What IT support actually costs a small business in Middle Tennessee

If you run a company with five to twenty-five employees, you have three realistic ways to buy IT help. Here is what each one costs, with real numbers, and when each one makes sense. I sell one of these three, so read accordingly. But the numbers are the numbers.

Option one: hire someone

The salary is not the cost. In Nashville right now, an IT support specialist averages about $63,600 a year and a systems administrator averages about $84,400. Benefits in the South add roughly 40 percent on top of wages, so the true employer cost looks like this:

• Basic help desk employee: about $75,000 a year
• Capable IT generalist who can run Microsoft 365, security, and devices on their own: about $89,000 a year
• Experienced systems administrator: about $118,000 a year

That is before recruiting, training, equipment, and the risk of everything living in one person's head.

Hiring makes sense when there is genuinely a day's worth of IT work every day. For most companies that happens somewhere past forty or fifty employees, or sooner if you have heavy on-site equipment or software of your own to support. Below that, you are paying for forty hours of presence to get a few hours of actual work.

Option two: an MSP

Managed service providers typically charge per user per month. For small businesses the going range is roughly $75 to $150 per user, depending on what is included. A fifteen-person company should expect somewhere between $1,300 and $2,200 a month, or about $16,000 to $27,000 a year.

For that you get real things: a help desk with response time commitments, after-hours coverage, monitoring, and a team instead of a person. If your business stops when a system goes down at 9 PM, that coverage is worth paying for.

The catch is that the model is built on the subscription continuing. An MSP has no reason to tell you that you are paying for coverage you do not use, and no reason to work toward needing them less.

Option three: hourly help

This is what I sell, at $125 an hour, billed in 15-minute increments, with fixed prices for anything that has a definable outcome.

The honest version of this pitch requires showing you the whole curve. Hourly runs heavier at the start. When an environment is disorganized, the early months involve untangling it while fixing things, and the bills reflect that. Then it tapers. One of my clients went from around $700 a month in their first year to around $300 a month now, because the recurring problems got fixed at the root instead of patched every time they resurfaced (one client's numbers, not a guarantee). Their heaviest year cost less than six weeks of a full-time generalist.

That taper is the part an hourly provider is not supposed to say out loud, because it means the work shrinks. It is also the entire point. If your hourly bills are not going down over time, your provider is billing symptoms instead of fixing causes, and you should ask why.

The comparison, plainly

For a fifteen-person company over a year:

• In-house generalist: about $89,000, whether anything breaks or not
• MSP: about $16,000 to $27,000, whether anything breaks or not
• Hourly with fixed-price projects: whatever the work actually was, front-loaded while things get fixed, tapering after

Hourly is the only one of the three without a fixed cost attached to it. A year with a big project in it costs more, a quiet year costs very little, and no month costs anything if nothing happened. The other two options bill you either way.

These are not three prices for the same thing. They are three different things. The hire gives you presence. The MSP gives you coverage. Hourly gives you the work itself, and only the work.

How to pick

Ask one question: what happens when something breaks at 9 PM on a Tuesday?

If the answer is "we lose money every minute until it is fixed," you need coverage. Pay for the MSP and do not feel bad about it.

If the answer is "someone deals with it in the morning," you are most of the market, and you are probably overpaying if you buy coverage. Buy the work instead.

And if you are not sure your environment is even in good enough shape to know what you need, that is a definable outcome too. I do a fixed-price assessment that scores your setup against ten points and gives you a written roadmap, whether you use me for the work or not.

One more thing, because it is the question underneath the question. My model is designed to end. When a client outgrows the written-request way of working, whether that is headcount, coverage needs, or a compliance deadline, I say so, and we plan a handoff to an MSP or an internal hire with documentation they can inherit in a day. Nobody should be anyone's client forever by default.

Salary figures from Indeed Nashville averages and BLS employer compensation data, July 2026. MSP ranges from published industry pricing surveys. Your numbers will vary; the shape of the comparison will not.

Next steps: See pricing, score your environment, or send a written request.