Managed IT or an in-house engineer: from what size

The question almost always arrives at the same moment: the company has grown, someone internally « knows a bit about computers » and now spends their Fridays on it, and the director wonders whether it is time to hire properly. It is a good question, and most providers answer it badly, because they have a stake in the answer.

The real cost of an internal post

A salary is not a full cost. In Switzerland you must add employer social contributions, loss-of-earnings insurance, occupational pension, the workstation and tools, continuing education in a trade that moves fast, and the recruitment itself. The usual order of magnitude puts the employer cost well above the gross salary, without counting the management time spent supervising someone whose work you cannot judge.

This is not an argument against hiring. It is a reminder that the honest comparison is not « a salary against an invoice » but « a full cost against an invoice », and that the latter includes an on-call rota, continuity during holidays and a breadth of expertise one person cannot cover alone.

The three thresholds that actually decide

Headcount alone is a poor guide. Three other criteria decide in practice.

The daily volume of requests

As long as requests amount to a handful per week, an internal hire would be underused on their core work and would end up doing something else. When they become daily and interrupt one person all day long, outsourcing alone no longer suffices: you need someone on site.

How specific the business is

A company whose IT amounts to workstations, email and a file server is buying a commodity service, and is wrong to pay a salary for it. A company whose activity depends on an application written for it, on industrial controllers, or on a digital production flow needs internal knowledge that nobody will sell at a flat rate.

The availability required

If an hour of downtime costs little, outsourcing covers the need. If an hour of downtime halts production or invoicing, you need either a serious contractual on-call arrangement or a presence, and both are paid for.

The point nobody makes

A lone IT person in an SME is a single point of failure, exactly like a server without a backup. They go on holiday, they fall ill, they resign, and the company discovers that nobody else knows the passwords or the logic of the installation. That risk is real and it is rarely weighed in the decision.

The practical consequence is not to give up on hiring, it is to require of the internal hire what you would require of a provider: documentation kept current, accounts held by the company rather than by the person, and backups that somebody else knows how to verify.

What we do, and what we do not

We do not try to convince a company that needs an employee that it needs us. When requests are daily, the trade is specific and downtime is expensive, hire: we say so in the meeting, and we would rather say it before than after. In the other cases, and in the mixed model, that is our work.

If you would rather decide on facts than on impressions, the review measures the real volume, the condition of what exists and the exposure in case of an outage. Thirty minutes, a dated document, no obligation to continue.