At some point every growing business asks the same question: do we hire an IT person, or outsource it? The honest answer is that it’s math, not ideology — and the math has more terms in it than most comparisons admit.
The real cost of one IT hire
A capable IT generalist in the Triangle market runs $65,000–$95,000 in salary, and that’s the visible part. Add benefits and employer taxes (typically 25–30% on top), tools and software licenses they’ll need, training to keep their skills current, and recruiting costs when they leave — and one hire lands at $90,000–$130,000 per year, all-in.
Now the terms nobody puts in the spreadsheet:
Coverage. One person works about 2,000 hours a year. Your business’s IT exists for all 8,760. Your IT employee sleeps, takes PTO, gets sick, and eventually resigns — usually with most of your infrastructure knowledge undocumented in their head. Every solo-IT business we meet has some version of the “when Dave left, we couldn’t find the server passwords” story.
Breadth. A modern SMB needs helpdesk skills, network engineering, cloud administration, security operations, and strategic planning. Those are five different specialties. One generalist is, by definition, mediocre at most of them — not because they’re bad, but because nobody is expert in all five.
Security specifically. Around-the-clock threat detection and response can’t be done by one person even in theory. It requires a staffed (or AI-augmented) security operations center. Solo IT means security is best-effort during business hours, which is exactly when attackers don’t strike.
What the MSP model actually buys
A managed service provider spreads a full team — helpdesk techs, network engineers, security analysts, strategists — across many clients. For a per-user monthly fee, a 20-person business gets access to the whole bench: the 24/7 monitoring, the SOC, the person who’s configured this exact firewall a hundred times.
For that same 20-person business, full MSP coverage typically costs $24,000–$60,000 per year — a third to half of one all-in IT hire, with no single point of failure and no knowledge that walks out the door.
The trade-offs are real too, and worth saying plainly: an MSP isn’t sitting in your office absorbing hallway context. Response is fast but not instantaneous for low-priority items. And a bad MSP (they exist) can be worse than a good employee. Reference-check accordingly.
When in-house wins — and when hybrid does
In-house starts making sense around 75–150 employees, when there’s enough daily hands-on work — hardware, onboarding, walk-up questions — to fill a full workweek. Even then, the smart play is usually co-managed IT: your internal person handles the hands-on and the hallway, while an MSP provides the 24/7 monitoring, security operations, escalation depth, and vacation coverage no individual can. Your employee gets a bench; you stop being one resignation away from chaos.
The decision in one paragraph
Under ~50 employees, an MSP is almost always the better math: more expertise, more coverage, less money, no key-person risk. From 75 up, run the numbers on a hybrid. And regardless of which way you go, insist on documented systems and exportable knowledge — the goal is that no single departure, employee or vendor, can hurt you.
Want the numbers run for your specific business? Book a free 30-minute consult — we’ll do the comparison honestly, including the scenarios where you shouldn’t hire us.
SMB IT Support provides managed and co-managed IT to small and mid-sized businesses across the Triangle, the Carolina Core, and greater North Carolina.