Managed IT vs. Hiring Your Own IT Person: The Real Math (2026)

The real question: hire or outsource?

Let’s talk about having in-house IT and the real costs, risks, and benefits associated with having one person or even a small team of people that you employ to provide IT services for your business. In the last video, I told you what a managed IT person can cost. And I’ve also told you what managed IT costs. And in the last video we discussed, It’s about $100 to $250 a user. Today, we’re going to talk about the other option, of course, which is hiring.

So a good technician or engineer, depending on the price varies between the two, is anywhere from $60,000 to $160,000 a year. And that’s your loaded cost. So you’re going to spend a substantial amount of money for one person who is only available you know eight hours a day and they have all the problems that come with having a single point of failure so let’s let’s go over that so true cost so you have your salary then that’s just the start of course you’ve got your benefits we’ve got all the tools and licensing and training and things that they need to to do to be on top of the career that that they have embarked upon.

The true loaded cost of one IT hire

You have turnover risk. Anybody who’s very good is going to get sniped. They’re going to be looking. And then when the turnover happens, we have all the risks that comes from the knowledge that they have that potentially they did not share with anybody or they did not write down. What happens when they leave? Hiring an IT person versus outsourcing. It has to be something that you consider these options or these issues when you do that.

The single point of failure (sick days, ransomware at midnight, the lottery)

So you have your single point of failure when they get sick, when you have the midnight ransomware that comes and shuts the business down, and then my favorite when they win the Lotto. What happens when this person no longer shows up anymore because they just don’t need the job or they get hit by the bus? So we’ve got to deal with this single point of failure.

The knowledge problem — why one person can’t keep up

We also have the knowledge problem. It is impossible for any one human being to stay on top of everything that needs to happen inside of an IT system today. It’s just too complicated. The other thing about it is it’s not just complicated, but the risks and the amount of damage that can happen has gone up exponentially over time. So the old model of having that one guy who knew everything just cannot scale. It doesn’t scale on a business size perspective and it doesn’t scale on a knowledge perspective.

As I said in the previous video, my lead engineer knows a lot, I know a lot, my technicians know a lot, and every day the amount of knowledge in our company grows multiplied by the number of people in it. Your guys and gals are going to have to know things like networking, they have to know security, They have to know Microsoft’s products, which are vast and take a tremendous amount of time and energy. Do they know strategy? Do they know how to help you make business decisions with your IT? Well, as a business owner who happens to know a lot about IT, I can do that. So you do get a lot more when you work with an managed IT provider versus having one person in-house.

When in-house IT actually makes sense (honest answer)

Now let’s be honest, there are some situations and then there’s also a point where having in-house team does make sense. If you’re willing to take all the risk, you can get somebody who has very deep knowledge of your business. They have institutional knowledge of the environment. They can be dedicated to solving very deep problems and be less generalists. Those are things that can be very helpful for you.

Once your business grows to 7,500, 200, 300 employees, it starts to make real sense to hire a small team and have them work for you. Now, again, you start running into issues where if you do hire a team, you got to hire someone who can manage a team and most IT people are not typically great managers, either a great manager or your great technician. That’s kind of how it goes.

Co-managed IT — the third option

Let’s talk about co-manage. This is the third option that many business users own, many business users use, and this does business owners use? Boy, this one does make some sense often. This is where you have an in-house person who can really be there with you 24-7, who could be there for the long term, who’s in your business, knows your employees intimately, but they can’t keep up with everything. So they outsource pieces and parts of the IT system to companies like Advanced Computer Solutions. So you might, they might go and say, well, I’m not going to stay on top of security.

That’s too deep, too much. I’m going to outsource that. And so we could take over that. Or they might say, you know what, I really don’t like supporting the users. I’m much more of a programmer. Well, we can take over supporting the users, closing tickets, making sure they’re productive.

I would not say that you actually save money with that system. It actually is a premium system, But it can be highly effective for businesses that have that deep knowledge need So at what size does hiring an in-house actually make sense?

At what size should you hire in-house?

Well, like I said, you need to have that 150 200 maybe 300 depending on the kind of business you have number of employees then it starts to make sense Can we so then a question we get a lot is can we hire an IT person and have managed IT?

Can you keep your IT person AND add managed IT?

Yes, and if you have somebody already and you really like them, but you just know that they’re not going to be capable of doing everything That’s where co-managed comes in and we have very successfully been able to help Companies that have knowledgeable IT people close mini gaps So that’s how it works when you have managed IT when you have in-house how you can look at the numbers Start to do some math on what is the risk and make some decisions on where you want to go with your business and And hopefully, you’ll see that Managed IT does have a good fit for your business, especially if you’re in the smaller range, 10 to 200, we’ll say, up to 300 employees, we can really start to really make things run better, enhance your capabilities,

get your people better handled for the issues that come up, and protect your business. I’m Albert Steed with Advanced Computer Solutions. I really appreciate you listening, and I hope you have a great day.