At some point between 25 and 250 employees, every company has this argument: do we hire an IT person, or engage a managed provider? Both sides usually argue with feelings. Here's the math — including the scenarios where hiring genuinely wins.
What the hire actually costs
A capable IT generalist — someone who can run your network, your Microsoft 365 tenant, your security tooling, and your help desk — commands a solid salary in 2026, and salary is the floor. Add benefits and payroll taxes (20–30%), the management and licensing stack one person needs, recruiting costs, and training time, and the fully loaded figure typically lands at 1.3–1.4× base. Then add what no budget line captures: one person works business hours, takes vacations, gets sick, and eventually leaves — taking the undocumented knowledge of your environment with them. At the mid-market's size, that's not an inconvenience; it's concentration risk in the function every other function depends on.
The coverage problem is worse than the cost problem
"IT" at a 100-person company is at least five jobs: help desk, infrastructure and cloud administration, security operations, vendor and license management, and planning. One excellent hire covers two of these well. The rest get done reactively or not at all — and the neglected ones are usually security and documentation, which are precisely the two your insurer, your customers' security questionnaires, and your future self care about most. A managed provider prices coverage across all five as a team sport: the person patching your servers isn't the same person answering the phone, and neither disappears in July.
What managed IT costs, honestly
Market rates for full-coverage managed IT run a wide per-user range, and the per-user number hides real differences in scope — we've broken that anatomy down separately. The comparison that matters: a managed agreement for a 50–100 person company typically costs in the neighborhood of one fully loaded hire — for 24/7-capable coverage, a security stack, documentation as a discipline, and no key-person risk. Our own scope and fees are published on the pricing page rather than saved for a sales call.
When hiring is genuinely right
Fairness requires this section. Hire when technology is the product — if you're building software, that expertise belongs in-house. Hire when you're past several hundred employees and IT justifies a team with a leader. And consider the hybrid that most growing companies actually land on: co-managed IT, where an internal person owns the business-facing side — priorities, projects, vendor politics — while a managed provider runs the operational layer underneath: monitoring, patching, security, help desk overflow. It's the arrangement that lets your one great IT hire do the valuable work instead of drowning in tickets.
The decision test
Ask one question: if our IT person quit on Friday, what would Monday look like? If the honest answer involves scrambling for passwords and praying nothing breaks, the risk is already priced into your business — you're just not paying it yet. The Managed IT Services page covers how full and co-managed coverage work, and a 30-minute conversation can pressure-test your specific situation — including whether hiring is your better path. We'll tell you if it is.