IT Support

In-House IT vs. Outsourced Help Desk: The Real Math for Small Business

Somewhere around 15–40 employees, every growing business has the conversation: "should we just hire an IT person?" The honest math is worth running before the job posting goes up.

The true cost of the hire

A capable IT generalist commands a real salary — then add benefits, taxes, training, and tools, and the loaded cost typically runs 25–40% above the base number. For that investment you get one person's skills, one person's hours, and one person's vacation schedule.

The coverage problem no salary fixes

One employee works ~40 of the week's 168 hours. Your systems don't. The server fails Saturday; the phones act up during their beach week; and 5:01pm is when the owner's laptop dies. Solo IT means hero culture, burnout, and a single point of failure with a badge.

The breadth problem

Modern small-business IT spans networking, phones, security, cameras, servers, backups, and vendor wrangling. No single generalist is deep in all of it — so the hire either learns on your infrastructure or brings in outside help anyway.

What the outsourced model buys

• A team, not a person: the network specialist for network days, the phone specialist for phone days.
• 24/7/365 coverage as a feature of the service, not an exhausted volunteer.
• No sick days, no turnover cliff where all institutional knowledge walks out at once — documentation is the product.
• Predictable cost, typically a fraction of a loaded salary for full coverage at small-business scale.

The honest tradeoffs

An outsourced desk isn't physically in your hallway, and shared attention means real (contractual) response times instead of shoulder taps. Businesses with heavy on-site daily needs sometimes land on a hybrid: a junior on-site coordinator backed by an outsourced team for depth and after-hours.

Run your numbers

Our 24/7/365 help desk plus on-site techs across the Southeast is exactly this model. Bring us your incident history and headcount — we'll show you the comparison in real dollars, and if the right answer is hiring, we'll tell you that too.