Most small businesses start with break/fix IT: something stops working, you call someone, they fix it, you pay. It is simple and it feels cheap. At some point — usually around the tenth employee or the first serious outage — it stops being either. This article explains the difference between break/fix and managed IT, what each really costs, and how to tell when it is time to switch.
How break/fix works
You pay for time, after a problem occurs. The provider has no visibility into your systems between calls and no financial reason to prevent the next call. Responsibility for noticing problems — a failing backup, a server disk filling up, an unpatched laptop — sits with you.
It works reasonably well when you have very few devices, no server, nothing regulated, and can tolerate a day without IT.
How managed IT works
You pay a fixed monthly fee for the provider to operate your IT: monitoring agents on every device, scheduled patching, backup checks, a helpdesk your staff can call, and documentation of the environment. The provider's incentive flips — every incident costs them time, so they are paid to prevent incidents rather than to repair them.
Side by side
| Aspect | Break/fix | Managed IT |
|---|---|---|
| You pay for | Hours, after something breaks | A fixed monthly scope |
| Provider's incentive | More incidents = more revenue | Fewer incidents = more margin |
| Who notices problems | You (or your staff, when they cannot work) | Monitoring, usually before anyone notices |
| Patching and updates | When someone remembers | On a schedule |
| Backups | Assumed to work | Monitored and periodically restore-tested |
| Documentation | In someone's head | Written, and owned by you |
| Budget | Unpredictable — quiet months, then a bad one | Predictable |
| Best for | 1–5 people, no server, low dependency on IT | 5–100 people who cannot afford downtime |
The hidden cost of break/fix
The invoice is only part of it. The larger cost is the time your team loses: the hour a salesperson spends without email, the morning the accountant cannot open the finance system, the afternoon the owner spends on the phone with a supplier. Multiply that by the number of incidents per year and by salaries, and the "cheap" model is frequently the expensive one.
The second hidden cost is risk. Without monitoring, backups fail silently, updates lapse, and former employees keep access. None of this appears on an invoice until the day it does.
Signs it is time to switch
- You have more than about 5–10 staff who depend on computers to do their job.
- You have a server, a line-of-business application, or customer data you could not afford to lose.
- Someone in your business has become the unofficial IT person and it is eating their real job.
- You have had one outage that cost more than a month of managed IT would.
- Nobody can tell you when the last successful backup was — or whether a restore has ever been tested.
- Your IT costs swing widely from month to month.
What a good switch looks like
Moving to managed IT should not be disruptive. A serious provider starts with an assessment: an inventory of hardware, software, accounts, risks, and recurring costs, written up in a report you can understand. Then they onboard — monitoring agents, backup checks, access review, a support process — while keeping what already works. You should receive documentation of your own environment, and it should belong to you, so that you are never locked in.
A fair test for any provider: ask what happens if you leave. If the answer involves them keeping your passwords, documentation, or domain, keep looking.
Can you keep a break/fix provider for some things?
Yes. Many organizations run a managed agreement for day-to-day operations and still use specialists for specific projects — an ERP consultant, a telecom installer. What matters is that one party is accountable for the environment as a whole and knows what everyone else is doing.