Why SMEs often underestimate their own technological execution power
We love talking about growth. New markets, more people, more revenue. But anyone who works with SMEs knows: from the inside, growth often feels heavier rather than bigger.
In a previous article I called this the growth paradox: we want to involve everyone, and in doing so we lose our own execution power. Consensus cultures that work at small scale suddenly slam on the brakes as you grow. Your decision-making clogs up.
Now there's a second paradox on top of that: we want to work smarter and more efficiently, but stay trapped in tools and processes that don't grow with us.
And that's exactly where a quiet but fundamental shift is happening right now.
From "software is for the big players" to "software is a right"
In her opinion piece in De Tijd, Beatrice de Mahieu describes how large language models (LLMs) are rewriting the rules of the game. For years, the rule was:
- Whoever had money bought developers.
- Whoever had scale got custom-built software.
- Everyone else made do with Excel, email, and heroic improvisation.
Digitalization was something other people could afford. For many SMEs and non-profits, "custom software" sounded like: expensive, slow, and risky.
LLMs are changing that fundamentally:
Building software remains a craft, but it's becoming so cheap and so accessible that even small organizations can, for the first time, have digital tools custom-built for them — or even help build them.
That's not a technical detail. That's a power shift.
- Power shifts from large IT departments to smaller, more agile teams.
- From "we have to make do with what standard packages offer" to "we build what we actually need".
- From one big implementation every three years to a steady stream of small, targeted improvements.
Growth doesn't stall on ambition — it stalls on friction
In conversations with SMEs, I rarely see ambition as the problem. What stalls things is friction:
- Decisions that get stuck in "let's just align on this quickly".
- Critical processes living inside a handful of complex spreadsheets and inboxes.
- Reporting that costs someone half a day of copy-paste work every month.
- A CRM, ERP or HR tool that "sort of" fits, but still needs 20 workarounds.
None of that is exciting, but it's exactly where growth leaks away. And it's exactly the kind of friction that can be resolved today with relatively modest effort — if you deploy the right resources intelligently.
The right resources, the right way
The core message: growth is possible, as long as you:
- Choose the right resources (tools, data, AI, processes)
- Deploy them the right way (governance, decision-making, ownership)
A few concrete shifts I'm seeing among forward-thinking SMEs:
- From Excel to small, targeted tools
- From consensus to a clear decision architecture
- From an IT project to an organizational project
The quiet luxury SMEs now actually have
The real luxury is no longer a massive IT budget. The real luxury is:
- Agility: the ability to make decisions without endless layers.
- Proximity: staying close to customers and operations, and spotting problems fast.
- Focus: choosing a handful of critical processes where friction really hurts.
Combine that with what's available today in AI-assisted tooling, low-code/no-code, and affordable custom-built components, and you get something new:
SMEs that break their growth paradox not by bolting technology on top, but by placing it at the heart of their execution power.
Where do you start as an SME?
A few very practical starting questions:
- Where does "let's just align on this" cost you the most time today? → That's usually where a clear decision architecture and a simple supporting tool belong.
- Which three spreadsheets or email flows are so critical that nobody dares touch them? → Those are often your best candidates for a light, custom-built solution.
- Where's the gap biggest between "how we'd actually like to work" and "what our tools allow"? → That's your business case. Not built from technology, but from execution power.
Closing
The question is no longer whether you're a big enough SME to "do something with AI and digital transformation".
The question is: are you willing to shape your decision-making, processes and governance so you can actually put your new technological execution power to use?
Growth is possible. But only if you deploy the right resources the right way.