The Machine That Runs Your Business

Every business has two faces. There's the front—the bit customers see, the promises made. Then there's the back—the operations, the delivery, the systems that actually make things happen.

When the back end is held together with duct tape and hope

Every business has two faces. There’s the front – the bit customers see, the sales conversations, the promises made, the brand you’ve carefully built. Then there’s the back – the operations, the delivery, the supply chain, the systems that actually make things happen. The front gets the attention. The back gets whatever’s left over.

For most SME owners in New Zealand, operations is the thing they think about when something goes wrong. A supplier lets them down. A delivery runs late. Quality slips. A key piece of equipment breaks at the worst possible moment. Suddenly, the machine that’s been quietly humming along reveals itself to be held together with duct tape, workarounds, and the institutional knowledge of one person who happens to remember how things work.

The front of your business makes promises. The back of your business keeps them. When operations works, nobody notices. When it doesn’t, everyone does – especially your customers.

The Reality

Let’s name what’s actually happening.

Supplier dependency is a risk most SMEs don’t think about until it bites them. You’ve got one supplier for that critical input – the component, the material, the service you can’t do without. The relationship is good. The pricing is fair. Everything works fine. Until it doesn’t. Until they have a problem that becomes your problem. Until they raise prices and you have no alternative. Until they get bought by someone who doesn’t care about your account. You’ve built your business on a foundation you don’t control, and you didn’t notice until the ground shifted.

Delivery bottlenecks appear when demand grows faster than your capacity to fulfil it. You’ve done the hard work of winning customers. Now you can’t serve them fast enough. Orders stack up. Lead times blow out. Staff are stretched thin, working overtime, cutting corners to keep up. Quality starts to slip because speed matters more. Customers who were excited to buy from you start asking uncomfortable questions about when their order will arrive. The bottleneck that was supposed to be temporary becomes permanent, because you’re too busy fighting it to fix it.

Quality wobbles erode trust in ways that are hard to recover from. Something goes out that shouldn’t have. A product that’s not quite right. A service that falls short of what was promised. Maybe the customer complains. Maybe they don’t – they just don’t come back. You find out months later, or you never find out at all. The wobble might have been a one-off, a bad day, an unlucky combination of circumstances. Or it might be a sign that your quality controls aren’t what you thought they were. The scary part is not knowing which.

Systems held together with workarounds is the operational reality of most SMEs. The software that doesn’t quite do what you need, so someone’s built a spreadsheet to fill the gap. The process that only works because one person knows the trick. The handover that happens verbally because nobody’s written it down. The integration that’s actually someone copying data from one system to another every morning. It works, until it doesn’t. Until that person is sick, or leaves, or forgets. Until the workaround breaks and nobody remembers why it existed in the first place.

Inventory headaches swing between too much and too little. Too much stock ties up cash you need for other things. It sits in the warehouse aging, depreciating, taking up space, representing money you can’t use. Too little stock means you can’t fulfil orders. Customers wait. Opportunities slip away. Urgent freight costs eat your margins. You’re constantly adjusting, constantly guessing, never quite getting it right. The balance that looks obvious in theory proves impossible to achieve in practice.

Capacity crunches force impossible choices. You’ve got more work than you can handle, which sounds like a good problem until you’re living it. Do you turn away business you fought hard to win? Do you push your team past the point of sustainability? Do you invest in capacity that might not be needed in six months? Every option has a cost. Growth that should feel exciting feels stressful instead, because your operations weren’t built for this volume and scaling them isn’t simple.

What’s Actually Going On

Here’s what sits beneath these challenges.

Most SME operations evolved rather than being designed. In the early days, you did whatever worked. You found suppliers who would deal with a small business. You built processes on the fly. You solved problems with whatever was at hand. That scrappy improvisation got you here – but the systems you improvised for a business of five people don’t work for a business of twenty. The duct tape is showing.

The owner’s attention goes to the front of the business because that’s where the money comes in. Sales, marketing, customer relationships – these feel urgent and important. Operations only demands attention when something breaks. So you fix the break and move on, never addressing the underlying fragility. The machine keeps running, but it’s running on borrowed time.

Supplier concentration happens because finding good suppliers is hard. When you find one that works, you stick with them. The relationship deepens. You become dependent without realising it. Diversifying sounds sensible but takes time you don’t have. So you keep all your eggs in one basket and hope the basket holds.

The documentation and systems gap reflects a deeper truth about SME growth. When you were small, everyone knew everything. Communication happened naturally. Processes lived in people’s heads. That worked when there were three of you. It doesn’t work when there are thirty. But building proper systems feels like overhead, like bureaucracy, like something big companies do. So you keep muddling through, and the institutional knowledge becomes concentrated in fewer and fewer heads.

A Way Forward

None of this is unfixable. But it requires treating operations as strategic, not just functional.

Map your single points of failure. Where are you dependent on one supplier, one person, one system, one piece of equipment? Make a list. These are your vulnerabilities. You don’t have to fix them all at once, but you need to see them clearly. For each one, ask yourself what would happen if it failed tomorrow. The answers will tell you where to focus.

Document the workarounds. That thing someone does every morning that makes everything else work? Write it down. The trick that only the long-serving staff member knows? Capture it. The spreadsheet that bridges two systems? Turn it into a proper process. Documentation feels tedious until someone leaves and takes critical knowledge with them. Then it feels essential.

Build supplier relationships, not just supplier transactions. Know your key suppliers as partners, not just vendors. Understand their business. Share your plans. Build the kind of relationship where they’ll tell you early if there’s a problem, where you’re a customer they want to keep. At the same time, quietly identify alternatives. Not to replace them, but to reduce your exposure. Options create resilience.

Invest in capacity before you desperately need it. This is hard because it requires spending money on capability you’re not using yet. But the alternative is worse – turning away business, burning out your team, or delivering poorly because you’re stretched too thin. Think of capacity as a leading indicator, not a lagging one. The time to build it is before the crunch, not during.

Treat quality as a system, not an outcome. Quality doesn’t happen by hoping people do good work. It happens through clear standards, consistent processes, regular checks, and a culture that takes pride in getting things right. If you’re experiencing quality wobbles, don’t just fix the symptom. Ask what system allowed the wobble to happen, and fix that.

Take operations seriously. Give it attention, investment, and leadership. The back of your business is what allows the front to make promises worth making. A brilliant sales effort means nothing if operations can’t deliver. The businesses that scale successfully are usually the ones that get operations right – not glamorous, not exciting, but right.

Where to From Here

If any of this sounds familiar, you’re not alone. Operations is the unsexy side of business, the part that doesn’t feature in entrepreneurship stories or business magazines. But it’s often where SMEs win or lose.

At RegenerationHQ, we work with business owners who are ready to build operations that scale – not with complicated methodologies, but with practical thinking about how work actually flows through your business. If you’d value a conversation about what’s creaking in your machine, we should talk.