Someone on our team handles IT on the side, but everything feels rigged up and strung together. What now?

Every growing business has had one: the office manager, bookkeeper, or tech-comfortable employee who became 'the IT person' by being helpful once. They've kept things running through genuine effort - and the result is what you'd expect from IT done in the margins of another job: workarounds instead of fixes, consumer equipment doing business jobs, passwords in a spreadsheet (or one person's memory), backups that someone set up once and nobody has checked since. It works right up until the day it doesn't, and by then the person who understands the rigging may be on vacation, overloaded, or gone.

The move to professional support isn't a judgment of that person - they did a job nobody hired them for. In practice the transition usually improves their life most of all: the MSP documents and untangles the accumulated workarounds, replaces the fragile pieces, and takes the 'why is the internet down' interruptions off their desk. Many businesses keep them involved as the internal point of contact - someone who knows the history and the people - which is genuinely valuable, minus the 2am stress.

Expect the first months to surface surprises; strung-together environments always hold a few (unlicensed software, an expired backup, equipment past end-of-life). That's not bad news - it's the unknown risk becoming a known, fixable list. The end state: your team member back at their real job full-time, and an IT foundation that doesn't depend on heroics.