5 Signs Your Business Has Outgrown Break-Fix IT

Here's the thing about break-fix IT: it works great when you're a five-person startup operating out of a garage. Someone's laptop acts up, you call a guy, he comes out, he fixes it, you pay him $150 for the hour. Simple.

But somewhere between 10 and 50 employees, that model stops making sense. The math changes. The risks change. And the cost of downtime goes from "annoying" to "genuinely threatening."

If any of the following sound familiar, it might be time for a different approach.

1. You're spending more on emergency fixes than you'd spend on prevention

This is the big one. Sit down and add up what you spent on IT emergencies last year. Not just the hourly rates — include the lost productivity. If your server went down for a day and your 20-person team couldn't work, that's roughly $10,000-$20,000 in lost output.

Now compare that to what proactive managed IT would cost. For a 20-person team, that's about $2,000/month. If managed IT prevents even one major outage per year, it's already paid for itself. Our first client saw three prevented outages in their first quarter alone.

2. Your IT person takes days to respond — and you've accepted it

This is the one that really gets under our skin. Somewhere along the way, business owners started accepting that "my IT guy will get back to me in a day or two" is normal. It's not. It's a sign that you're not a priority.

In a proactive managed IT model, response time is measured in minutes, not days. At Kingdom Technologies, we guarantee a sub-15-minute response — not an auto-reply, but a real human who's already working on your problem.

If your IT provider's voicemail greeting is longer than their average response time, it's time to switch.

3. You worry about cybersecurity but aren't actually doing anything about it

You've read the headlines. Ransomware attacks on small businesses. Data breaches costing hundreds of thousands. You know it's a risk. But your current IT setup offers zero proactive protection — no monitoring, no threat detection, no employee training.

Here's the uncomfortable truth: 43% of cyberattacks target small businesses, and the average cost of a data breach for a small company is over $150,000. If you're relying on "it probably won't happen to us," you're gambling with your business.

Managed IT with cybersecurity doesn't just fix problems after they happen — it catches threats before they reach your team. 24/7 monitoring. Automatic patching. Real-time threat detection. Employee phishing training. The stuff that actually prevents breaches.

4. Your team complains about technology more than they use it

When your employees spend more time working around technology problems than working on their actual jobs, something is fundamentally broken. Slow computers. Printers that never work. Software that crashes every Tuesday for some reason.

These aren't just annoyances — they're productivity killers that compound over time. A single employee losing 30 minutes a day to tech issues costs your business about $3,000 a year. Multiply that by your headcount and the number gets uncomfortable fast.

Proactive IT management means your systems are maintained, updated, and optimized before they become a problem. Your team should barely think about technology — it should just work.

5. You're growing and your IT can't keep up

This is the growth trap. Your business is adding employees, maybe opening a second location, maybe moving to the cloud. Every new hire needs a laptop configured, email set up, access provisioned, and security locked down. Your break-fix guy handles it eventually, but "eventually" is losing you days of new-hire productivity.

Managed IT scales with you. New employee? We onboard them in hours, not days. New office? We design and deploy the network. Moving to the cloud? We handle the migration. The technology grows with the business instead of holding it back.

The bottom line

Break-fix IT is reactive by design. It profits when things go wrong. Managed IT is proactive by design — it profits when things go right. That alignment of incentives changes everything about how your technology gets treated.

If you recognized your business in any of these signs, you don't need to suffer through another year of slow responses and emergency invoices. There's a better way, and it starts with understanding where you stand today.