Free Operator's Brief · Managed IT
Your IT is “fine.” Until the day it isn’t.
On a calm day, reactive break-fix IT and fully managed IT look identical — and reactive even costs less. That’s the trap. Downtime runs $8K–$25K an hour for a mid-market firm (ITIC), and 88% of SMB breaches involve ransomware (Verizon DBIR). This brief prices the bet and shows how to see your own number before the bad day does.
Asset 01 · Infographic
The Cost of Reactive IT — at a glance
One-page visual: downtime cost, ransomware risk, reactive vs managed, the ≈$503K annual drag, and the 90-day path. Screenshot-ready for a leadership meeting.
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02 · Operator's Report
The Cost of Reactive IT
4-page PDF for mid-market operators: the reactive-vs-managed comparison, the $503K worked example, and the 90-day move to managed IT. No email required.
CORE12 · AN OPERATOR'S BRIEF
THE COST OF REACTIVE IT · 2026
Your IT is “fine.”
Until the day it isn’t.
$8K–25K
per hour of downtime
88%
SMB breaches with ransomware
≈$503K
annual drag, 85-person firm
The difference only shows on the bad day
Same result on a good day. On the bad day, only one has a plan.
66–80%
of downtime traces to human error and preventable causes — ITIC
6 in 10
firms can’t calculate what an hour of downtime costs them
181 days
median time a breach goes undetected — “fine” can already be compromised
A worked example
The bad day has a price. Here’s the arithmetic.
A $30M firm, 85 employees, $58 average loaded hourly rate, on reactive or light-touch IT. Swap your headcount and rate — the ratios hold.
Unplanned downtime
30 hrs/yr × $8,000/hr (ITIC low end, 20–100 employees)
$240,000
Slow-resolution productivity drain
85 employees × 0.75 hr/wk waiting on IT × 46 wks × $58
$170,085
Reactive-IT overspend
Hourly break-fix + emergency premium vs a fixed managed plan
$93,600
Conservative annual drag — excludes any incident
≈ $503,685
THE DAY IT ISN’T
One ransomware event ≈ $638,536 to recover
Average recovery for a 100–250-employee firm, before any ransom. Forty percent of smaller firms say a $100K hit alone would put them out of business. (Sophos, 2025 · Verizon DBIR, 2025)
Why waiting doesn’t hold the line
The hardware you’ve been lucky with can still fail. A breach can go unnoticed for months. Reactive costs creep up with every emergency and every renewal, while the one year you need a tested backup may be the year you learn you didn’t have one.
You don’t need a bad day to find out. Just a baseline.
Weeks 1–2 · See
IT Risk Report
Quantify downtime, security, compliance and productivity exposure for your industry and headcount.
Weeks 3–8 · Stabilize
Foundation + Protection
Patching, tested backup and recovery, endpoint and identity, MDR and 24/7 monitoring.
Ongoing · Optimize
The managed model
Fixed monthly cost, under-10-minute response, a quarterly roadmap and executive reporting.
Ask in your next leadership meeting
- If we lost email and files for a full day tomorrow, what does it cost — and can anyone in this room name the number?
- When did we last test a restore from backup — not confirm one ran, actually restore from it?
- What’s our real response time when something breaks at 4pm on a Friday?
What to ignore
A provider who bills more the worse your week gets. “We’ve never had a problem” presented as proof you’re covered. Security sold as a bolt-on rather than built into the plan.
See it before the bad day does
Get your IT Risk Report.
Your downtime, security and compliance exposure on your inputs — not industry averages — plus the three risks most likely costing you now.
Run the IT Risk Report2 min · no cost · no sales call