Hire an internal IT person or use an MSP?

The short answer

For most Dallas businesses under about 40 to 50 employees, a managed IT provider (an MSP) is cheaper than hiring an internal IT person and covers more ground. The salary is only the first line of what a full-time hire costs. Add benefits, payroll tax, the monitoring and security tools that person still has to buy, the vacation and sick days when nobody is covering, and the fact that one generalist cannot be an expert in networking, Microsoft 365, backups and security all at once. Compare that with a monthly fee that already includes the tools and that scales with your headcount.

If you have been telling yourself "I need a full-time IT guy but cannot afford one," the good news is that the choice is not salary or nothing. You can pay by the hour when something breaks, pay a flat monthly fee for everything, or bring in part-time technology leadership for the planning side. I offer all three from my office in Dallas, and I will tell you honestly which one fits before you spend anything. The rest of this article walks through the real numbers and the situations where an internal hire is the better call, because sometimes it is.

What does a full-time IT person actually cost in Dallas?

Let me be careful with numbers here, because they change and every business is different. As a typical market range, a full-time IT generalist in the Dallas–Fort Worth area is commonly paid somewhere around $55,000 to $85,000 a year in base salary, and more if you want someone with real security or server experience. That is the number most owners have in mind when they say they cannot afford it. It is also the smallest part of the bill.

Here is what usually sits on top of the salary:

• Benefits and payroll costs. Health insurance, payroll tax, retirement matching and paid time off commonly add a meaningful percentage on top of base pay.
• Tools. An internal person still needs remote monitoring software, endpoint protection, a backup platform, a password manager and a ticketing system. Those are subscriptions, billed per device or per user, and they are the same tools an MSP already pays for and spreads across many clients.
• Training and idle time. Technology moves. A person who is not learning is slowly becoming less useful, and a person who is learning is not fixing your printer. In a 15-person office, an internal IT person is also idle for a large part of the week, and you pay for that time.
• Coverage gaps. One employee gets sick, takes vacation, and eventually leaves. When they leave, their knowledge of your setup often leaves with them unless you insisted on documentation from day one.

Add it up and a single internal hire in Dallas commonly lands well above the salary line once everything is counted. That is the number to compare against an outside provider, not the base pay.

What are my options if I cannot afford a full-time hire?

You have more choices than most owners realise. Here are the ones I see working for small Dallas businesses, roughly from lightest to heaviest commitment:

1. The office manager handles it. Somebody who is already on payroll resets passwords, orders laptops and calls the internet provider. This works until the first real outage, a ransomware email, or a server that will not start. It is free until it is very expensive.
2. Hourly IT support with no contract. You call when something breaks and pay by the hour. My published rates are $100 an hour remote and $150 an hour onsite during business hours, with a one-hour minimum. Good for very small offices with simple setups. See hourly IT support and break/fix for the details.
3. A managed IT plan. One monthly fee per user or per device that covers updates, unlimited remote support, onsite visits when remote cannot fix it, antivirus and email security, backups, and management of your router, firewall, switches and Wi-Fi. This is the closest thing to "an IT department" a small business can buy. Mine is month-to-month and you can cancel any time. Details are on the managed IT services page.
4. Fractional CTO or IT consulting. Part-time technology leadership: planning, budgeting, choosing systems, managing vendors. Useful when the day-to-day is handled but nobody is steering. See IT consulting and fractional CTO.
5. A junior internal hire plus outside backup. Someone in the building for hands-on tasks, with an outside provider covering security, backups, servers and the things a junior person should not be learning on your production network.

Most 5 to 30 person offices I talk to end up with option 3, sometimes with option 4 layered on top when they are growing or planning a move.

What does an MSP do that an internal person usually does not?

The word MSP simply means managed service provider: an outside company, in my case a small owner-led one, that takes ongoing responsibility for your technology for a fixed monthly fee. The difference from an internal hire is less about skill and more about what comes bundled and how the work is organized.

A managed plan normally includes the platform: monitoring on every computer and server, automatic operating system and application updates, endpoint protection, email security, and managed backups with recovery testing. An internal hire has to select, buy, configure and maintain each of those separately, and in a small office that maintenance often slips because there is always something more urgent.

A managed plan also includes the boring, preventive work that nobody asks for and everybody benefits from: checking that last night's backup actually completed, applying the security update before the exploit spreads, noticing that a drive is failing before it fails, renewing the domain name before the website disappears. When an internal hire is being pulled in ten directions, that work is the first to be dropped. When it is the core of a monthly agreement, it gets done.

