Your first IT hire, or an outsource
We sell the outsource, so here is the case for hiring instead, and the point at which most businesses genuinely need both.
At some point a growing business stops being able to run its technology on goodwill and whoever is best with computers. The question that follows is whether to hire someone or engage a firm.
We are one of the firms, so the useful thing we can offer is not our conclusion. It is the reasoning, including where hiring wins.
Where a hire is genuinely better
When the work is deep in your business rather than in technology. Someone who understands your production process, your product data and your customers’ quirks, and happens to be technical, is more valuable than any external party. That knowledge takes a year to build and cannot be bought by the hour.
When you need somebody present. Multiple sites with constant physical work, equipment being moved, users who need someone to walk over. Some operations genuinely run on presence.
When responsiveness to internal politics matters. An employee can sit in a meeting, read the room, and know that the request from the sales director is really about something else. That is not a service.
Once the volume justifies it. Past a certain size the arithmetic favours employment for the routine work, straightforwardly.
Where a hire struggles
Breadth. One person cannot be current on identity, networking, security, ERP, telephony and development. Nobody is, and expecting it produces someone who is adequate at everything and expert at nothing, usually while feeling guilty about it.
Cover. They take leave, they get sick, they leave. A single internal person is a single point of failure with a mortgage, and businesses that rely on one IT employee are usually one resignation away from not knowing their own passwords.
Escalation. When something is genuinely hard, who do they ask? Good internal people in small businesses are often isolated, and it is a common reason they leave.
Career. A capable person in a solo role runs out of things to learn. If you cannot offer progression, you are training somebody for their next employer, which is fine as long as it is deliberate.
What we actually see working
For most businesses between about twenty and a hundred and fifty people, a combination rather than a choice.
An internal person, or a part of someone’s role, owning the things that need presence and business context: the floor, the users, the product data, the day to day. And a firm behind them for breadth, escalation, cover during leave, and the specialist work that comes up a few times a year.
That is the partial outsource, and it is a normal arrangement rather than a compromise. It also tends to be the thing that keeps a good internal hire, because they get someone to ask and someone to cover them, which are the two things most likely to make them resign otherwise.
The question that actually decides it
Not cost. What do you need to be excellent at, and what do you need to simply work?
Technology that needs to simply work, email, devices, backups, patching, is a poor use of a talented employee’s attention and an obvious thing to hand to someone whose whole job it is. Technology that is a genuine advantage in your market deserves someone inside who cares about it.
Get that split clear and the structure follows. Get it wrong and you either pay a firm to learn your business every year, or pay an employee to relearn Microsoft licensing every year.
Our position, stated plainly
We would rather work alongside a good internal person than replace one, and we will say so when we think a client should hire. It is a smaller engagement and a longer one, and the alternative, being the only party who understands a client’s environment, is exactly the dependency this business was set up in reaction to.
If you are weighing this up, the useful conversation is about the split rather than the choice. Happy to have it either way.