The real math of an internal hire
Start with salary. Pull up any job board and search mid-level sysadmin roles in Dallas — whatever number you find, that's the posting number. Your books will show a bigger one. Add benefits and payroll taxes. Add the monitoring, ticketing, and security tools they'll need — an MSP spreads those licenses across every client it serves; you're buying them for one person. Add training, because the Microsoft stack doesn't hold still. Add recruiting, because good sysadmins in this market get hired fast and poached faster.
For comparison: fully managed IT in the Dallas market typically runs $95–$185 per user per month, and co-managed runs $45–$110. Those are typical market ranges, not a quote. At 30 employees, the middle of the fully managed range works out to roughly $50,000 a year — for a whole team, not one person. At 150 employees, the math starts leaning the other way. Run your own numbers. Here's the full cost breakdown.
What one person can and can't cover
A good sysadmin covers a lot: password resets, new hires, printers, the server closet, most of Microsoft 365. Here's what one person can't be: deep in everything. Networking, security, backup and recovery, cloud architecture, compliance questionnaires, vendor fights — those are different specialties. You're asking one hire to be all of them.
And one person is a single point of failure. They take vacations. They get sick. They quit — usually with most of your documentation in their head. When your entire IT department is one badge, every one of those is a business risk, not an HR event.
When hiring internal is actually the right call
Sometimes it is. We'd rather tell you that now than after a bad contract.
- Your work is physical. Warehouse floor, manufacturing line, clinic hardware — if IT means hands on equipment all day, you want a person on site, on payroll.
- You run custom or niche software that takes months to learn. Institutional knowledge beats a help desk.
- You're big enough to build a team. At a certain headcount, a real internal department makes sense. One hire isn't a department; three might be.
- IT is your product. If technology is what you sell, own it.
If that's you, hire. No hard feelings.
Co-managed IT: keep your person, add depth
This is the option most comparison articles skip, and it's often the honest answer for companies between 30 and 200 employees. Your internal person keeps the day-to-day — they know the building, the people, the weird legacy app. A co-managed provider adds what one person can't carry alone: security tooling, escalation depth for the hard problems, and coverage when your person is out or moves on.
It also spreads the single-point-of-failure risk. Documentation lives in a shared system instead of one head. In the Dallas market, co-managed typically runs $45–$110 per user per month — a range, not a quote. And if your one-person IT shop is retiring, co-managed is often the bridge. Here's how a transition works.
Switch IT Dallas is run by K3 Technology, a managed IT and cybersecurity provider with an office on Alpha Road. The practice is Microsoft-centric — which matters if your stack is 365 and Azure, and most are.
Five questions to ask before you decide
- 1. Is the work mostly hands-on-site, or mostly systems and cloud? Physical work favors a hire. Systems work favors outsourcing or co-managed.
- 2. Could you go two weeks with no IT coverage? That's every vacation your one hire takes. If the answer is no, one person isn't a plan.
- 3. Who owns security? "The IT guy handles it" is not an answer. Security is its own discipline, and it's where one generalist is stretched thinnest.
- 4. What happens when this person leaves? If the honest answer is "we'd be in trouble," you've found the real cost of the internal-only model.
- 5. Did you do the math on the loaded cost? Salary is the visible number. Tools, training, benefits, and turnover are the rest of it.
Answers pointing both directions? That's usually co-managed territory. Twenty minutes on the phone usually beats another week of spreadsheets.