Under about 20 people, most businesses don't have IT support — they have whoever's least intimidated by settings menus fixing things between their actual job. That works until it doesn't. Here's the baseline that keeps a small team out of trouble without needing a dedicated hire.
01Access and password hygiene
A password manager for the whole team, unique passwords per service, and two-factor authentication on anything that touches money or customer data — email, banking, your payment processor. This is the single highest-leverage IT habit a small team can adopt, and it costs almost nothing to start.
02Know what happens when someone leaves
A simple offboarding checklist — revoke access to every shared account, not just the obvious ones — matters more than most small teams realise until the day it doesn't happen fast enough. Write it once, before you need it.
03Back up the things you can't recreate
Customer records, financial data, anything you couldn't rebuild from memory. Automatic, not "someone remembers to do it monthly" — and actually test a restore occasionally, since an untested backup is a guess, not a safety net.
04Triage tickets before they pile up
Sort issues into three buckets: someone's blocked right now (fix immediately), an annoyance that can wait a day, and a "nice to have" that can wait a week. Without this, small teams default to fixing whatever's loudest, which usually isn't the same as whatever's most urgent.
05Know when to call a specialist
Day-to-day resets, access issues, and routine software troubleshooting can stay in-house. Anything touching network security, compliance, or a genuine data incident is worth a specialist from the start — the cost of getting that wrong is much higher than the cost of asking early.