Pain points experienced by SMEs

Background

As outlined in the article on architecting small enterprises, the opportunity exists to:

Establish stronger foundations through well-architected small enterprises that enable them to scale and respond to emerging opportunities more readily
Gain experience in cultivating and managing the organisational capability portfolio
Harness enterprise potential earlier in the life of an enterprise, at lower cost and with greater value being realised

This article is aimed at identifying:

Those points in the life of an enterprise where leaders experience pain arising from the difficulty of key “structural” decisions or from the legacy of failing to make appropriate “structural” decisions
The means by which they seek advice and support in resolving these difficulties
The search terms that they use in seeking to find appropriate advisory or assurance services

Based on our experience in managing growth:

it is evident to us that pain points emerge in the following general circumstances:

responding to significant market changes, requiring a change in business or operating models
seeking to “find efficiencies” to enable products / services to be “more competitive”
restructuring the organisation
formalising support arrangements (eg. establishing a Business Manager, or a Chief Operating Officer, or a Corporate Services function)
moving from informal (undocumented) to more formal (documented) business processes
addressing the “manual processes” that surround “IT systems” or the siloes that “IT systems” seem to have become

In larger organisations, advice and support for transformation and change will be sought from:

In smaller organisations, the advice may be sought from:

In light of the above:

- What other pain points have you observed?
- What other sources of advice have small to medium enterprises used?
- What means have these organisations used to provide appropriate advice and support?