Alright, so you're looking at a quote, and maybe somewhere in the back of your head there's a number that you're kicking around associated with a question like: "Could I just hire somebody instead?"
So should you?
It's a fair question and it's worth asking out loud, so here's the honest answer, including the part where hiring turns out to be the right call.
The team grew, the person who was good with computers got buried, and tickets (if they've even graduated above an email or Teams message in their inbox) started landing on someone you hired to do something else entirely. Now they're behind on the job you actually pay them for, and you're wondering whether that work belongs to somebody whose name is on it.
That's the normal way a business arrives at this question, and it's a reasonable place to end up.
Whatever base figure you've got in mind, the real cost is that plus payroll taxes, health coverage, a retirement match, a workstation and the refresh cycle behind it, and enough training that the person you hire this year is still current three years from now.
More often than not, that lands about a third above base. And this person hasn't even touched a company-owned keyboard yet.
An IT person is only as good as what they've got to work with, so to do the job properly they'll need monitoring on every machine, endpoint security with someone actually watching the alerts, web filtering, backup that stays out of ransomware's reach, a ticketing system, and somewhere to write things down so the knowledge lives outside one person's head.
All of those tools get bought one seat at a time, at whatever the published price happens to be that year.
This is the part that matters more than the money.
IT stopped being one job a while ago. Networking is its own career, cloud identity is another, and security is a third, each with specialists who spend every day in it. So which one do you hire? Whichever you pick becomes your strongest area, and the other two get whatever attention is left over. That choice tends to surface later, usually on the day something comes up in the area that got the least of it.
Then there's the calendar. You'll get a solid forty hours a week and technology keeps its own hours, and maybe you'll squeeze some more out of them. They'll take vacation, and state law gives them paid sick leave and protected family leave on top of that, which are good protections your people should have. They also mean a department of one has stretches on the calendar where the work waits for them to come back.
And eventually they'll move on, since median private-sector tenure runs under four years and IT roles take six weeks or more to fill, so plan on a gap every few years followed by a ramp year while somebody new learns your systems.
Every bit of that is structural. It's what comes with a headcount of one, and the right hire will still be the right hire.
Hiring is an evaluation challenge before it's a salary decision, and your process will only ever be as sharp as the most technical person in the building. Can that person reliably separate a strong candidate from a confident one?
We've sat across from people holding computer science degrees who couldn't say what DNS does, and we've watched people with no degree at all talk a client through a failed migration without raising anyone's blood pressure. On paper those two resumes look about the same.
And the question comes back once they've started. Six months in, how's the work? Somebody staying ahead of things and somebody letting things drift will hand you the same status update, which is that everything's running fine. Telling those apart takes somebody who can read the work.
When the work happens in-house, the outcome of that work lands on your side of the table, so a mistaken firewall rule that opened wider than intended, or a backup that reported success every night and restored nothing during a crisis, becomes your cost and your Monday morning.
Contracted work carries a defined scope and an agreement that says who owns the outcome. The work has to be right either way, and what changes is where the exposure sits.
There are businesses where it is, and you should hear that from us first.
If you run software specific enough that the people who understand it best all work in your building, someone in-house living in it daily is worth real money. If you have compliance obligations that call for a named internal owner, well, then maybe you need one. Past a couple hundred employees, ticket volume alone justifies a full-time person. And some operators just want somebody down the hall, which is a fair preference and one we'd help you act on.
What we'd suggest is that the hire tends to work better as an addition than a replacement, and the strongest setups we see pair somebody internal who knows the business with an outside team covering the platform, the monitoring, and the specialties that take a bench to cover.
A group of people rather than a person, so network, security, cloud, and endpoint work each go to somebody who does that work every day.
The platform, the monitoring, the backup, and the security stack are ours, already bought, already running, and already staffed, which means coverage holds through vacations, leaves of absence, and the week somebody's kid gets sick. Growing from fifteen people to fifty is something we absorb on our side.
One monthly line item in place of a salary, a benefits package, a software renewal calendar, and a recruiting cycle.
So when should you hire? You'll be the one who decides, and you shouldn't have to work it out alone. You'll own every account from day one, and we'll build your environment so an internal team can pick it up cleanly whenever that day arrives. When hiring starts to make sense for you, we'll be the ones to agree with you and we'll help you do it. That's been the plan since the beginning.
So, should you hire somebody?
Maybe one day, and we'll be the ones to tell you when. Until then, the quote you're looking at already has a team behind it.
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