Black Lab vs. Internal IT

Hiring your first IT employee feels like the responsible move. Sometimes it is. Here’s the honest comparison for a growing business — written by people who have sat on both sides of it: Black Lab began as the internal IT operation behind three Texas care companies — DSSW, Lifespan Home Care, and CDS in Texas — and spun off as a separate company in November 2025. In the spin-out’s first year, the group’s overall IT budget came down by roughly $100,000.

What one IT hire actually costs

Price a competent IT generalist in your market, add benefits, taxes, tools, and training, and you have the real annual number — and for it you get one person’s skills, one person’s hours, and one person’s vacation schedule. When they’re out, you have no IT. When they resign, they walk out with every password and every piece of undocumented knowledge.

What the same budget buys from an MSP

The same spend covers a full managed service agreement for most businesses in this size range — and the difference isn’t just price. It’s depth:

• A team, not a person. Network problem? Security question? Server migration? Different specializts, same phone number.
• Coverage without gaps. Monitoring doesn’t take PTO. After-hours emergencies reach an on-call engineer, not a personal cell phone that may or may not answer.
• Documentation as a discipline. Your environment is documented because our business depends on it — nothing lives only in one person’s head.

When internal IT is the right answer

We’ll say it plainly: some businesses should hire. If you’re at the top of that range or beyond, run specialized line-of-business systems that need daily hands-on attention, or need someone physically present at all times, an internal hire makes sense — and the best setup is often both: your person handles the day-to-day and the floor, we handle security, infrastructure, and after-hours. Co-managed arrangements like that are a standard part of how we work.

The question to ask

It isn’t “person or company?” It’s: what happens at 2 a.m., what happens when they quit, and who’s checking the security work? Get those three answers from any option you consider — including us.