How to Handle IT When You're Too Small for a Full-Time Hire
There's a gap between 'wing it' and 'hire someone.' Here's how smart remote teams bridge it without breaking the budget.
You've got 30 employees. Maybe 60. You're remote-first, growing fast, and IT is held together with duct tape and good intentions.
Sound familiar? You're not alone. Most companies at this stage are stuck in a frustrating middle ground: too big to wing it, too small to justify a full-time IT salary.
The "wing it" phase
In the early days, IT is everyone's side job. The founder sets up Google Workspace. The first engineer picks the VPN. Someone in ops creates a Notion page called "New Hire Setup" and it works well enough. For a while.
Then you hit 20 people. Then 50. Suddenly onboarding takes three days instead of three hours. Someone leaves and nobody remembers which tools they had access to. A laptop dies and there's no backup plan.
Why a full-time hire doesn't make sense yet
A competent IT manager costs $80,000 to $120,000 a year with benefits. At 30 to 60 employees, there genuinely isn't 40 hours of IT work every week. You'd be paying a six-figure salary for someone who spends half their time looking for things to do.
That changes at scale. Once you're past 200 people, a full-time hire is absolutely the right call. But before that, you're overpaying for coverage you don't fully need.
The options in between
There are a few ways companies try to solve this:
The "tech-savvy employee" approach. You assign IT responsibilities to someone who's already got a full-time job. They resent it. The work is inconsistent. And when they leave, all institutional knowledge walks out the door.
The MSP route. You sign up with a managed service provider. They give you a ticket portal, charge per device, and treat you like every other customer. It works for offices with on-prem servers. It's a poor fit for remote teams using modern SaaS tools.
The fractional IT model. You bring in a dedicated IT professional on a monthly retainer. They own your IT stack end to end: onboarding, offboarding, security, support, SaaS management. All without the overhead of a full-time salary.
What to look for
If you go the fractional route, look for someone who understands remote-first operations. They should be comfortable with MDM platforms, identity providers like Okta or Google, and the modern SaaS stack.
They should also communicate async. If your IT person needs to be on a Zoom call every time someone forgets their password, you've hired the wrong person.
The bottom line
You don't need to choose between chaos and a six-figure hire. The fractional model exists specifically for this stage. Professional IT coverage at a price that makes sense for your size.