In-house hire, break-fix, or managed IT?

One person who knows your business deeply, on your payroll, doing everything from passwords to strategy.

A good in-house technician is unbeatable for physical presence and institutional knowledge. The structural problem is coverage: one person takes holidays, gets sick, and eventually resigns, taking the documentation that lives in their head. Salary, benefits and tooling typically exceed a managed agreement before the second hire.

Where it winsIf you have more than roughly seventy-five staff on one site, complex line-of-business systems, and daily hands-on needs, an in-house hire, backed by a co-managed agreement for coverage, is genuinely the better model.

Pay an hourly rate when something breaks. No contract, no monitoring, no ownership between incidents.

Break-fix looks cheap because you only pay when something is on fire, but nobody is watching for smoke, so the fires are bigger and the data losses real. The economics also point the wrong way: the provider earns more when your systems fail more.

Where it winsFor a very small office (a handful of computers, no server, cloud email), break-fix with good backups is honestly all you need, and we'll say so.

A flat monthly agreement covering monitoring, support, security and maintenance, with the incentives pointed at prevention.

The provider profits when your systems don't fail, which is the correct alignment. The trade-offs are real too: you share a team rather than owning one, and a bad managed provider is worse than a good hourly one, which is why the comparison page you're reading names where the alternatives win.

Where it winsFor most businesses between ten and seventy-five staff, this is where the economics and the coverage land best.