closely. This can signal the need for an IT Administrator. In Fallowfield’s case, his reporting line switched from CTO to CFO soon after joining Solidatus to focus on cost control.

“The trigger for us to use [subscription management tool] Cledara was to consolidate and track spending, reducing licenses where possible, and let me and the CFO have that view of our software spend,” he says. “Before I joined, they had their first round of funding six months before so were feeling pretty flush. But after a while I guess you start watching that money more carefully.”

Maxio’s Fritts is also quick to acknowledge the role IT can have in keeping costs under control.

“At a previous employer, the CEO did not see the value in having an IT person. But then I came in all guns blazing and shaved off $80,000 in annual spend in my first three months by eliminating licenses that weren’t being used,” he explains. “My motto is, ‘my job is to make sure you guys can go out and do your job to make us money’.”

Don’t leave it too late

Startups are often filled with clever, tech-savvy employees. But even they need processes, policies, and structures to keep operations running smoothly and securely. IT Administrators play a vital role in fast-growing businesses. The key is not to leave that hire too late.