The three arrangements
Neither. You handle IT internally, or informally, and call someone when something breaks. This is where most businesses start and where a surprising number stay well past the point it works.
Co-managed. You keep your internal IT person and add an outside team alongside them. You decide the split. They usually keep the daily relationship and the things only they understand about your business, and the outside team takes some combination of coverage, security, specialist work, and projects.
Fully managed. An outside team runs IT. There’s no internal IT person, or the person who was doing it goes back to their actual job.
How to tell which one fits
You’re a candidate for fully managed if nobody in the business has IT as their real job, and the person who’s been absorbing it has a different role they were hired for. This is extremely common. The office manager who became the IT person by default is usually doing two jobs and neither one properly.
You’re a candidate for co-managed if you have one capable IT person and the honest problem is capacity rather than skill. They can do the work. They can’t do all of it, can’t take a vacation without the queue piling up, and never get to the projects that would reduce the tickets.
Neither is defensible if you genuinely have enough internal coverage that nobody is a single point of failure. That usually means at least two people who can cover each other. One person, however good, isn’t coverage.
What each one actually costs
Fully managed is generally priced per user or per device, monthly. Co-managed is usually priced lower, because you’re buying a portion of the work rather than all of it, though the gap is smaller than people expect once security is included.
Neither looks free and isn’t. The cost sits in unplanned hardware replacement, in the hours your IT person spends reacting, in the projects that never happen, and in the risk you’re carrying that nobody has priced. It’s real money. It just doesn’t arrive on an invoice, which makes it easy to ignore until a bad month makes it visible all at once.
The mistake we see most
Businesses treat co-managed as a smaller version of fully managed, and design it that way. It isn’t, and the ones that work are designed differently.
The difference is who the arrangement is built with. If you design a co-managed arrangement in a room without your IT person in it, they will quietly work around it, and within a couple of months you’ll have two organizations solving the same problems separately and reporting different numbers to each other.
The arrangements that last get designed with that person, and they set the split. Sometimes that means they hand over the after-hours queue and keep everything else. Sometimes they keep the relationship and hand over security and projects. Both work. What doesn’t work is deciding for them.
Signs it’s time to change something
- One person knows things nobody else knows, and there’s no documentation
- The last real vacation that person took was interrupted
- You’ve deferred a project more than twice because nobody had time
- An insurer or a client asked a security question nobody could answer confidently
- A server or a piece of software is running past its support date because replacing it never became the most urgent thing
- You’re opening a second location
Any two of those together is usually the signal.
Where we come in
Co-managed is one of the most common ways a business starts working with a FlexPath company, and we design it with the person already doing the job rather than around them. If they’re the one reading this, that’s the right outcome.
If you want to think it through, bring your IT person to the conversation. It’s a better conversation with them in it.
