Somewhere between 15 and 50 employees, most businesses hit the same question: do we hire our own IT person, or outsource it? Having sat on the outsourced side of this conversation since 1983, here is our honest take — including when hiring in-house genuinely is the right call.
What one in-house hire actually costs
A capable IT generalist in the GTA commands a solid professional salary — and by the time you add benefits, training, tooling, and software licensing, the real annual cost lands well north of the salary line. For that, you get one person’s skills, one person’s availability, and one person’s vacation schedule.
That last point is the one businesses underestimate. One person cannot be a security specialist, a cloud architect, a network engineer, and a help desk — and they definitely cannot be all of those things while on vacation.
What a managed services provider gives you instead
For a fraction of one salary, a good MSP provides a whole bench: help desk staff for the everyday tickets, senior engineers for the hard problems, security tooling no small business would buy alone, and 24/7 monitoring that never books time off. You are effectively sharing an enterprise-grade IT department with other businesses your size — and paying only for your slice. Here is what that typically costs in the GTA.
When in-house genuinely makes sense
- You have highly specialized line-of-business systems that need daily hands-on attention — custom manufacturing software, complex ERP environments.
- Your headcount is large enough (often 75+, depending on complexity) that a dedicated internal team becomes cost-effective.
- Technology is your product — software firms usually need internal technical staff regardless.
The hybrid option most people overlook: co-managed IT
This is the quiet winner for a lot of growing businesses. Your internal IT person keeps what they are great at — the line-of-business systems, the daily hands-on support, the institutional knowledge — while an MSP provides the security stack, monitoring, patching automation, and senior escalation depth behind them. Your IT person stops being a single point of failure, and stops burning out.
Questions to ask before deciding
- What happens today if our key IT person (internal or external) disappears for two weeks?
- Who is watching our systems at 2 a.m., and would we know if something was wrong?
- Are we getting strategic advice about next year, or just fixes for yesterday?
- What does our current approach cost per user, per month — honestly, all-in?
If any of those answers made you wince, it is worth a conversation. Book a free IT assessment — whether the right answer for you is an MSP, a hire, or co-management, you will leave knowing where you actually stand.
