Building an In-House IT Department From Zero
Problem
Regal Distributing — a $150M foodservice and jan/san distributor with about 75 employees across office, warehouse, and driver staff — ran entirely on an outsourced MSP relationship. Every ticket, every project, every piece of institutional knowledge about “how our systems work” lived with a third party. There was no internal IT function, no documentation the company owned, and no one on staff who could make fast, informed decisions about the company’s own infrastructure. I was hired as employee #1 in IT, with a mandate to change that.
Approach
[Fill in: how you actually sequenced this — e.g. audited existing MSP contracts/systems first, took over specific services one at a time, hired the second team member, built documentation as you went]
Rather than trying to replace the MSP wholesale on day one, I prioritized [fill in: e.g. the systems with the highest business risk or the most recurring tickets] first, so the company felt an immediate improvement in responsiveness while I built out the rest of the function. I brought on a second team member to keep the department at a sustainable two-person size rather than over-hiring, and split responsibilities so we could cover [fill in: helpdesk/frontline vs. infrastructure, or whatever the actual split was].
Documentation was a first-class deliverable, not an afterthought — Confluence and NetBox became the system of record so knowledge stopped living in one person’s head, which is the exact failure mode we were moving away from.
Outcome
Within [fill in: timeframe], Regal moved from full MSP dependency to a self-sufficient, two-person internal IT function supporting roughly 100 users across the office, warehouse, and driver population — a ratio of about 1:40-50 that’s lean even by small-company standards. That team has since gone on to lead every major infrastructure initiative at the company (AD redesign, a full headquarters relocation, ERP go-live support, and more), which wouldn’t have been possible without first establishing in-house ownership and institutional knowledge.
[Fill in: any concrete before/after — MSP monthly spend eliminated, response time change, first project delivered fully in-house, etc., if you have or want to cite one]