Laptops everywhere
Bought ad hoc, set up differently, and no list of what exists or who has what.
Growing businesses
An IT department, without having to build one.
IT that worked perfectly well at twelve people rarely survives to forty. We bring the structure a growing company needs — devices, identity, licensing, onboarding, security — without you having to hire for it.
- Built to scale with you
- Onboarding in minutes, not afternoons
- You can see what you own
- Every device knownand who has it
- Access that matches rolesnot who asked first
- Licences under controland reviewed
- A plan for next yearnot just this week
Technologies we work with
- Microsoft
- SOPHOS
- Acronis
- HPE
- 3CX
- UBIQUITI
- veeam
Sound familiar?
The mess that growth quietly creates
None of this is anyone's fault. Each individual shortcut made sense at the time. The problem is that thirty sensible shortcuts add up to an environment nobody fully understands.
Onboarding by memory
Every new starter is set up slightly differently, depending on who did it and how busy they were.
Shared passwords
A spreadsheet or a group chat holding logins that several people use and nobody owns.
Unmanaged licences
Subscriptions on personal cards, seats still assigned to leavers, and no single view of the cost.
No asset register
Nobody can answer how old the hardware is, what is under warranty or what needs replacing.
Inconsistent access
Permissions granted by request rather than by role, and never reviewed afterwards.
Weak backups
Some things are backed up, some are not, and nobody has tested a restore.
Unmanaged SaaS
Teams sign up for tools independently, each holding company data outside anyone's view.
Recurring problems
The same faults return because there is no time to fix causes, only symptoms.
Leavers left behind
Accounts and access that outlive the employment, sometimes by years.
No IT roadmap
Spending happens when something breaks, which makes it unpredictable and usually more expensive.
Nothing written down
The knowledge lives with one or two people, and leaves when they do.
Growth stages
The problems change as you get bigger.
IT problems at twenty-five people are different from IT problems at eighty, and solving tomorrow's problem today is as wasteful as ignoring it. What matters is putting the structure in slightly before you need it, so it never becomes urgent.
- A standard build, so every device starts the same way
- Access granted by role, so a new starter is set up in minutes
- One place that lists every device, licence and account
- A leaver process that removes everything, the same day, every time
- Security controls that scale rather than being redone at every size
- A budgeted roadmap, so replacement is planned and not a surprise
As the team grows
What tends to break next
Stage 3 of 4
Around 50 people
3 of 3 in place
Access has drifted: people keep permissions from old roles, and leavers are removed from some systems but not all of them.
Nothing has broken yet
Give it a few more hires.
What tends to break
What we put in place
Illustration. These are patterns, not rules: plenty of businesses hit the 50-person problems at 20.
How we work
Tidy it up, then keep it tidy.
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Find out what exists
Devices, accounts, licences, systems and suppliers — written down, usually for the first time.
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Standardise
One device build, one way to onboard, one place to request things, one set of security controls.
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Automate the routine
Joining, moving and leaving become a form rather than a favour, and nothing gets forgotten.
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Plan ahead
A rolling plan for hardware, licences and projects, reviewed with you so budgets hold.
Joiners, movers and leavers
The process that saves the most time, and the most risk.
Onboarding and offboarding is where growing companies lose hours and accumulate security debt simultaneously. Turning it into a defined request — rather than a message to whoever is around — fixes both at once.
What a defined process gives you
- A starter ready on day oneDevice, accounts and access prepared before they arrive.
- ConsistencySame role, same access, every time.
- Clean leaversEverything removed, licence reclaimed, device recovered.
- An audit trailA record of who was granted what, and when.
Why CaminhoIT
The bit between "too small to hire" and "big enough for an IT team".
Most growing companies cannot justify a full-time IT manager, but have long outgrown asking a friend. We sit in that gap: the day-to-day support, the systems behind it, and someone who will tell you what needs doing next year.
- Support for everyonenot just the founder
- Structure that scalesbuilt once, grown into
- Predictable costper user, agreed upfront
- Full visibilitythrough your client portal
- Proper adviceahead of the problem
- Portugal and the UKuseful if you operate in both
Questions
Questions from businesses in the middle of growing
At what size should we stop doing IT ourselves?
There is no fixed number, but the useful signal is not headcount — it is whether the person doing IT is being pulled away from the job you actually hired them for. That often happens somewhere between fifteen and thirty people. The second signal is when you cannot answer a straightforward question, such as how many laptops the company owns or who still has access to the finance system.
Do we need an internal IT person as well?
Usually not until well past a hundred people, and even then the role tends to change rather than replace what we do. Some clients keep an internal person for their own systems and business applications while we handle infrastructure, security, devices and the helpdesk. Both arrangements work, provided the split is written down.
How is it priced as we grow?
Managed IT is normally priced per user or per device, so the cost moves with headcount in a way you can forecast. Project work — a migration, an office move, a hardware refresh — is quoted separately and agreed before it starts. We will set the specific numbers out in a proposal; we do not publish rates that would not survive contact with your actual environment.
We are a startup and move fast. Will this slow us down?
The aim is the opposite. Nearly all the friction in a fast-growing company is the absence of a process, not the presence of one: waiting for a laptop, chasing access, discovering a tool nobody knew was in use. A standard build and a defined onboarding request remove decisions rather than adding them.
We have staff in more than one country. Does that complicate things?
It is normal for our clients. We support people across Portugal and the UK in English and Portuguese, and cloud-first management means a laptop can be shipped to someone and enrolled wherever they are. What needs local thought is procurement, warranty cover and on-site attendance, which we plan per location.
Our IT is genuinely messy. Is that embarrassing?
No, and it is close to universal. Every company that grew quickly has an environment that reflects the decisions of whoever was free at the time. We are not there to judge the history, just to write down what exists and work through it in a sensible order.
Want to see where the gaps are first? Run the IT Health Check →
Related
What growing companies usually put in first.
Ready to get started?
Put the structure in before you need it.
Tell us where you are and where you expect to be in a year. We will tell you what needs to change, and in what order.