Most small businesses ask this question right after IT becomes painful enough to think about. The honest answer depends on your size, your IT load, and what you actually want covered. Here's the math.
"Hire an IT person" sounds like a $70k decision. The all-in cost is meaningfully higher:
All-in: $85k–125k+ per year. Plus vacation/sick coverage gaps, plus turnover risk (IT roles flip every 2–3 years industry-wide).
Quick sanity check: divide your all-in IT hire cost by 12. If you're paying $7,500/month for IT support that's mostly resetting passwords and fixing the printer, the math doesn't work.
We say this against our own interest, but it's true: at some point, in-house wins. The trigger is usually:
If that's you, hire. If it's not, outsourcing is just better economics. And if you're somewhere in between — say a 30-person business with one tech-savvy operations manager who keeps getting pulled into IT — the right answer is often outsource the IT and let your ops manager go back to their actual job.
Some of our best client relationships are with companies that have one in-house IT person and use us for backup, off-hours, vacation coverage, and specialty work. We don't compete with their internal IT — we cover the gaps.
Roughly 50+ employees, or any business where IT issues are happening daily and outsourced response time is becoming a real bottleneck. Below that, the math almost always favors outsourcing.
In DFW, $65k–95k base salary for a generalist IT/sysadmin. Plus 25–30% for benefits, taxes, equipment, training, software licenses. Total $85k–125k+ per year, before vacation coverage.
Daily on-site presence, deep institutional knowledge, dedicated time for projects you choose. For a 50+ person company with ongoing IT projects, that's real value. For a 15-person business it's a lot of payroll for someone fixing the printer twice a week.
Yes, and we work with several clients in this model. Internal IT handles day-to-day, we handle backup, security, off-hours, vacation coverage, and specialty work like compliance audits or M365 migrations.