We got a call from a CTO we’d been working with for a couple of years. High-trust relationship, good work, no complaints. She wanted to let us know they were thinking about bringing IT in-house. We asked her why. She thought about it for a second and said something like “it’s kind of a financial decision, and kind of a strategic one.” We didn’t push back. But we thought about that answer for a long time after.
Because here’s the thing: those two goals are usually in contradiction with each other.
A strategic IT hire, someone who can build infrastructure, manage a growing workforce, own security posture, and think two steps ahead of the business, costs real money. A financial decision points you toward someone cheaper. The person who checks both boxes exists, but they’re rare, and they’re not staying at a 75-person company for long once they figure out what they’re worth.
What we see more often is a company hiring for one and hoping for the other.
The math that makes an internal hire look attractive usually goes something like this: our MSP costs X per month, a salary costs Y per year, and Y divided by twelve is less than X. That math isn’t wrong. It’s just incomplete. It doesn’t account for benefits, payroll taxes, recruiting fees, onboarding time, or the two weeks every August when your entire IT function is at a lake house in Michigan and completely unreachable. It also doesn’t account for what happens when your headcount spikes from 75 to 90 in a quarter, or drops back down.
A hire is always on. An MSP is a dial.
There’s also a version of this decision that’s really about presence. The feeling that IT should be there, in the office, fixing the thing that’s broken. We understand that instinct. But the companies we work with aren’t primarily paying us to fix printers. They’re paying us to make sure the printer problem never becomes a security problem, that the new hire on Monday has everything she needs before 9am, and that when something does go sideways, there’s a system behind the response. Not one person’s memory and one person’s schedule.
We told the CTO we’d love a shot at “applying” for the role and showing her what it would look like if we took on more. She said she’d come back to us. She didn’t.
They made the hire. And after their new person started, we didn’t have less work. We had more. Not because they were lazy or incompetent. They were great. But one person has one person’s knowledge and one person’s bandwidth. No single hire walks in the door with deep experience in security, device management, identity, compliance, and the specific way your business actually runs. What they couldn’t cover, a device management gap left over from a fast hiring sprint, a compliance question that needed someone who’d been through the audit before, we filled. Our team does this because it’s a team: different people, different backgrounds, different areas of depth, all behind the same relationship.
The client got a more complete version of IT than they’d had before. They just didn’t get a cheaper one.
That might be the most honest thing we can say about this decision: bringing IT in-house and working with an MSP aren’t always mutually exclusive. But if the goal is to spend less, the math deserves a harder look before you post the job. And if the goal is to get more, we’d genuinely love that conversation.