Hiring an IT person or outsourcing: what each really costs a 15-person firm

Somewhere around fifteen people, the arrangement that got you this far stops working. The partner who "handles the IT" is losing evenings to it, or the nephew who set up the network has a real job now. You have two serious options: hire someone, or pay a provider.

Most comparisons of the two are written by someone selling one of them, and that includes this one. So here are the public numbers, the arithmetic, and the cases where hiring is the better answer.

What an in-house hire costs

Salary. The federal Bureau of Labor Statistics puts the median wage for a computer user support specialist at $60,340 a year (May 2024). Treat that as a floor. Someone who can also manage security will cost more.

Benefits and payroll costs. By the Bureau's employer cost figures, benefits make up about 30% of what a private employer pays for an employee. On that basis a $60,340 salary is about $86,000 a year in total.

Tools. Your new hire still needs security software for every computer, backup, monitoring and a way to track requests. None of that is in the $86,000.

Your time. You'll recruit them, manage them and review them, without being able to judge most of their work.

And then there's what a salary can't buy:

• Cover. One person works about 40 of the 168 hours in a week. Problems don't keep to those 40.
• Vacations and sick days. When they're away, nobody's there.
• Breadth. You're asking one person to be the help desk, the network engineer, the security analyst and the compliance officer. Those are four different jobs.
• Continuity. When they resign, what they know about your systems leaves with them, unless they wrote it down.

What a provider costs

Ours, because our prices are published and you can check them on the pricing page. For fifteen people:

Plan	Per month	Per year
Essentials	$1,125	$13,500
Business	$2,235	$26,820
Secure	$3,510	$42,120

Those figures include the security tools, backup, a help desk in business hours and a security team watching every computer around the clock.

What they leave out, so you can budget honestly:

• On-site visits and project work, at $150 an hour, quoted before the work starts. Allow for a few hours a month.
• Your Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace licenses, which you'd pay for either way.
• Hardware.

Other providers price differently. What managed IT costs explains how to compare quotes.

Side by side

	In-house hire	Provider (our Business plan, 15 people)
Yearly cost	About $86,000, before tools	$26,820, plus on-site visits
Security tools	Bought separately	Included
Hours covered	One person's working week	Help desk in business hours; security monitoring 24/7
When someone's on vacation	No cover	No change
Security expertise	Depends on the hire	A dedicated security team
In the office	Every day	By visit, in Miami-Dade and Broward
Knows your firm	Deeply, in one head	Documented, and reviewed with you each quarter
If it ends	The knowledge walks out	The documentation is yours

On cost alone the provider comes in well under half. But cost alone isn't the decision.

When hiring is the right call

We'd rather say this than win a client we shouldn't have.

• You're past fifty people, or have several offices. There's enough work for a full-time person, often with a provider behind them for security and out-of-hours cover.
• You run specialized systems that need hands on them daily: servers in the building, a plotter room, a studio full of equipment.
• You need someone physically present every day, and remote help with the occasional visit won't do.

In those cases, hire. Then ask the candidate who covers their vacation and who watches at night.

When outsourcing is the right call

• You have between five and fifty people.
• Most of what you use is in the cloud: Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace, your practice software, a document system.
• What you need is breadth, cover and security, more than someone down the hall.

That describes a typical professional firm of this size.

The third option: the partner keeps doing it

It feels free, and it's the most expensive of the three.

A partner who spends five hours a week on IT, at a billing rate of $350, is giving up $1,750 a week. Over fifty weeks that's $87,500 of time nobody billed. It's about what the hire would have cost, without the hire.

And that partner isn't watching the network at 2 AM, hasn't tested a restore lately, and didn't go to law school or sit the CPA exam to do this.

What you're really paying for

Either way, you're buying the same thing: a quiet year, and somebody capable on your side when it isn't quiet.

So test both options against the worst day, not the average one. It's a Saturday. Ransomware is moving through the shared drive. Your one IT person is on a flight to Denver.

With a hire, that's the day you discover what $86,000 didn't cover. With a provider whose security team works around the clock, it's the day the monthly fee was for. Run the lost work for a day like that: eight people billing six hours at $200 is $9,600, and a ransomware recovery is rarely over in a day.

Most owners would rather pay a known amount every month and have that Saturday be someone else's job.

How to decide in a week

1. Count the requests. For two weeks, note every IT problem and how long it took. You'll learn whether you have a full-time job's worth.
2. List what must be done on site. It's usually shorter than expected.
3. Price both properly with our IT cost comparison worksheet.
4. Put the hard questions to any provider you consider, using ten questions to ask or the IT provider scorecard.
5. Book a free review if you'd like a second opinion on your own numbers.