Somewhere around 10-15 employees, most business owners have the same conversation with themselves: things are breaking often enough that "figure it out yourself" or "call a guy" isn't working anymore, and it's time for something real. The default instinct is often to hire — post a job for an "IT person," bring someone on, done. That's sometimes right. Often it isn't. Here's the actual comparison, not the sales-pitch version.
The cost math
A full-time IT hire in the Fraser Valley — someone competent enough to handle helpdesk, some networking, basic security, and vendor coordination — runs roughly $60,000–$85,000 in salary alone, before benefits, training, software licensing for their tools, and the hardware they need to do the job. All-in, you're looking at $80,000–$110,000+ for one person.
A managed IT services contract for a 10-50 person business typically runs $100–$200 per user per month, depending on scope (helpdesk only vs. helpdesk plus security plus infrastructure management). For a 25-person business, that's roughly $2,500–$5,000/month, or $30,000–$60,000/year — for a team, not a person. You get more coverage hours, broader skill coverage across networking, security, cloud and procurement, and no single point of failure.
The math tilts toward managed IT for most businesses in this size range, purely on cost — but cost isn't the whole story.
The single-person problem
This is the part that doesn't show up in a spreadsheet. If you hire one IT person, your entire technology operation depends on one human being who takes vacation, gets sick, and eventually leaves for a better offer. When that happens, you're not just short-staffed — you often don't know what they knew. Passwords, undocumented workarounds, "oh yeah, that server needs a manual restart every few weeks" knowledge lives in their head. A managed provider has redundancy built in: if your primary contact is out, someone else on the team can pick up the ticket, because documentation and processes are the deliverable, not a nice-to-have.
Response time, honestly
Managed IT providers sell "fast response" hard, and it's often true — but "response" and "resolution" aren't the same thing, and this is where the comparison gets more nuanced. An in-house person sitting at a desk down the hall can walk over and physically fix a jammed printer or a dead monitor in five minutes. A managed provider's remote team can often resolve software issues just as fast, sometimes faster, because they're not interrupted by every small request in the office — but anything requiring hands-on-hardware work depends on their onsite dispatch model. This is worth asking directly: does the provider have technicians who can actually show up, and how fast, or is "onsite support" an add-on they subcontract out with a multi-day lead time?
When in-house actually makes sense
In-house IT starts making more sense past roughly 50-75 employees, when there's enough steady-state work to justify a dedicated person (or two) full time, and especially when you have specialized, business-specific systems that benefit from someone who lives inside your environment every day rather than context-switching across multiple clients. It also makes sense when your business has genuinely unique technical needs — custom software, specialized equipment integration, or compliance requirements — that benefit from deep institutional knowledge over broad coverage.
A hybrid model is common and often underrated: a part-time or junior in-house person handling day-to-day desktop support and ordering, backed by a managed provider for security, infrastructure, strategic projects, and everything the in-house person doesn't have the depth to handle alone. This gets you the "someone down the hall" responsiveness without the single-point-of-failure risk.
The questions that actually matter
Skip "how much does it cost" as your first question and ask instead: what happens when your primary contact is unavailable, what's the actual guaranteed response time — in the contract, not the sales deck — for both remote and onsite issues, and what does the provider not do that you'd need to solve another way. A managed IT quote that looks cheap because it excludes onsite dispatch, project work, or security monitoring isn't actually cheap — it's a different, smaller scope wearing the same label.
For most businesses between 10 and 50 employees in the Fraser Valley, managed IT is the more resilient and often more economical choice — but the right answer depends on how hands-on your operations are, not just the invoice total.