When to hire an IT person versus when to call an MSP
The right answer isn't always one or the other. Some businesses need a full-time IT person. Some need an MSP. Many need both. The choice comes down to your size, your growth trajectory, and how much specialized work your systems actually require.
When you should hire an in-house IT person
Hire someone when you have enough ongoing, day-to-day work to keep one person busy most of the time, and when you need someone who knows your business deeply and is always available.
That typically happens around 30 to 50 employees, though it depends on your industry. A manufacturing floor with complex production systems might need someone at 20 people. A professional services firm with mostly laptops and cloud apps might not need one until 60.
A full-time hire makes sense when your needs are predictable and your IT environment is stable. They'll learn your systems intimately, know your team, handle the day-to-day tickets, and be there when something breaks at 4 p.m. on a Thursday. They're also your single point of knowledge, which is both a strength and a serious risk. If they leave or get sick, everything they know walks out with them.
When to call an MSP instead
An MSP works better when you want predictability, you need expertise you can't hire locally, or you don't have enough IT work to keep someone busy full-time.
If you're under 30 people, a dedicated hire rarely makes financial sense. You'd pay $50,000 to $80,000 a year in salary and benefits for someone who won't have eight hours of work every day. Managed IT pricing typically costs less and includes security, backups, and monitoring that a single hire would struggle to deliver alone.
MSPs also shine when you need specialized skills: cybersecurity, compliance, cloud architecture, disaster recovery. Hiring someone with all those skills is expensive and hard. An MSP gives you a whole team.
The tradeoff is that an MSP doesn't know your business the way an in-house person will. You get response times and ticket management instead of a familiar face. But for most small and midsize businesses, that's a fair trade for lower cost and better coverage.
Co-managed IT: the hybrid approach
This is where the answer gets practical. Keep your in-house person (if you have one) or hire one for specific, day-to-day work. Have an MSP handle everything else.
Your IT person manages user accounts, handles the help desk, coordinates vendors, and keeps the lights on. The MSP handles security, maintains your backups, monitors your systems 24/7, manages your servers and network, and gives you strategic guidance. Your IT person has someone to escalate to instead of being the last stop, and they're not drowning in emergencies.
This works especially well as you grow. You start with an MSP when you're small, add an internal person as you get to 25 to 30 employees, and the MSP becomes their support team rather than their replacement. Your IT person doesn't need to be an expert in everything. They just need to be good at your business and know when to call in the specialists.
The decision framework
Start by asking these questions:
- How many people do you have? Under 20, an MSP alone usually wins on cost. Between 20 and 50, it depends on your complexity. Over 50, a hybrid is common.
- How complex is your IT? Multiple offices, servers, custom software, or regulated data? You need specialist expertise, which an MSP provides. Simple setup, a local person works.
- Can you afford to be down? If an outage costs you money or your customer trust, you need 24/7 monitoring and tested backups. That's what an MSP does. If you're okay with problems getting fixed during business hours, hiring someone might be enough.
- How fast do you want to grow? If you're scaling, an MSP scales with you without hiring overhead. If you're stable, an in-house person who knows your environment saves money.
- Do you have someone who could do it? If you have a capable person already on staff, co-managed IT lets you keep them while outsourcing what they can't handle alone.
If you're unsure where you stand, a free risk review will show you what you're doing well and where the gaps are. That conversation often makes the decision clear.
Book a free IT security risk review and we'll map your actual needs. You might discover you need less than you thought, or that what looks like a hire problem is actually a security or backup problem that costs way less to solve.