Honest Comparison
Internal hires, MSPs, resellers, independent contractors, whoever on staff is good with computers — every path to "IT support" is missing something. They are not all missing the same thing. Here is where each one actually lands.
Most options force a choice: pay more for real expertise, or pay less and accept the risk. Here's how the common paths stack up — and why that tradeoff isn't actually a law of nature.
Most advice on this topic treats it as a binary choice — pay more for real expertise, or pay less and accept the risk. That math changes when the seat is filled by a contracted principal rather than a salaried one.
No option here is a bad choice for everyone — but each comes with real, well-documented tradeoffs worth knowing going in.
Strengths: Deep bench of specialists, genuine strategic capability, brand-name credibility.
Trade-offs: Priced for enterprise budgets. Minimum engagement sizes exclude most SMBs entirely, and frameworks are often built for companies far larger than yours.
Strengths: Dedicated, on-site, aligned with your interests, and deeply familiar with your business day to day.
Trade-offs: Their reach ends at their own experience. When the work exceeds what they have done before, they either guess or you go find a vendor with no relationship and no context — and no way to tell a fair scope from an expensive one. Full salary and benefits regardless of workload, and a single point of failure when they are out or move on.
Strengths: Broader coverage than a single hire, with a predictable contract.
Trade-offs: Ticket-queue model with rotating techs who don't know your environment, measured on tickets closed rather than decisions made well. Revenue often depends on selling hardware and licenses — which creates bias, even with good intentions.
Strengths: Can offer competitive pricing on the hardware or software itself.
Trade-offs: They hold annual volume commitments with the manufacturers they represent — contracted numbers signed before your name came up. The recommendation narrows before you are in the room, and urgency tends to arrive on their calendar rather than yours.
Strengths: Genuine technical skill, direct relationship, no ticket queue, and typically a fair hourly rate.
Trade-offs: You are buying hands, not a department. They do the work you ask for; nobody owns the work you didn't know to ask about — monitoring, restore-tested backups, patch cycles, lifecycle tracking, documentation. No infrastructure of their own, no bench to escalate to, and if they become unavailable your environment knowledge leaves with them. Often no workers' compensation or general liability either, which becomes your exposure the moment someone is hurt on your property.
Strengths: No ongoing contract — you pay only when something breaks.
Trade-offs: Purely reactive by design. No proactive maintenance, no strategic input, and costs spike unpredictably exactly when something big fails.
Strengths: Free or nearly free, personally trusted, already knows your organization, and often genuinely capable at the things they handle.
Trade-offs: The gap is rarely skill — it's that nobody is watching the things that don't announce themselves. Backups that have never been restore-tested. An administrator account belonging to someone who left in 2022. No one who would notice a compromise for weeks. That gap can't be closed by being more capable; it takes continuous accountability, which was never part of the arrangement.
Strengths: No added cost beyond subscriptions you already pay for.
Trade-offs: Owner or staff time gets diverted from the actual business, default security settings are often left as-is, and there's no strategic oversight behind the decisions.
Strengths: The alignment of an employee — no hardware sales, no commissions, no manufacturer agreements — with reach past any one person's knowledge, our own infrastructure behind it, and a named principal accountable for the outcome. Fixed monthly rate that doesn't move when your technology does.
Trade-offs: You don't get forty hours a week. You get executive-level judgment on the decisions that require it, qualified hands on the rest, and specialist time scoped per engagement rather than sitting idle on payroll.
The hardest part of changing how IT gets handled is usually not technical.
If a volunteer, a board member's son, or the office manager has been handling technology for years, replacing them is a social decision before it is a business one. Nobody wants to be the person who pushed out someone who helped for free.
They usually stay. They keep doing the part they are good at, with someone accountable above them, documentation behind them, and no obligation to carry risk they were never equipped to carry. What ends is the arrangement, not the relationship.
The same applies to vendors. If you would rather keep the firm that installed your phone system, the contractor a board member recommends, or the integrator you already trust — keep them.
We will scope the work, review the quote, hold them to it, and verify what was delivered. We don't need to be the ones doing it. Someone needs to be accountable for whether it was done right.
Most organizations screen for credentials, because credentials are the part that's easy to see. These questions get at the part that isn't.
These are useful questions whoever you hire. If the answers are good, that is worth knowing. If they are difficult to get, that is worth knowing too.
The alignment of an employee, the reach of a department, and none of the payroll. That's the entire point of the math.
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