Is your “Internal IT” just a stressed-out Office Manager holding the admin passwords, or is it a strategic function that actually owns your business outcomes?
Internal IT is the dedicated ownership of your company’s technology strategy, infrastructure, and vendor accountability—it is the proactive “brain” that ensures your tech stack facilitates growth instead of acting as a bottleneck once you hit the 60-user threshold.
In the deep dive below, we are going to expose why 60 staff is the ultimate “red zone” for SME infrastructure, the financial trap of the £100k full-time hire, and the exact difference between an MSP that “fixes” and an Internal function that “owns.” We will also answer the critical questions regarding the “Accountability Gap,” the hidden risks of Shadow IT, and how to bridge it without exploding your overhead.
What is the difference between Internal IT and an MSP?
In the world of business technology, people often confuse the “hands” with the “head.” An MSP provides the hands—the technical labor required to reset passwords and patch servers—but they rarely provide the head. An MSP is an external vendor; they are incentivized to close tickets quickly to maintain their profit margins. They are not incentivized to sit in your leadership meetings for three hours to discuss how a new 3-floor office move will impact your 2027 scaling plans.
People also ask: “Do I need an IT manager if I already have an MSP?” The answer is almost always yes once you cross 50 staff. In my experience, the “Accountability Gap” is where businesses lose the most money. When an internet line goes down, the ISP blames the router, and the MSP blames the ISP. Without Internal IT, the CEO is the one stuck in the middle of that finger-pointing match. Internal IT acts as the translator. You tell the Internal Lead what the business needs to achieve, and the Internal Lead ensures the MSP and the hardware vendors deliver the infrastructure to make it happen.
If no one internally owns the outcome, you are just paying a monthly fee for a service that isn’t aligned with your business goals. True Internal IT doesn’t just support the business; it enables it by removing the technical friction that slows down your departments. It ensures that your technology budget is spent on growth, not just maintaining a status quo that is slowly becoming obsolete.
Why is 60 employees the breaking point for IT?
Growth is rarely linear in terms of technical requirements. There is a specific threshold, usually around the 60-user mark, where the “scrappy” IT methods of a startup begin to fail under the weight of enterprise-level demands. When you have 15-20 staff, you can survive on a consumer-grade router and a break-fix mentality. But at 60 staff spread across multiple floors, the technical debt starts to compound.
This is the stage where Shadow IT takes over. Employees start buying their own SaaS because the internal systems are too slow or the onboarding process is non-existent. True Internal IT shuts this down by providing a tech stack that actually works for the users. You shouldn’t wait for a crash to address this. You hire or appoint ownership when the complexity of your tech (moves, security, multi-site connectivity) starts to slow down your staff’s productivity.
At 60 staff, the risk of a single hour of downtime costs more than a manager’s monthly retainer. With 60 users, you likely occupy a larger footprint or multiple levels. This introduces the need for Managed Switches and Vertical Risers to ensure connectivity doesn’t drop between floors. This is also the size where you become a primary target for cyber-attacks. An MSP might install an antivirus, but Internal IT ensures that Cyber Essentials or ISO 27001 standards are actually part of the company culture.
How much does an Internal IT Manager cost in 2026?
The biggest hurdle for an SME is the sheer cost of mid-to-senior technical talent. In the current market, the gap between what you need and what you can afford is widening significantly. The London Salary Trap is a real phenomenon where a mid-to-senior IT Manager now commands £80k–£90k. When you add 20% for NI and pensions, plus the £19,000 average recruitment cost for a management role, you’ve spent your entire year’s IT budget on one person before buying a single piece of hardware.
Furthermore, you face the “Single Point of Failure” risk. If you hire one person, what happens when they go on holiday? Or worse, when they leave and take all the secret knowledge of your network with them? This is why the Deetrain model is becoming the 2026 standard. You get the brain of a £100k Director to handle the strategy, the wayleaves, and the vendor management, but you keep your MSP to handle the daily “my printer is broken” tickets.
