I have been working for a small business for about 4 years. They are effectively a staffing company that provides workers for Federal Contracts. I started as a 1099 contractor providing IT support. They had zero IT infrastructure and I networked everything, created backups with redundancies, encrypted their files, and designed and launched a new website. Their old website was really awful. It reminded me of GeoCities. The business is run by the 2 co-owners, the wife of one of the co-owners, a single recruiter, and myself. Let's call the co-owner without the wife Jeff, the co-owner with the wife Bill, and Bill's wife Julie. I work mostly with Jeff, because Bill is actually working on one of our client contracts at a Federal site.
After about a year, the Jeff and Bill reached out to me and asked if I would be interested in supporting the business with non-IT related tasks as a W-2 employee, while still handling all things IT. I agreed after negotiating a salary increase. However, they made it clear to me that I would be an hourly Exempt employee. To this day, my employment agreement with them is entirely verbal. Jeff said that any time I worked over 40 hours I could use as “flex time” to use as PTO for when work was slow. Work is rarely slow, and because I am usually swamped, I was working an average of 47 hours per week just to stay on top of things. I don't mean to sound arrogant, but I am an extremely efficient worker when I want to be. I could have easily stretched it to 60 hours per week, but screw that. I would rather have time for myself outside of work.
In addition to still doing all things IT related, I have had the following added to my plate by Jeff: hiring and onboarding new employees, terminating employees, conducting employee evaluations, proposal writing for RFPs, submitting proposals to clients, contracts management, handling all communications with clients and staff, data tracking and organization, and I created and maintain an Affirmative Action Program (AAP). Before this job, I had absolutely zero experience in doing that I would classify as HR duties. It made me incredibly uncomfortable to be responsible for developing an AAP, which I expressed to the owners. Jeff's response, “just do your best.”
Anyway, fast forward to about 3 months ago. Julie gave 2 week's notice and quit. She said that her reason for leaving was that it was just time for a change. Her responsibilities included accounts payable / receivable, payroll, and timekeeping. She was part-time. I asked the Jeff is he was going to hire someone to replace Julie. He said that he was confident that he and I could absorb her job duties and he was not going to hire anyone to replace her. I have expressed about 4 times that this is not going to be sustainable for me. Unfortunately, it is a case of Jeff is hearing me, but not understanding.
After Julie left, Jeff took over payroll and immediately started questioning why I was working over 40 hours consistently. I explained exactly why, and he said that I am no longer to work over 40 hours unless it is approved by him. I told him that I would actually prefer to not work over 40 hours in the first place, so great. Now work is not getting done at the end of the week and is consistently spilling over into the following weeks. I keep asking Jeff to hire someone, but he keeps saying he will not. Meanwhile, Jeff and Bill are going to play golf at least once a week and dumping the work they are ignoring on me every time they do it. I even went as far to explain to them that the business will only shrink from here and not grow, because we are drowning in day-to-day work, and cannot focus any time on business development. They said that was a good point, but they are still not going to hire a replacement for Julie. I cannot help but look at this as anything but them wanting to just pocket that extra money created by not having to pay Julie's wages.
I have started looking for employment elsewhere, because I do not know what else to do. My mental health has gotten really bad these past few months. I have my first appointment for therapy scheduled for tomorrow. I have 180 hours of PTO banked up that I feel like I can't ever use due to the fact that things would fall apart if I took more than an afternoon off. I keep fantasizing about quitting without notice and collecting that last fat paycheck which would include my PTO payout. I know for a fact that I am handling so many aspects of the business that Jeff and Bill have no idea how to handle. Also, because I set up their entire IT infrastructure, I hold the keys and passwords for everything. However, this is the best paying job I have ever had, so I feel like I am trapped here and I am just stuck eating turd burger after turd burger. I am thinking about writing an email to Jeff and Bill expressing how I feel (again) and essentially giving them an ultimatum. Either hire help, or I'm gone and you're screwed.
What do you think I should do? Is there some way of articulating to them the need of hiring someone that I am not thinking of?
Side note: This business also does a lot of sketchy rule-bending that I find extremely unethical. For example, they are an SBA-certified HUBZone small business. They pay family members residing in a HUBZone minimum wage for 40 hours to do nothing so that they can maintain their certification to get a leg up on the competition for these federal contracts.
TLDR: I am an over-worked IT professional that is having to do HR work because the owners refuse to hire and departmentalize.