Most business owners who handle their own IT think they’re saving money. And for the first year or two, they might be. But there’s a hidden cost that nobody talks about — and once you see the maths, it’s hard to unsee it.
This isn’t a scare piece. I’m not trying to convince you that you need to outsource everything to someone like me. But I’ve worked with enough businesses across Galway and the west of Ireland to see the pattern repeat over and over. Here’s what actually happens.
The hourly rate you’re not counting
If you’re a business owner, your time has a value. Maybe you bill clients at €80 an hour. Maybe you don’t bill hourly, but your time generates revenue — sales calls, client work, business development. Either way, every hour you spend on IT is an hour you’re not spending on what actually grows the business.
Let’s be conservative and say you spend 5 hours a month on IT tasks. Troubleshooting the printer, researching why email isn’t working, setting up a new user’s laptop, dealing with a slow computer, figuring out why the Wi-Fi dropped. Five hours is probably low, but let’s use it.
At €80/hour, that’s €400/month. Over a year, that’s €4,800 of your time spent on IT. For context, that’s more than most small businesses pay for outsourced IT support.
And here’s the thing — you’re probably slower at these tasks than someone who does them every day. What takes you 45 minutes to research and fix might take an IT person 10 minutes. So it’s not just €4,800 — it’s €4,800 spent inefficiently.
The cost of downtime
When something breaks and you can’t fix it quickly, your whole team stops. Let’s say you have 5 people and your email goes down for half a day. That’s 5 people × 4 hours × let’s say €25/hour average cost (wages, overhead). That’s €500 for a single incident.
If your internet goes down and you don’t have a plan B, everyone’s sitting around. If a shared drive becomes inaccessible, nobody can work on current projects. If ransomware hits and you don’t have proper backups, you’re looking at days of downtime, not hours.
The businesses I support don’t experience extended downtime because the systems are set up to prevent it, and when something does go wrong, it gets fixed in minutes, not days. That’s not a sales pitch — it’s just the reality of having someone who knows your setup on speed dial.
The security gap
This is the big one. Most business owners don’t know what they don’t know about security. They think they’re fine because “nothing has happened yet.” But most breaches go undetected for weeks or months.
The cost of a security incident for a small Irish business:
GDPR fines: Up to 4% of annual turnover or €20 million, whichever is higher. Most small business fines are in the thousands, but even a €5,000 fine hurts. Read more about GDPR obligations for small businesses.
Client trust: Tell your clients their data was compromised because you didn’t have MFA turned on and see what happens to your retention rate.
Cleanup costs: Incident response, forensics, rebuilding systems. Even a straightforward email compromise can take 20+ hours to fully investigate and remediate.
Legal costs: If client data is involved, you may need legal advice on notification obligations and liability.
A proper security baseline — MFA, email protection, phishing awareness, proper backups — costs a fraction of what a single incident costs to clean up.
The compounding problem
Year one: everything works. You set it all up, it’s running, you feel great about doing it yourself. Savings = real.
Year two: tech debt starts accumulating. That password policy you were going to implement? Never happened. Those backups you were going to test? Haven’t tested them. That old laptop running Windows 10 that’s about to go end-of-support? Still in use. The common IT mistakes start piling up.
Year three: you’re firefighting. Something breaks every week. You’re spending 8+ hours a month on IT instead of 5. The team is complaining about slow machines and printer issues. You’ve got 3 different systems that don’t talk to each other. And you’re wondering why the business isn’t growing as fast as it should.
This is the pattern. I’ve seen it dozens of times.
What outsourced IT actually costs
For a 5–10 person business, proper IT support typically costs between €200–€500 per month depending on what’s included. That covers monitoring, security, backups, user support, and someone who actually knows your setup and can fix things quickly.
Compare that to the invisible costs above: €4,800+ in your time, plus downtime costs, plus security risk. The maths usually starts to favour outsourcing around the 5-person mark. Below that, the hybrid approach often makes more sense — you handle the basics, someone else handles the rest.
The middle ground that works for most people
You don’t have to hand everything over. Most of the businesses I work with in Tuam, Claremorris, Claregalway, and Athenry use a hybrid model:
They handle day-to-day tasks — password resets, basic troubleshooting, adding a new calendar event. I handle the things that need expertise — security configuration, backup management, new user setup, vendor management, and the “something’s gone really wrong” calls.
This typically costs a fraction of full managed IT because you’re not paying someone to do things you can do yourself. But you’re also not flying blind on the things that matter.
A real example
A business I started working with last year — 8 people, professional services firm. The owner was spending roughly 6 hours a week on IT. Not because things were constantly breaking, but because of the accumulated overhead: researching solutions, troubleshooting, managing licenses, dealing with the printer, setting up new laptops, responding to “the internet is slow” complaints.
Six hours a week at her billing rate was costing the business over €20,000 a year in lost productive time. She now pays a fraction of that for IT support, and those 6 hours a week go back into client work. Revenue went up. Stress went down. The IT actually works properly now.
The point isn’t that everyone needs IT support. The point is that the “saving” from doing it yourself isn’t always a saving once you count your time honestly.
How to know if it’s time
Track your IT time for one month. Every time you touch something IT-related — troubleshooting, research, setup, vendor calls — note the time. At the end of the month, multiply by your hourly rate. If that number is higher than what IT support would cost, you have your answer.
Want to know what IT support would actually cost for your business? WhatsApp me — I’ll give you a number, no obligation. And if the answer is “you’re fine doing it yourself,” I’ll tell you that too.