Trenutak kada tvrtka shvati da ima dug u sustavima

It usually hits during growth, a key person leaving, or a compliance deadline.

I’ve watched it happen dozens of times. A business that was running “fine” suddenly isn’t. Everything that worked before stops working. And the leadership team looks around wondering: how did we get here?

The answer is systems debt. They’d been accumulating it for years. They just didn’t know.

What Systems Debt Looks Like

Systems debt is the gap between how your business actually runs and how it would need to run to be resilient.

Every shortcut contributes. Every “we’ll document that later.” Every process that lives in one person’s head. Every workaround that became permanent. Every tool that was “temporary” five years ago.

These aren’t failures. They’re rational responses to constraints. When you’re small, formal systems feel like overhead. It’s faster to just handle things. The documentation can wait. The proper tool can wait. Growth can’t wait.

So you accumulate debt. And for a while, it doesn’t matter.

The Trigger Events

Three things typically force the reckoning:

Growth. The informal coordination that worked at five people fails at fifteen. Suddenly there are too many handoffs, too many dependencies, too much information that isn’t written down. New hires can’t ramp up because there’s nothing to ramp up on. Decisions take longer because nobody knows who’s responsible.

The business grows, but the systems don’t. Eventually, the gap becomes impossible to ignore.

Key person departure. Someone leaves — voluntarily or not — and takes half the operational knowledge with them. The passwords they never shared. The vendor relationships they managed personally. The quirky workarounds that kept the critical spreadsheet functioning.

This is when businesses discover how much was held together by individual heroics rather than actual systems.

Compliance deadlines. An audit. A certification requirement. A regulatory change. Suddenly you need to prove things: who accessed what, when changes were made, that your processes match your documentation.

And you discover that you can’t prove any of it. Because the systems to track these things don’t exist.

The Painful Part

Here’s what makes systems debt particularly painful: fixing it is urgent but can’t be rushed.

When growth is straining your operations, you don’t have time to stop and build proper systems. You’re too busy handling the growth.

When a key person leaves, you’re scrambling to cover their work, not documenting processes.

When the compliance deadline hits, you’re doing whatever’s necessary to pass, not building sustainable infrastructure.

Systems debt comes due at exactly the moment when you have the least capacity to address it.

Why It Accumulates Silently

The insidious thing about systems debt is its invisibility. It doesn’t show up in financial statements. There’s no dashboard that tracks it.

What you see instead are symptoms: things taking longer than they should, mistakes that require rework, knowledge that exists only in people’s heads, friction that everyone’s learned to work around.

These symptoms get normalized. “That’s just how things are.” “It’s always been like that.” The cost is real — in time, in errors, in fragility — but it’s diffuse and hard to measure.

Until it’s not. Until something breaks visibly enough that the accumulated debt becomes undeniable.

What I’ve Learned

The businesses that handle this best share a trait: they start acknowledging systems debt before it comes due.

This doesn’t mean fixing everything — that’s neither possible nor necessary. It means being honest about where the debt exists. What depends on specific people? What would break if someone left? What couldn’t survive an audit?

That awareness changes behavior. Not dramatically, but enough. Documentation happens a little more often. Knowledge gets shared a little more intentionally. The worst single points of failure get addressed.

It doesn’t eliminate the debt. But it keeps it from becoming a crisis.

The Uncomfortable Truth

Every business has systems debt. The question is whether you’re managing it consciously or pretending it doesn’t exist.

The latter feels easier until one of the trigger events hits. Then it becomes the most expensive kind of problem: urgent, unavoidable, and completely predictable in retrospect.

By then, fixing it isn’t strategic. It’s survival.

Better to look honestly at the debt while you still have choices about how to address it.

Article: What Breaks First When a Small Business Grows — The predictable failure points when informal systems meet scale.