What is co-managed IT?
A written split of responsibilities between your internal IT staff and us, with shared tooling and shared documentation. Your person stays the authority on your business and keeps the parts they want to own. We bring the bench: more hands, deeper security coverage, after-hours weight, and someone to talk shop with who has seen the problem before. The failed version of this arrangement is a helpdesk bolted on top of a burned-out admin; the written split of real responsibility is what makes the good version work.
How do we know if co-managed is right for us?
The signs are usually visible from the owner’s chair. One person carries everything and vacations are a coverage crisis. Patching happens when there is time, and there is never time. The cyber insurance renewal asks questions nobody is positioned to answer well. A big project, a move, a migration, a new location, keeps not happening because the daily load never lets up. If two or three of those sound familiar, the model fits.
How is the work actually split?
In writing, before anything starts, and it follows what your team wants to own rather than a template. A common shape: your person keeps user support, the line-of-business apps, and the local knowledge; we take monitoring, patch rhythm, backup rehearsals, identity and email security, and after-hours weight. Both sides work from the same documentation, so nothing depends on which team touched it last. The split can move as your team grows.
What happens to our IT person?
They keep their job, and their job gets better. We are hired to work for your IT lead, not around them. They stop being the single point of failure, stop losing nights to patch windows, and get a second set of eyes on the decisions that used to be theirs alone at 2 AM. The failure mode we refuse is the vendor who treats the internal person as an obstacle. If we ever think a responsibility should move, we say it to them first, in plain terms, with the reasoning.
What does the first month look like?
Quiet, mostly. We read the documentation that exists, build what does not, and sit with your IT person to map the environment: what runs where, what is fragile, what they have been meaning to get to for a year. The split gets drafted together and signed off by both sides. Then the first weight comes off, usually patch rhythm, since that is the load that eats nights and weekends first. No tooling gets replaced in week one, and nothing changes without your person knowing before it happens. By the second month the short written reviews start, shared with your person before anyone else, so the two of you are never surprised in the same meeting. The measure of a good first month is your IT lead saying the job feels lighter, and being able to point at why.
What does co-managed IT cost?
The comparison most owners are actually weighing is a second full-time hire, and that is the right lens to bring to the conversation. Co-managed pricing depends on the split: what your team keeps, what we carry, and how much environment there is to cover. It goes in writing after a short assessment, the bills match it, and it adjusts when the split does. If what you actually need is one big project rather than an ongoing arrangement, we will say so.
Quick answers
Will you work with the tools our IT person already uses?
Where they work, yes. We assess what is in place before proposing changes, and anything we do propose comes with the reasoning attached, to your person first.