Should you hire someone for IT, or bring in a company?

What you're actually choosing between

The real choice is between depth in one head and breadth across several, and between one schedule and a rota. Most of the differences come back to those two things.

What one person can be, and what they can't

No individual is a network engineer, a security analyst, a backup administrator and a Microsoft 365 administrator at the same time. In a small business those four jobs share one job title, but they're still four jobs. A good generalist will cover most of your day to day and be worth having. They won't also be the person who notices that backup verification has been quietly failing since a firmware update in March.

Nobody is awake at two in the morning, either. One hire is one schedule, with holidays in it, sick days in it, and Tuesdays when they're already elbow-deep in something else. How good they are doesn't change any of that.

What a hire arrives without

An internal hire doesn't come with monitoring, centrally managed security software, off-site backup, filtering, or a staffed service investigating security alerts around the clock. Every one of those is a separate purchase that sits on top of the salary, and most are priced for businesses rather than for one person.

An IT company already carries that stack, because its cost is spread across everyone it looks after. Ours is listed by name on the managed IT page, so you can check it item by item against what a hire would have to go out and buy. Hiring a better person doesn't change that part.

What a hire really costs

The salary is the visible part. The parts that aren't visible are employer costs and benefits, the tooling above, cover for the times that person isn't available, recruiting a replacement when they leave, and the gap while you find one.

We're not going to print a salary range for your market, since you can price that better than a page can. Price both properly, with everything in, and then compare.

When hiring is genuinely the right answer

There are two situations where it wins. The first is simply having enough IT to keep someone busy full time. If it's a full day's work every day, a hire is the efficient answer and an outside company will feel like an expensive middleman.

The second is systems specific enough that dedicated knowledge beats breadth. A manufacturer with a machine control system, or a practice with a clinical application nobody outside the building understands. Someone who works with it every day will know it better than anyone who visits it a few times a year.

Even then, most businesses that size still buy the tooling and the overnight cover from outside, because one employee can't be awake all night either.

The middle answer

Co-managed means your person keeps what belongs inside the building, and we carry the parts that are hard for one person to hold — the stack above included, so hiring someone doesn't mean buying it twice. In practice it takes two shapes, and some businesses want both.

The first is a security layer. We bring the products an internal hire usually can't get to on their own: a staffed service investigating security alerts around the clock, centrally managed security software, and backup with a tested disaster recovery process behind it. These are priced for companies running them across many clients, and they're most of what a new internal hire would otherwise have to go out and buy one at a time.

The second is help desk. Internal teams are often perfectly capable and simply buried. Password resets, new-starter setups and printer problems eat the day that was supposed to go to the work they were actually hired for, and they rarely have the tooling that makes that queue quick. We take the day-to-day, they keep the projects.

Some businesses want one of those and not the other. If that's the shape you need, it's worth a conversation about which parts make sense for you.

If a company is the answer

What we cover and how it works is on the managed IT page. If you're weighing that against calling someone only when things break, read managed IT or break/fix first. If you're comparing quotes, read per user or per device, because the basis moves the bill more than the headline does.