Around 30–50 employees, most growing businesses hit the same question: do we hire our first IT person, or partner with a managed IT provider? Here’s our honest take — including when the answer is “both”.
The true cost of in-house IT
A capable IT generalist in the UK costs £35,000–£50,000 plus employer costs — and that buys you one person, with one set of skills, who takes holidays, has sick days, and eventually leaves. You’ll also need to fund training, tools and vendor relationships on top.
A managed IT service typically costs a fraction of that and brings an entire team: helpdesk engineers, security specialists, cloud architects and a strategist who reviews your roadmap quarterly.
Where outsourcing wins
- Coverage: a team covers 8am–6pm every day, plus monitoring overnight. One hire can’t.
- Breadth: nobody is genuinely expert in email, networking, security and cloud at once. A team can be.
- Continuity: no single point of failure, no knowledge walking out of the door.
- Tools: monitoring, backup, security and management platforms come included, already paid for.
Where in-house wins
- Physical presence: if you run warehouses, labs or sites full of hands-on hardware, someone on-site daily makes sense.
- Deep business systems: heavily customised internal applications may need a dedicated owner.
- Scale: past roughly 150–200 users, a hybrid model (in-house person + outsourced support) usually works best.
The hybrid sweet spot
Many of our larger clients employ one IT coordinator and put us behind them: they handle the day-to-day and projects, we provide monitoring, security, out-of-hours cover and specialist firepower. It’s often the best of both worlds.
Whichever route you choose, get a proper picture of your environment first. Our free consultation includes an honest recommendation — even if that recommendation is “hire, don’t outsource.”
Need help putting this into practice?
Our engineers are happy to talk through your setup — no obligation, no jargon.
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