Skip the salary, the sick days, and the guesswork.
Every growing Memphis business eventually has the same conversation: “Maybe we need to just hire an IT person.” Then someone runs the numbers — salary, benefits, training, the fact that one person can’t cover vacations, sick days, or every specialty from networking to cybersecurity to phone systems — and the math stops making sense fast.
A single IT hire gives you one person’s skill set, one person’s availability, and one point of failure. IT outsourcing in Memphis through Big River Digital gives you a full team’s worth of coverage — help desk, network, security, backups, strategy — for a predictable monthly cost that’s usually a fraction of a salaried hire, without the HR overhead or the risk of losing your only IT knowledge the day someone gives notice.
This isn’t about replacing your business with a call center. It’s about handing the IT function — the part of running a business that has nothing to do with what makes your business special — to a team that does it every day. Depending on what you need, that includes:
You get all of it under one roof, with one phone number, instead of stitching together a freelancer for network issues, a different one for security, and a nephew who’s good with computers for everything else.
It’s easy to underestimate what an ad hoc IT setup actually costs, because the costs are scattered instead of showing up on one line item. A freelancer who’s slow to call back. A part-time hire who’s out sick the day the server goes down. A security gap nobody was specifically responsible for closing.
That gap matters more than most owners realize. An estimated 43% of all cyberattacks target small businesses, according to Accenture’s Cybercrime Study — not because small businesses have more to steal, but because they’re assumed to have weaker defenses. And when something does go wrong, the numbers get serious fast: the average cost of a data breach for organizations with fewer than 500 employees is $3.31 million, up 13.4% year-over-year, according to IBM’s Cost of a Data Breach Report. A widely cited industry estimate — not one single definitive study, but a figure that shows up consistently across cybercrime reporting — holds that roughly 60% of small companies close within six months of a significant cyberattack or data breach.
None of that is meant to scare you into a purchase. It’s meant to make an honest point: the “informal IT” setup a lot of Memphis businesses run on isn’t actually the cheap option. It just defers the cost to a worse moment.
Here’s the comparison most owners actually want to see:
A salaried IT hire typically means one person’s salary plus benefits, payroll taxes, training, and equipment — with coverage gaps any time that person is out, and a hard ceiling on how many specialties one hire can realistically cover.
A patchwork of contractors means variable monthly costs that spike exactly when things go wrong, multiple invoices, and no single person accountable for the whole picture — everyone can blame someone else when something breaks.
Outsourced IT with BRD means one flat monthly cost that doesn’t change because someone had a bad week, a full team instead of one person’s bandwidth, and one point of contact who owns the outcome — not just their piece of it.
Fortune Business Insights’ market research on why businesses adopt managed IT lines up with what we hear from Memphis owners directly: predictable costs, stronger security posture, freeing internal staff to focus on the actual business, and closing skills gaps no single hire could cover alone. That’s the outsourcing pitch in one sentence, minus the sales language.
You may already know us. Big River Digital has been the marketing team — websites, advertising, social media — behind a long list of Memphis businesses. That relationship already runs on trust: you’ve handed us your brand, your customer-facing presence, the thing that makes your business look competent to the outside world.
Outsourcing your IT to the same team means you’re not adding a fourth or fifth vendor to manage. You’re extending a relationship you already have, with a team that’s locally accountable — not a national call center reading from a script, but people in Memphis who pick up the phone. One vendor for your marketing and your network isn’t something any other IT provider in this market can offer, because none of them do marketing.
Fill out the short form below this section — your name, business name, phone, email, and a quick note on what’s going on (just exploring, something’s actively broken, or you’re ready to switch providers). Hit “Get My Free Audit,” and we’ll follow up to schedule your audit and get it on the calendar. No lengthy intake process, no obligation to buy anything afterward.
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If your current IT setup is one person, one contractor, or one string of favors away from a bad week, it’s worth a conversation. Call Big River Digital at (901) 708-7844 or schedule your free IT audit and see exactly what outsourcing would look like — and cost — for your business.