People also ask: “Is it cheaper to outsource Internal IT?” Financially, yes, but only if you outsource the function of management (Oversight), not just the technical support. By adopting a fractional model, you bridge the gap. You get the high-level expertise required to manage a 3-floor office move or a security migration without the permanent overhead of a C-suite salary.
What are the hidden risks of having no Internal IT lead?
Many businesses operate in a state of functional ignorance, where they believe everything is fine simply because the lights are still on and the Wi-Fi is connected. But beneath the surface, the lack of an internal lead creates silent liabilities that eventually surface as “emergency” costs. Many CEOs think they are saving money by not having an IT lead, but they are actually paying a chaos tax.
When you don’t have an internal person owning the lifecycle of your hardware, you end up buying expensive equipment in a panic because a 7-year-old server finally died. It’s not just hackers you have to worry about; it’s data loss and lack of redundancy. If your primary fiber line is cut by a rogue digger in the street, does your business stop? Internal IT ensures you have a secondary failover line ready to go so that your 60 users remain productive.
Without technical oversight, you are also at the mercy of whatever your MSP or ISP wants to sell you. Internal IT audits these vendors and ensures you aren’t paying for ghost licenses or services you no longer use. I have audited 60-user firms and found thousands of pounds a month being wasted on software for employees who left the company years ago. An internal lead stops the bleed.
Who owns the IT outcomes in your business?
In most companies, everyone is responsible for IT, which in reality means no one is. When a major project like an office move or a security migration fails, the lack of a clear owner leads to a blame game that costs the company thousands in lost billable hours. Ownership means being responsible for the result of a project—like a 3-floor office move—rather than just the hours spent working on it.
I have seen CEOs lose weeks of productivity because they were the ones trying to coordinate an AV specialist and a cabling contractor. That isn’t leadership; that’s expensive clerical work. You shouldn’t be the person arguing with BT about a wayleave signature or trying to figure out why the boardroom TV won’t connect to the Wi-Fi. What does an IT Manager actually do daily? They manage the Risk Register, they ensure compliance is maintained, and they ensure that when the business decides to move offices, the infrastructure is ready on day one.
The Strategic Roadmap is the most valuable output of internal ownership. They look at the next 12–24 months and ask the hard questions: “Is our server capacity ready for 80 staff?” or “Do we have a backup for our primary fiber line?” They prevent emergency spending by planning for upgrades before things break. By having an internal lead, you create a culture of technical accountability where one person owns the result.
How do you transition from a “Helpdesk” to a “Strategy” model?
Moving away from the Break-Fix mentality is a psychological shift for most leadership teams. It requires viewing technology as a utility that powers the business, rather than a cost center that needs to be minimized. To do this effectively, you need to audit your current internal capability. If you are hovering around the 50-60 user mark, you need to ask yourself if you have a plan for replacing aging switches and Access Points before they fail.
The transition isn’t about buying more software; it’s about hiring or partnering with an expert who can sit at the table and tell you what you need, not just what you want to hear. If we had to move 60 people to a 3-floor office tomorrow, who owns the Wayleave process? Who is responsible for ensuring MFA is enforced across 100% of our accounts? Is our IT spend predictable, or are we constantly hit with surprise hardware bills?
If you cannot answer “yes” to these, you have an accountability gap. Addressing this gap is the first step toward a scalable business. You move from being a company that “has computers” to a company that uses technology as a competitive advantage.
Conclusion: Stop being the “IT Support CEO”
The most expensive way to manage IT is to have your CEO or COO doing it. At 60 staff, your time is worth far more than the cost of professional IT oversight. Internal IT isn’t a luxury for 60-person firms; it’s a defensive necessity. In the modern business environment, your ability to scale is directly tied to the stability of your infrastructure.
By moving to a fractional oversight model, you bridge the gap between having a helpdesk and having a strategy. You stop reacting to problems and start building an infrastructure that supports your next 20 hires. Don’t let your technology be the thing that caps your growth. Focus on running your company, and let a dedicated lead own the outcomes that keep you online.