Techsperience vs in-house IT: when does hiring make sense?

The “should we hire in-house or use a managed-IT firm?” question is asked a lot, and most answers are either self-serving (managed-IT firms saying “use us”) or romanticised (firms imagining a single brilliant IT manager who’ll solve everything). Neither is right.

This article gives the honest comparison, including the cases where we’d tell a firm to hire internally rather than work with us.

What a managed-IT firm gives you

A reputable managed-IT firm gives you:

• A team of people, with overlapping skills, available across business hours and on-call out-of-hours
• 24×7 Security Operations Centre cover (almost impossible to replicate in-house under 200 staff)
• Tools and platforms that wouldn’t be cost-effective for a single firm (RMM, MDR, ticketing, audit tooling, vCIO software)
• A vCIO presence at the partners’ table
• Continuous Technology Alignment review against industry standards
• Compliance posture (Cyber Essentials, ISO 27001 alignment, SRA expectations) baked in
• Continuity when individuals are on holiday or leave

The headline cost for a UK law firm is £100 to £150 per user per month, plus software licences and hardware.

What an in-house IT person gives you

A full-time IT manager gives you:

• Someone who works for your firm, in your office, with your culture
• Deep familiarity with your specific environment, software stack, and people
• Same-day responsiveness on minor issues — fee-earners can walk over to the IT desk
• A single internal voice for IT decisions
• Capacity for project work without separate quotes

The headline cost for a UK law firm in London or the Home Counties is £55,000 to £75,000 fully loaded for a capable IT manager. A junior support hire is £30,000 to £40,000.

Where managed IT wins

For firms under approximately 80 staff:

• You can’t afford the redundancy. A single IT manager goes on holiday. Gets ill. Quits with two weeks’ notice. Your firm depends on technology — you cannot have one person be the single point of failure for it.
• You can’t justify the toolset. The tools a managed-IT firm uses (security operations platform, MDR, vCIO software, network monitoring, backup-and-restore at scale) cost more per year than a junior IT salary. Multi-tenanted across many firms, the unit cost is reasonable. Single-tenanted, it isn’t.
• You’d have to pick a generalist. Below 80 staff, you can hire one person. That person will be a competent generalist — they will not be a deep specialist in security, networking, M365 administration, and practice-management integration. A managed-IT firm has each of those people.
• Compliance posture is hard to maintain. Cyber Essentials, ISO 27001, SRA expectations — these need continuous attention by people who do them across many environments. A solo in-house manager will let some slip; not from incompetence, just from bandwidth.

Where in-house wins

For firms over approximately 250 staff:

• The economics flip. At 250 staff, the marginal cost of additional managed-IT users exceeds what an in-house team would cost. You can hire two or three people for what 250 users at £125/month per user buys you.
• Internal politics matter more. A 250-person firm has internal coalitions, change-resistant fee-earners, and entrenched ways of working. An external IT firm has limited authority to push through change. An internal CIO has more.
• Specialist roles become viable. At 250 staff you can justify a security specialist, a M365 administrator, an applications person, and an IT manager. Below that, you’re hoping one person does all four.

The middle ground: 80-250 staff

Most firms in this range benefit from both. The right model is usually:

• One in-house IT person — typically titled IT Manager — handling day-to-day user support, internal advocacy, and project coordination.
• A managed-IT firm providing infrastructure operations, security operations centre cover, vCIO strategy, and continuous alignment review.

The in-house person is the firm’s voice; the managed-IT firm is the depth and the cover. The two together are meaningfully better than either alone, at this size.

For Techsperience clients in this range, we work alongside the in-house IT manager rather than around them. The vCIO sessions are joint sessions. The alignment review surfaces gaps the in-house person can prioritise. The 24×7 SOC means the in-house person can take a holiday.

When we’d tell a firm to hire instead

The honest answer:

• You’re growing past 250 staff and don’t have an internal IT lead yet. Hire one. We’ll be the team that sits behind them.
• You have a specific compliance overlay we don’t have depth in. If your firm has a regulatory profile that needs daily, deep specialist attention — not just SRA-grade controls — an in-house specialist is the right answer.
• You’ve had a managed-IT relationship that didn’t work, and the diagnosis is fundamentally cultural. Sometimes the answer is “we need someone in our office, on our payroll, in our culture.” A managed-IT firm cannot replace that, however good.

If any of those describe your situation, we’d say so on the 10-minute call. We’d rather not start a relationship that ends in eighteen months because the underlying need was different.

How to think about the decision

Two questions, in order:

1. Below 80 staff? Managed IT is the right default. Solo in-house hire is almost always the wrong call.
2. 80 to 250 staff? Managed IT plus one in-house person is the right default. Pure in-house is fragile; pure managed-IT misses internal advocacy.
3. Over 250 staff? Internal team plus managed-IT for specialist depth (SOC, vCIO, peer benchmarking) is increasingly common. Pure managed-IT is unusual at this size; pure in-house leaves specialist gaps.

The wrong decision is rarely the choice of model. It’s underestimating the level of investment required, then trying to make whichever model you picked work on a 70%-of-needed budget.