In the fast-moving world of small business, the pressure to keep costs down and productivity up is constant. It’s tempting to adopt a “this will do” approach when it comes to technology, patching together systems, relying on ad-hoc fixes, or deferring investment in IT improvement. After all: business is OK right now, right?

But that approach hides a far more insidious cost: the time, disruption and missed opportunity that accrues when your tech isn’t built for growth, reliability and efficiency. In fact, poor IT setups cost far more than the price of “just surviving”, and for small businesses and non-profit organisations that margin can be razor thin.

At In The Sky IT, we see it constantly: smart business owners, doing everything they can, yet hampered by sub-optimal technology. Here’s why making do with bad tech is a false economy.

1. Time is money, and you’re wasting both

When your systems are slow, unstable or poorly integrated you pay in hidden ways:

• Staff waiting for applications to load, data to sync, or queries to return.
• Duplicate data entry because systems don’t talk to each other.
• Frustration and disengagement when people fight tech rather than use it.
• Re-working and corrections when “quick fixes” create errors and data inconsistencies.

Each minute lost aggregates across your team and across days. What feels like a small lag becomes a productivity drag. In a growth-minded business every hour spent waiting is an hour lost in serving customers, innovating or scaling.

2. Avoidable costs

When you accept “it works for now” you may still be paying:

• Subscriptions for multiple siloed tools instead of one integrated platform.
• Legacy systems that are harder (and costlier) to support and maintain.
• Excessive help desk time dealing with recurring “weird tech issues”.
• Lost opportunities – e.g., inability to onboard new users quickly, or support remote working efficiently.

The cost of maintaining fragile or inefficient systems often exceeds the cost of replacing or upgrading them, yet many businesses stick with what they know because they ‘just make do’.

3. Business risk and disruption

Poor technology setups expose you to risk:

• A single point of failure or unsupported system can bring your operations to a halt.
• Data-integrity issues, security gaps, compliance failures.
• Inability to scale or adapt quickly. When you need to move fast, you’re held back.

When you don’t plan your tech strategically, you inadvertently build constraints into your business.

4. Missed strategic opportunity

Good technology isn’t just about keeping the lights on, it’s a competitive asset. If you’re bogged down in “making do” then you can’t focus on:

• Using data proactively to inform business decisions.
• Automating repetitive tasks so staff can focus on value.
• Enabling mobile, hybrid or flexible working that supports talent retention.
• Integrating systems so that your tech supports growth rather than creating a bottleneck.

A strategic tech setup becomes a platform for growth; a poor setup becomes a dragchute.

Common Mistakes SMEs Make – and How Strategic Tech Planning Avoids Them

Here’s a handy checklist of the typical mistakes we see,  and how taking a strategic approach can avoid each one.

Why Your Business Can’t Afford to Be “Good Enough”

When you look at the full impact of poor technology: lost productivity, frustrated staff, higher costs, missed opportunities, reputational or compliance risk. It becomes clear that “making do” is expensive. More expensive than it feels, and harder to track than you might think.

Here are three real-world implications:

• Hidden hourly cost: Even a small daily delay (say 15 minutes) per user becomes hundreds of lost hours per year across the team. That’s cost and opportunity lost.
• Growth bottleneck: When adding staff, expanding offices, or adopting new services you hit the tech ceiling, and growth stalls or becomes painful.
• Competitive gap: Other businesses invest in their tech; you remain mired in operational drag, you deliver slower, adapt more slowly, innovate less. Your customers notice.

By contrast, a strategic tech setup pays dividends: efficiency, scalability, better decision-making, happier staff and customers, and ultimately cost savings and revenue growth.

How In The Sky IT Helps You Break the “Make-Do” Cycle

Here at In The Sky IT we specialise in helping SMEs (and start-ups) turn their tech from a burden into a business enabler. With over 20 years’ experience working for leading organisations and SMEs we bridge the gap between strategy and delivery.

When you engage with us on a tech refresh or digital transformation project, we always walk your organisation, regardless of size, through the following five steps

• Carry out a technology health-check: what systems, processes and workflows are in place; where are the pain-points.
• Develop a roadmap aligned to your business goals: growth, scalability, remote working, data-insights, cost control.
• Ensure your tech is future-ready: cloud-friendly, modular, secure and efficient.
• Wrap in a support plan, training curriculum and change-management policy so your people adopt and use systems properly.
• Develop a governance and cost-control framework so you avoid surprise bills, multiple overlapping tools and hidden costs.

The outcome is tangible: stable, high-performing technology that grows with the business. Downtime decreases, operational efficiency climbs, and staff frustration drops. In The Sky IT ensures every part of the organisation runs on systems designed for success, not survival.

Starting the Conversation: Next Steps

If any of the above resonate, here’s how you can move forward:

1. Schedule a Technology Health-Check – A short, no-obligation review of your current systems, workflows and pain-points. Many consultancy firms offer a service like this. If you’d like to work with In The Sky IT, please get in touch.
2. Define Your Business Goals – Growth, efficiency, remote work, customer experience: what does your business want to achieve in the next 12–24 months?
3. Create Your Tech Roadmap – With cost, benefit and risk mapped out – so you invest with confidence.
4. Execute With Team Buy-In – Because technology is only as good as adoption and use. Training, support, governance all matter.
5. Review Regularly – Business evolves and so should tech. A yearly or bi-yearly review ensures you stay ahead.

At In The Sky IT we’re ready to walk that path with you: from feeling stuck, to having tech that works for you. Because in today’s world you can’t afford to make do. Your tech should be helping you, not holding you back.