There is one more difference that matters for a business of your size. With me, you get someone who has spent over 15 years in IT across many industries and large organizations, applied to a small office. An internal hire at a small-business salary is usually early in their career. Both can be good. Only one of them has seen your exact problem before.

When does hiring an internal IT person make sense?

I would be doing you a disservice if I pretended the answer is always outsourcing. There are clear situations where an internal hire is right, and I will say so on the phone if you are in one of them:

• You have enough people. Somewhere around 50 or more employees, the daily volume of questions, onboarding, laptop swaps and meeting-room problems is enough to keep one employee busy. At that size the math on an internal generalist starts to work, often with an outside provider still handling security and infrastructure.
• You run in-house or custom software. If your business depends on an application only your business uses, you need someone who lives inside it every day.
• You have heavy daily hardware work. A shop with dozens of specialised devices, lab equipment, or production machines that need hands on them constantly is better served by someone in the building.
• You need someone physically present for compliance or client reasons. Some regulated environments and some client contracts expect a named employee to be accountable for systems on site.
• You are growing fast. If you are adding five people a month, an internal person to handle onboarding, with an MSP behind them, can be the right combination.

Outside those cases, a Dallas office of 5 to 40 people is almost always better off with a managed plan and, if needed, a few hours a month of planning help. The money you save is real, and the coverage is broader.

How do the three options compare side by side?

Here is the comparison I sketch on a notepad when an owner asks me this in person. Market figures are typical ranges for the Dallas area, not my prices; my managed plan is quoted per user or per device after a short conversation.

If you want the price side of this in more detail, I wrote a separate piece on what managed IT services cost in Dallas.

Can I have both? The hybrid that works for growing offices

Yes, and it is often the best answer for a business between 25 and 60 people. The structure is simple: someone inside the company owns the first call, and I own everything behind it.

The inside person might be an office manager who is good with computers, or a junior IT hire. They set up new laptops from a checklist I write, answer "how do I" questions, hand out loaner equipment and escalate anything they cannot solve in a few minutes. I handle the network, the server or cloud environment, Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace administration, security, backups, vendor calls and the planning conversation about what to buy next year.

What makes this work is that I stay the point of contact, so the inside person always talks to the same one. There is no ticket queue to explain the history to. They text me, I know the setup, and my team and I get the problem solved. It also makes the junior hire better over time, because they are learning from someone who has seen a lot of environments instead of learning by breaking things.

The other form of hybrid is a managed plan for the day-to-day plus a few hours a month of fractional CTO time for direction. That suits a firm whose owner is tired of making technology decisions alone: which practice management system to move to, whether to keep the server, how to handle a second location. The support keeps things running; the consulting decides where they should be running to.

How to decide in one afternoon

You do not need a consultant's report to make this call. Here is the process I would use if I were sitting in your chair:

1. Count your people and devices. Users, computers, servers, printers, phones. Write it down.
2. List what broke in the last six months. Be honest about how long each problem lasted and who fixed it. This tells you how much support you actually consume.
3. Write down what nobody is doing. Backups checked? Updates applied? Old employees' accounts disabled? If the answer is "not sure," an internal hire will not fix that by themselves; a managed plan will, because it is the job.
4. Price the internal hire fully. Salary, benefits, tools, training, and what happens when they are out. Use the typical Dallas ranges above as a starting point.
5. Get one or two managed quotes on the same unit. Per user or per device, with a written list of what is included. Then read how to compare IT support quotes so you are not comparing a fee against a salary and a whole tool stack against nothing.
6. Pick the option you can leave. If the plan is month-to-month, you are never stuck. An employee is harder to unwind.

If you would rather talk it through, that is the conversation I have most weeks. Tell me your headcount and what has been going wrong and I will give you a straight answer about which of the three fits, including "hire someone" when that is true. The rates for everything hourly are on the pricing page.

Questions people ask

Written and reviewed by

Anthony Omini, founder of Cross River Tech

Over 15 years in IT across many industries, now running Cross River Tech, a small owner-led managed IT company in Dallas. Every article is written from his own client work and checked by him before it is published.

Not sure which option fits your office? Tell me how many people and devices you have and what has been going wrong. I will tell you honestly whether you need a hire, a plan, or just a few hours.

Ask Anthony(214) 612-7080About Anthony