Top 10 SMB Tech Issues: No Plan for Growth or Recovery
18 August 2025
Issue 10: No Plan for Growth (or Recovery)
Too many SMBs run their tech like a patchwork quilt — it works “for now,” but there’s no roadmap for where it’s going, and no plan for how to bounce back when things go wrong. Growth happens reactively, and recovery is left to chance.
The problem
- No scalability plan: Systems that work for 10 staff collapse under the strain of 30.
- Ad-hoc resilience: Backups exist, but nobody knows how long a restore would take — or if it’s even possible.
- Budget blindness: Costs spike with each new hire, app, or vendor, without a model for sustainable growth.
- No “what if” scenarios: Outages, ransomware, supplier failure — not tested, not rehearsed.
The real-world impact
- Growth stalls because systems can’t scale; manual workarounds become the norm.
- Recovery from downtime takes days, not hours — customers leave, and trust is lost.
- Costs balloon as shadow IT fills gaps and duplicated tools creep in.
- Auditors or insurers raise red flags, driving up premiums or blocking contracts.
What good looks like
- Growth-aligned IT strategy: Tech scales with headcount and customer demand, not against it.
- Documented disaster recovery (DR): RPO/RTO defined, tested, and achievable.
- Cost models: Clear visibility of per-user or per-service spend, enabling predictable budgeting.
- Playbooks: Outage, ransomware, and supplier failure scenarios rehearsed with clear responsibilities.
Where to start
- Run a scalability test: could your systems handle 2x users tomorrow?
- Define RPO/RTO for critical systems and test at least one restore this month.
- Build a growth roadmap — align IT investments with hiring and sales projections.
- Do a tabletop disaster recovery exercise: simulate ransomware, power loss, or supplier outage.
The takeaway
Hope is not a strategy. If you want to grow — and survive disruption — you need a plan. Roadmap your IT for scale, test your recovery before you need it, and make growth intentional rather than accidental.
Need help turning “what if” into “we’re ready”? Get in touch.