I own two managed services firms. Selling IT support is literally my business. So take it seriously when I tell you: support is not the thing most growing companies are missing.
Support keeps the lights on. Tickets get answered, laptops get replaced, the server stays patched. Every MSP worth hiring does this, including mine. But there’s a set of questions no ticket queue will ever answer for you. What should we build next year? What should we kill? Where would an attacker actually hurt us? Is our technology spend pointed at where the business is going, or at where it was five years ago?
Those are leadership questions, and in most small and mid-sized companies, nobody owns them.
The pattern
I see the same pattern over and over. The company grew. IT decisions kept getting made the way they were at ten employees: reactively, one purchase at a time, by whoever was closest to the problem. Now there are sixty people, three offices, a compliance requirement someone mentioned in a contract, and a stack of tools nobody remembers buying. Nothing is on fire. But nobody can tell the owner what the plan is, because there isn’t one.
What the gap costs
Here’s what that costs. Renewals get signed because canceling them is work. Security money goes wherever the last scary headline pointed, while the actual weak spot sits unexamined because nobody’s job is to go looking for it. None of this shows up as a line item called “no IT leadership.” It shows up as a few percent of waste in a dozen places, and eventually as one very bad week when the thing nobody was watching finally breaks.
Why the obvious fix doesn’t fit
The traditional fix is hiring a CIO or IT director. For a company with 30 to 300 employees, that’s a brutal proposition. A real one costs more than most of these companies can justify, and the honest ones will tell you the job is 10 hours a week of strategy stapled to 30 hours of work someone else should be doing. So companies either skip the role entirely or promote their best technician into it, which usually just means their best technician stops doing the thing they were great at.
The fractional model exists because the strategy part genuinely is 10 hours a week. You need someone senior in the room when budget, security, and roadmap decisions get made. You do not need them there full-time, and you definitely don’t need to pay for them full-time.
One thing I’d push back on, though: fractional leadership is not a lighter version of the same job. It forces a discipline the full-time version often loses. When you have limited hours with a company, you work on what moves the business. There’s no time to attend every meeting or referee every tooling debate. I think that constraint is a feature.
A test you can run this week
A test you can run on your own company this week: ask who can explain, in plain language, what your top three technology risks are and what you’re doing about them. If the answer is a person, and their explanation matches what you’re actually spending money on, you’re in better shape than most. If the answer is a shrug, or “our IT company handles that,” that’s the gap. Your IT company handles the tickets. Someone still has to own the direction.
That someone doesn’t have to be me. But it has to be somebody, and “nobody” has been the default answer for too many companies for too long.