IT From Zero to Decent

This post is about how to go from zero intentional IT to something decent.

We’ve worked with dozens of businesses, all between 10 and 200 employees, during the last couple years, and two actions in particular provided the best quality-of-life improvements to a team’s tech usage.

Both can be done inside of a week; here they are:

1. Build a Software Tracker

A typical small business has a dozen or more tools, and the sprawl is causing pain. Some are billed monthly, and some are annual. Some are on a company card and others are on the owner’s personal card. When a new hire starts, somebody tries to remember which accounts they need, and when somebody leaves, those accounts usually stay active for months.

You can’t manage what you can’t see, so start by making a list.

The easiest first step is a simple, shared spreadsheet with four columns:

NAME: the name of the software
PURPOSE: what it’s used for (e.g., “Productivity Suite,” “Accounting,” “Email Marketing”)
OWNER: the person at the business who owns it
DOCS: a link to a folder with basic documentation about the tool

That’s it. The first goal is visibility; the docs folders will start sparse or empty, and that’s fine.

What are these four columns?

NAME is required and self-explanatory, just put the name of the tool.

PURPOSE is required and should have a few words on what the software does.

OWNER is the person at the company who is responsible for the tool or is the resident expert. This is optional.

DOCS is where this work compounds. Add a link pointing to some container, whether that’s a Google Drive folder, a Notion page, a Confluence space, or whatever. Inside that folder is the basic documentation for the given tool.

Build the docs over time

Once the tracker is populated, write very basic docs for each tool. Timebox yourself and get something down, starting with:

How to log in
How the tool is used at the business
Who has access and at what permission level
The most common two or three tasks people do in this tool
Who to ask when something breaks

This is usually enough, and the intention is to build them slowly. Every time someone has a non-trivial question, add it here. In our experience, 1 hour every Friday keeps the info clean and evolving appropriately.

(Side note, as we’re building more AI workflows for clients, these docs become the foundation for skills and agents.)

2. Get a Password Manager

A password manager solves these problems:

The shared spreadsheet of passwords that half the team can see
Logins stored in a browser on one person’s personal laptop
The “reset password” dance every time somebody needs access to something
The moment an employee leaves and nobody knows everything they had access to
Passwords that are just some variation of the business name and the current year

Our usual recommendations are 1Password or Bitwarden. Both are excellent; the important thing is that you pick one and actually roll it out.

Why these two steps

It is really hard to do IT without these two things in place. Onboarding, offboarding, vendor consolidation, security improvements, and disaster planning all depend on having a clear picture of what you have and who has access to it.

If you’re running a small business and your IT has never been formalized, start here. You don’t need to hire anyone or buy anything expensive. Just make the tracker and pick a password manager.