I've handled the IT myself until now, but the business is too big - or I'm too busy. How do I hand it off?

This is one of the most common stories behind every MSP relationship: a capable owner ran the IT for years, the business grew, and now every hour spent on printers and passwords is an hour not spent running the company. The tipping point isn't skill - owners who've done their own IT usually understand their systems better than anyone - it's that the job now needs coverage (someone available when you're in a meeting, on vacation, or asleep) and consistency (patching and backups that happen on schedule, not when you get to them).

The handoff plays to your strength: because you know the environment, discovery is fast and accurate. Over the first month, what's in your head becomes documentation the business owns; the provider's monitoring takes over the invisible maintenance; and your team gets a help desk that isn't you. Good providers treat a technically fluent owner as an asset - you'll get straighter answers and better strategy conversations than the average client.

Two suggestions from watching this transition succeed: first, stay the decision-maker but get out of the ticket queue completely - half-handoffs where the owner still fields requests defeat the purpose. Second, use the transition to fix the things you never had time for; every owner-run environment has a to-do list of known compromises, and the first 90 days is when it finally gets done.