When I led Tarsus through the late nineties and into the noughties, we didn’t have many tools to choose from, and a distributor’s margins didn’t leave much room to buy what there was.
By Guy Whitcroft
What we did do was work our ERP system hard, tuning it for better controls and visibility, squeezing more out of what we already had. It helped, up to a point. What it didn’t do was change where the hard decisions landed. They still landed on the same few desks, only now we could see them coming a little sooner.
I’ve thought about that a great deal since, because the pattern hasn’t gone anywhere, despite the plethora of tools now available. Resellers, distributors and vendors spend their working lives helping customers choose better technology, and then run into constraints inside their own businesses that aren’t technology problems at all. They look like it, mind you. The CRM isn’t giving the right visibility. The service desk reporting is thin. The AI tools are genuinely impressive, and yet the business still feels stretched. Information moves faster, the dashboards look better, and somehow the same decisions still queue at the same doors.
That last bit is the part worth looking at.
Technology is very good at exposing what was already unclear inside a business. Put automation into a process where nobody really owns the exceptions, and the exceptions simply arrive faster. Put AI in front of a team that has no real authority to act, and you get quicker escalations to the same overloaded person at the top. The tool was never the constraint. It just made the actual constraint harder to ignore.
And the actual constraint, more often than not, is delegation misunderstood. Plenty of leaders delegate the activity, but keep the authority. A sales manager is responsible for a number, but can’t approve terms. An operations manager owns delivery, but can’t shift priorities without checking upward. A service manager is accountable for the customer, but can’t make the call that would fix the problem on the spot. The task has moved; the authority hasn’t.
At small scale, that’s manageable. The founder, or the country manager, keeps stepping in. Their judgement fills the gaps, their relationships smooth the edges, their head holds the context. But as the business grows, the very involvement that once created speed starts to absorb it. The organisation learns to wait. Not because people are incapable, but because the structure still routes everything to the top.
I watched it happen in our own business, and I’ve watched it in plenty of others since.
For those inside the larger vendors and distributors, don’t assume this is only a problem for the smaller VARs in your base. The same thing shows up in a multinational subsidiary where every meaningful decision routes back to a regional office and the local team has sensibly learned to stop trying. Founder dependency and authority dependency are shades of the same problem. The bottleneck simply sits further away.
None of this is an argument for more bureaucracy. Most businesses have enough administration already. Better structure should remove unnecessary traffic, not add it. It should make clear which decisions belong where, what needs escalating and what doesn’t, and who’s accountable once a call has been made. That clarity matters more as AI and automation become ordinary, not less. Faster tools raise the value of clear ownership – and the cost of confusion.
So perhaps the more useful question isn’t, “Which tool should we add next?” It might be “What part of our business are we about to make faster?”
If the structure is clear, the technology will help. If it isn’t, all it does is make the bottlenecks arrive sooner.