IT costs in context

The Real Price of Productivity

Most businesses view IT as a utility where the goal is to minimize the monthly bill. However, in a modern professional service firm, IT is the factory floor. When the floor is poorly maintained, production stops.

Internal Staff-to-Employee Ratios

According to the GTIA 2025 SMB Technology and Buying Trends Research (a May 2025 US-specific survey of 720 employer firms with 2-249 paid employees), 50% of small and midsize businesses rely on internal staff for their ongoing IT management.

For firms where every employee is a "power user," the old ratio of 1 internal IT staffer per 50 to 100 employees is a recipe for fragility. In high-regulation sectors (Finance, Law, Architecture...), the benchmark has shifted toward 1:30. Across all sectors of the economy and company sizes Indeed.com puts the current average ratio at one IT worker for every 27 employees (95% of US employers have less than 50 employees).

In the United States, the median annual salary for an IT Manager is $137,478. Once taxes and benefits are included, this scales to a fully loaded cost of $170k–$190k+, representing a "high floor" for internal hiring (Sources: Salary.com, Avasant, McKinsey, Capterra, Paychex...).

Modern Spending Benchmarks: excluding Staff Costs

Current data indicates that SMBs (26-100 employees) now average $255,000 annually in tech spend excluding staff. For companies between 100 and 500 users, the average is now over a million (Sources: Gartner 2026, McKinsey 2023)

According to the Avasant IT Spending and Staffing Benchmarks study, the average IT spending as a percent of revenue for private and public companies (including midsize businesses) is approximately 5.2% (up to 11.4% for financial service firms). 

For "Power User" firms where every staff member is a high-cost billable professional, the target for resilient infrastructure is 5.5% to 8% of gross revenue. We view this range as the "Resilience Floor" because allocating below this level doesn't save money. Instead, it creates Technical Debt, which is a hidden and high-interest tax that manifests as costly downtime and uninsurability.

The "Silent" Extraction: Understanding the MSP Margin

While traditional Managed Service Providers (MSPs) often lead with a seemingly competitive "per-seat" price, the true cost of their service is frequently hidden beneath the surface of the contract. This "MSP Revenue Iceberg" relies on silent extraction; revenue generated through significant markups and/or "backend" rebates from distributors on software, hardware, and cloud consumption that can range from 15% to 40% over cost. Because these providers often act as "resellers" first and "stewards" second, their profit margins are built into the very tools you use to run your business.

Beyond product markups, traditional MSAs are often written with narrow definitions of "maintenance" that trigger out-of-scope project billing for 10% to 20% of total revenue. In these models, the AYCE fee covers only "keeping the lights on," while any meaningful improvement is billed as a separate "change order."

• Maintenance (Included): Patching a server, resetting a user password, or troubleshooting an existing email connection.
  
  
• Evolution (Extra Fee): Onboarding a new employee, moving a physical office, or executing an advanced system configuration (e.g., deploying a new security protocol).

At Concierge CIO, we operate as a fiduciary. We reject these hidden extractions by providing software at MSRP and cloud utilities as pass-through costs. We charge no markup and retain no rebates or kickbacks on any of your technology spend. Our only incentive is the health, security, and cost effectiveness of your environment, not the volume of your software or hardware spend. 

Fiduciary Comparison: Traditional vs. Concierge CIO Partners

 

Our Pricing: Open-Book Stewardship

Our model rejects the "Black Box" approach of traditional IT. We operate on a fiduciary basis where your Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace licenses are provided at MSRP with $0 markup or kickback. "Utility" services, such as Azure/AWS cloud consumption and VoIP minutes, are treated as pass-through costs. This ensures that we have no financial incentive to recommend more expensive solutions; our only incentive is the health and security of your environment.

While typical providers bill a flat "per seat" rate regardless of who is sitting in it, our pricing is unit-based and strictly tied to operational costs. We prioritize expertise over administrative bloat: 70% of your investment goes directly to senior engineering labor. The remaining 30% covers the comprehensive software stack we supply and our own infrastructure.

We operate on a direct correlation where your technology investment reflects your actual needs. We typically split our engineering time 50/50 between reactive and proactive stewardship, ensuring your systems are not just "fixed" but constantly hardened against future risk. By leveraging our Guild Model, we provide enterprise-grade CIO oversight at a fractional cost, converting a high-floor executive salary into a scalable, high-leverage investment. We replace a single point of failure (the solo IT silo) with a redundant team of senior experts. 

At the 50-user tier, your annual investment for our entire Guild remains significantly below the fully loaded cost of a single mid-level internal manager (as detailed in our benchmarks above).

Unit-Based Pricing: Targeted Value

Modern businesses are complex, and a "one-size-fits-all" price ignores how you actually work. We provide targeted stewardship for every persona and asset in your organization. These units can be added or removed at will directly through this site, and you can manage your entire environment through our payment portal .

• The Full Concierge Microsoft: Bespoke CIO strategy and elite engineering to ensure uninterrupted billability through permanent high-trust stewardship.
  
  
• The Full Concierge Google: High-governance stewardship for cloud-native teams pairing the strong security of ChromeOS with seamless browser access to essential Windows applications.
  
  
• The Full Concierge Enterprise: Our white-glove stewardship for users and teams operating across mixed clouds or hardware platforms.
  
  
• The Cloud Workspace: Designed for contractors and remote teams. We provide a "Digital Clean Room" via Azure Virtual Desktop.  
  
  
• The Full Concierge Federated Enterprise: Our most comprehensive mandate. This integrates the multi-cloud sovereignty of our Enterprise mandate with a dedicated Cloud Workspace via Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD).  
  
  
• The Front Line User: Designed for staff who primarily utilize communication and collaboration tools like Microsoft Teams or mobile-first applications.
  
  
• The Surgical Clean Room: Virtual Windows Application Delivery for contractors and BYOD users providing secure access to critical business tools without the overhead of a full virtual desktop.
  
  
• The Managed Asset: For "Hot Spares," lobby PCs, or conference room hardware that isn't assigned to a specific person but must remain Shields Up and ready for work at a moment’s notice.
  
  

Tiered Investment & Economies of Scale

Our mandate fees reflect the concentrated engineering effort required to maintain a high-governance environment. In the Foundational Phase (under 10 units), our stewardship focuses on the manual provisioning and structural optimization required to stabilize and grow a high-performance estate. As your firm achieves Environmental Maturity through scale, our standardized workflows allow us to pass those operational efficiencies back to you in the form of a Stewardship Credit.