Most growing businesses reach a point where IT stops being something one person handles between other jobs. Your office manager fields the password resets. You fix the printer before a client meeting. It works, right up until a laptop dies the week before a pitch, or nobody notices a disk warning until it is an outage.
The obvious next step is to get a provider in. Sometimes that is right. Often the harder question is which parts should go out at all, and the people best placed to answer it are the ones quoting.
The question nobody neutral is asking
Hire someone, bring in a provider, or do a bit of both? Most businesses have no clear line between “we should handle this ourselves” and “this needs a professional”, and every vendor’s answer happens to be the option that involves buying more from them.
The answer depends on things a sales process does not examine: how much of your IT is genuinely specialised versus routine, how much downtime you can absorb, what you are already paying without realising it, and whether the person currently doing it wants the job.
What you can buy here
Assess
Scoped to your business, fixed fee, a written report you keep.
Guide
What to buy and who from. Requirements, shortlist, contract review.
Oversee
Someone else delivers, and you have someone on your side of the table.
How I help you choose
I review what you have, what supports it, and where the gaps are, then tell you which model fits: full outsourcing, a hybrid with your internal person, or a defined project to fix specific things before any ongoing arrangement makes sense. If outsourcing is right, I help you specify it properly, run the selection, and plan the handover so you are not left mid-transition with two providers pointing at each other.
What I run myself, and what goes to a partner
For a small business on standard cloud tools, I provide support myself, bought in hours rather than as a contract. That is IT support on Services I run. I do not run a 24/7 helpdesk or send a crew on site at short notice. If you need first-line support with phone cover, I will help you choose a provider and then hold them to what they signed.
Who this is for
Businesses past about five staff and up to about a hundred, without a dedicated IT department, or with one person doing the job of a team. It fits whether you are moving off an ad hoc arrangement for the first time, replacing a provider who has stopped earning it, or trying to work out whether you need external support at all.
If you are a smaller business and want support handled simply, at a price you can see, IT support on Services I run is the better fit. If you run a trade business, Tradie IT, which I also run, has services written for trades.
Common questions
Do we lose control of our systems if we outsource?
Not if the arrangement is written properly. You keep ownership of accounts, data and decisions. Most of the horror stories trace back to a contract nobody read, which is the part I look at hardest.
We already have someone doing IT part-time. Is that wrong?
Usually not. The common shape is your internal person handling day-to-day requests while a provider covers monitoring, escalation and after-hours, with me making sure the split is sensible and the provider is delivering.
How long does moving from an existing provider take?
Most straightforward handovers run two to four weeks once documentation is in hand. The risk is rarely technical. It is the gap where nobody is clearly responsible, so that gets agreed in writing before anything moves.
Can we bring it back in-house later?
Yes, and it is worth setting up so you can. Documentation written during the transition is what makes a future internal hire possible rather than a fresh start.
Next step
If you are not sure whether your current arrangement fits the business you have now, that is a normal place to start. Book a 20-minute technology conversation.