You have an in-house IT staff. Do you know what that is actually costing you? Not just their salaries, which in the Miami-Fort Lauderdale area averages $66,770 per year per team member, but all the other hidden costs, including the cost of benefits, payroll and worker’s compensation, overhead costs, supplies, office space, equipment etc. Then there’s the cost of employee turnover, overtime and mistakes.

And what about your time? How much is it valued at hiring, training and managing your IT staff? You need to take all these expenses into account as well. 

Maybe it’s time to consider outsourcing to a managed service provider (MSP) for some or all of your IT needs. Here are five hidden costs of an in-house IT team to keep in mind:

1. Recruiting and Hiring

How many applicants did you have the last time you posted a position? Before COVID-19, the average was 250 applicants. What will it be now?

There is a cost associated with digging through the avalanche of applications to find the few (typically four to six) applicants you want to interview even if you don’t use a recruiter. If you do hire a recruiter, that’s another hidden cost.

When you finally find the right candidate, he or she may not stick around long, putting you right back where you started. The average tenure in IT is five years, with hot markets like Miami seeing turnover every one to two years.

2. Training and Ramp-Up Time

Once you hire your perfect candidate, they’ll need time to ramp up on your systems. It can take up to two years for a new employee to become fully productive no matter their background and knowledge base.

Then they will need  the ongoing training that is critical for IT roles. Information technology systems and the cyber security threat landscape change rapidly, sometimes daily. It’s important to make that investment of time and money to keep up with training.

3. Sick and Vacation Time Coverage

If you are a small company with a one- or two-person IT team, you may find it very difficult to achieve the 24/7/365 IT coverage you need. Even with three or more techs, you run the risk of an illness taking the whole team offline for a while. That’s why in-house IT teams often use an IT service provider to cover support gaps due to illness, injury, vacation and even burnout.

4. Tools and Technology

Both in-house and outsourced IT teams need tools to protect a network and minimize downtime. The difference is that when you hire in-house, the full cost of these tools is on your business. A managed service provider (MSP) such as Internos can purchase the same tools at enterprise levels and pass those discounts on to you — often as a nominal per person/per month use fee. The tools you need include:

• Data backup and recovery
• Anti-spam
• Next-gen antivirus
• Anti-malware
• Inventory
• Monitoring
• Ticketing system/issue tracking
• Asset tracking
• Network documentation and knowledge base

In addition to their actual costs, these tools can be time-intensive and expensive to implement, run, monitor and analyze. Those costs are also absorbed by an outsourced IT firm.

5. Growth and Scalability

When processes and support can’t be scaled fast enough to let you grow in spurts, you miss opportunities — painful for small businesses. Imagine you get a huge order for a new client and your one- or two-person IT team can’t make the needed changes to your network fast enough to take advantage of that opportunity. You could hire additional in-house IT teammates (if you could find them in time) but that can feel like “one step forward, two steps back” for your long-term growth.

Managed service provider (MSP) costs are usually based on per-employee pricing. So if you need to quickly scale up or down based on market changes, you can do so seamlessly and with moderate and predictable cost fluctuations.If you are considering outsourcing for all or some of your IT service needs, don’t forget to consider these hidden costs. Contact us or book a meeting for a no-cost, no-pressure consultation to get a direct comparison for your specific business needs.