There is a moment in most growing companies when the person who is “good with computers” stops being enough. Maybe it is the office manager who somehow became the printer expert. They are doing IT work on top of the job you hired them for, and neither job is getting the attention it deserves.
So you start thinking about hiring a real IT person. That is usually the right instinct. But the role is broader than most owners picture, the cost is higher than a salary line suggests, and one person cannot cover nights, vacations, and every specialty a modern business touches. Here is an honest look at the job, the market, and how an internal hire and an outside provider work together.
What the Job Actually Covers at a Small Company
Most owners imagine this role as fixing things. Something breaks, the IT person shows up, it works again. That is maybe a third of it. At a company with 20 to 100 people, the internal IT person usually inherits all of this:
- Day to day support. Password resets, printers, video calls that will not connect, the spreadsheet that keeps crashing. This is the visible work, and it fills a calendar fast.
- Onboarding and offboarding. New hires need a computer, accounts, permissions, and a phone. Departures need all of that shut off the same day. Done sloppily, this is how former employees keep access to your email for months.
- Device lifecycle. Buying, imaging, tracking, warranty claims, and replacing hardware before it fails rather than after.
- Vendor wrangling. The internet provider, the phone system, the accounting software, the industry specific application nobody else understands.
- Security hygiene. Patching, multi factor authentication, endpoint protection, permissions reviews, and the security questionnaire your biggest client just sent over.
- Backups and documentation. Restoring from backups on a schedule to confirm they work, and writing down how everything is configured so the knowledge lives in the company rather than in one person’s head.
The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Outlook Handbook splits this into two tracks: user support specialists who diagnose problems, walk people through solutions, install equipment, and train users, and network support specialists who test systems, perform maintenance, and troubleshoot the network. At a small company you are hiring one person to do both, plus the vendors and the security work.
The Market Reality, Stated in Ranges
National figures are a starting point, not a quote. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported a median annual wage of $61,550 for computer support specialists in May 2024, with user support specialists at $60,340 and network support specialists at $73,340 in that same May 2024 data. For context, the Bureau of Labor Statistics put the median for computer and information technology occupations overall at $105,990 in May 2024, against $49,500 for all occupations.
Read those as a floor for a generalist and a signal that real depth in security, cloud administration, or networking costs considerably more. Denton County competes with Dallas and Fort Worth pay, so confirm current local ranges before you budget. Then add what never makes the salary line: payroll taxes, benefits, paid time off, training and certifications, recruiting, and the tools one person needs. Loaded cost lands well above base pay.
One more piece of context. The Bureau of Labor Statistics projected employment of computer support specialists would decline 3 percent from 2024 to 2034, while still expecting roughly 50,500 openings a year over that decade, mostly from people leaving the field rather than from new positions. Churn is normal here. Plan assuming this person eventually moves on.
Why One Person Cannot Cover Everything
This is not a knock on whoever you hire. It is arithmetic and specialization.
- The clock. One employee covers roughly 40 hours out of the 168 in a week. Servers, backups, and attackers do not keep your business hours.
- Time off. Two weeks of vacation, a bout of the flu, jury duty, a family emergency. Each is a stretch where nobody is watching the systems.
- Breadth. Modern small business IT spans networking, Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace administration, identity and access, endpoint management, backup and disaster recovery, phone systems, and whatever application runs your revenue. Nobody is genuinely strong in all of them.
- Depth when it counts. A generalist can keep the lights on beautifully and still be out of their depth during a ransomware event, a failed migration, or a compliance audit. Those are the moments where being wrong is expensive.
- No one to escalate to. When your only IT person is stuck, there is no second opinion in the building.
Burnout and the Single Point of Failure
Solo IT people burn out predictably. They start energized, get buried in ticket volume, stop doing proactive work because the reactive work never ends, and then get blamed for the outage that proactive work would have prevented.
The bigger risk is concentration. If one person holds the admin credentials, the network diagram, the vendor relationships, and the undocumented workarounds, that person leaving is an operational event, not just an HR one. We have walked into companies where a departed administrator was the only one who knew the firewall password. Requiring documentation, shared credential vaulting, and a second set of eyes is not distrust. It is the same reason you do not let one person write and sign the checks. For the broader case, see our piece on why cybersecurity is no longer optional for mid-sized businesses.
The Co-Managed Model, and Who Owns What
Co-managed IT is a simple idea: you keep an internal person, and a provider covers the hours, specialties, and redundancy one person cannot. It works when the division of labor is written down. Here is the split that tends to hold up:
- Your internal person owns the business relationship. They know your people, your workflows, your busy season, and which application actually matters. They set priorities and translate between the business and the technology.
- The provider owns depth and coverage. After hours monitoring, security operations, backup verification, escalation engineering, and the specialists you would never hire full time.
- Tooling and documentation are shared. Same ticket system, same documentation, same credential vault, visible to both sides. This is the biggest predictor of whether co-managed works.
- Escalation rules are explicit. Write down what the internal person handles, what goes to the provider immediately, and who can declare an incident at 2am.
- Projects get real capacity. Migrations, office moves, and rollouts get a team instead of one person running a project while answering the help desk.
If you are early, one honest option is to start with a provider and hire internally later, once ticket volume justifies it. If you already have someone who is drowning, adding coverage is usually faster and cheaper than a second technician. Our guide on what to look for in an outsourced IT partner covers the questions worth asking either way.
The Bottom Line
Hiring your first internal IT person is a good move at the right size. Just hire with clear eyes. The job is support plus onboarding plus vendors plus security plus documentation, the real cost sits well above the salary, and no one person covers 168 hours a week or every specialty you depend on. The strongest setup we see is one capable internal person who owns the relationship and the priorities, backed by a provider who brings coverage and depth.
If you are weighing an internal hire, already have one who needs backup, or want a sanity check on what your environment really requires, we are happy to talk it through with no pressure. We work with small and mid-sized businesses across Denton County, and we will give you a straight answer even if it is that you do not need us yet. Contact us today.
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