I have been renting my first house for the last two years by myself, and had considered going with a property management company after I had to boot my tenants, but something fell into my lap (neighbors across the street who I trusted), and I never ended up doing it. I currently live about 80 miles away in my wife's house, with which we are about to go through the same headache (I'll come back to this).
I took in my original tenants on a recommendation from a co-worker. The pros to this was that they did take care of the house in that there was no physical damage, but I don't think they ever cleaned the place in a year and a half. The con was I was too nice. First they couldn't give me a deposit because they had to break another lease and I said it was fine, you can pay me extra until you build it up. For a while we were fine (despite me losing $400/month because my mortgage was more than I could rent it out for) but after we renewed for a second year, they both lost their jobs. I used the deposit to pay the rent one month. They said they couldn't come up with the next month's rent, so we had a mutual agreement where they could break the lease with no penalty but they had to be out by the end of the month and their deposit was already gone.
If I had paid a company to take care of it I may have missed out on a few of these headaches. The company wouldn't hesitate to charge them late fees (they were often late after the first year), they would have charged them to break the lease, etc... I was too nice.
The house sat empty for about 3 months where I was paying two mortgages on top of everything else while we deliberated on moving back right away and my wife would just quit her job outright. We also considered getting a PM company this time and trying to do a 6 month - 12 month rental. That became moot when my neighbor sold his house and needed a place to stay for 6 months, so he is in there now.
In the mean time, my wife's house has been on the market since November without a single bite. We are considering selling it at a loss this time, since we don't really want to deal with the potential headaches of renting it, or the worst case of having it sit empty for a few months and making two mortgage payments on just my salary, whether we choose to rent on our own or get a PM company.
So I guess the point of this long ramble was I wish I had given up the 10% or whatever and handed over management to someone else. You can still find and screen your own tenant before you find a PM, then hand over management btw. But once the house goes empty I don't think YOU are allowed to screen potential new tenants. I could be wrong though.