Foreword
Twenty years. The same
five problems.
I have been working with small and medium businesses across the UK for over 20 years. The technology changes. The problems don’t.
This report is about those problems — the ones I see every single week. Not because business owners are careless or uninformed, but because technology moved fast, businesses moved fast to keep up, and the strategy part got left behind.
None of these problems are your fault. All of them have solutions. None require a large budget or technical background. They just need to be made a priority.
“Our IT just
kind of happened”
Most businesses start small, adopt tools reactively as they grow, and end up with twelve subscriptions, files in four places, and no clear picture of what anyone is actually using. It’s not a sign of poor management — it’s a sign that the business was focused on growing, not on keeping a neat technology inventory.
The problem is that this accumulated complexity becomes increasingly expensive to maintain, harder to secure, and more difficult to hand over when team members change.
What to do: Start with a simple audit. List every tool, every subscription, where your data lives, and who has access. Once you have that picture, you can make sensible decisions about what to keep, consolidate, or cancel.
Passwords and security
are still being ignored
In 2025 I still regularly find businesses sharing passwords over WhatsApp, using the same password across multiple systems, with no multi-factor authentication and former employees still holding active access to critical systems.
The risk this creates is not theoretical. In a single week last year I spoke to three business owners who had experienced direct financial loss because of weak password practices. The amounts ranged from £4,000 to over £40,000.
“The cost of not doing the security basics is much higher than the cost of doing them.”
What to do: Turn on multi-factor authentication on every account. Get a password manager — LastPass, 1Password, or Bitwarden all work well. Remove access the same day someone leaves your business. None of this is expensive. None of it requires technical expertise.
Nobody knows
where the data is
“Some on OneDrive, some on laptops, some in email — I’m not entirely sure.” That answer, which I hear regularly, should worry any business owner. It means your data is not backed up properly. It means staff are probably duplicating work. And it means you almost certainly have a GDPR exposure you are unaware of.
What to do: Pick one place for your data to live and be disciplined about it. Set up automated backups — and test them. Do a basic GDPR check: do you know what personal data your business holds, where it is stored, and who has access to it? If not, that needs to be resolved.
The same tasks are being
done manually every day
Chasing invoices. Copying data between systems. Updating spreadsheets. Sending the same email every week. In most SMEs these are done manually, every time, by a human being — often someone capable of far more valuable work.
In 2025, there is no good reason for most of these tasks to be manual. The tools to automate them are affordable, reliable, and genuinely straightforward to implement.
What to do: Identify your five most repetitive tasks. Tools like Zapier, Make, or Microsoft Power Automate can automate most of them without any development work. Start with one. The time saving is usually immediate — and the confidence it builds leads to more.
Technology decisions are made
without proper advice
Most SMEs choose technology based on a friend’s recommendation, an advert, or whatever was cheapest. The result, which I see constantly, is expensive contracts that don’t fit the business, tools nobody actually uses, and painful migrations three years later when the wrong decision finally becomes undeniable.
The irony is that proper independent advice almost always costs far less than the wrong decision costs to fix.
What to do: Before any significant technology decision — a new system, a migration, a major subscription — get independent advice from someone with no financial interest in what you choose. A few hours of proper guidance almost always costs less than making the wrong decision.
Closing Thoughts
None of this is
unusual. None of it is your fault.
Every business I work with has at least two or three of these problems. Many have all five. It doesn’t reflect poorly on the business or its leadership — it reflects how fast everything moved, and how little time there was to stop and think strategically about technology while everything else was demanding attention.
The solutions are not complicated. They are not expensive. They do not require a full-time technology person. They require clarity about where things stand, and the willingness to address them one at a time.
If you would like to talk through where your business stands, I am available for a complimentary 30-minute conversation. No agenda, no obligation. Just an honest look at what matters most.