DKB Innovative's 2026 analysis lists thirteen recurring ways IT delivery breaks down in fast-growing SMBs. None of them are exotic. All of them are recognisable. A few that recur in our own client conversations:
The provider scales by adding tier-1 staff, so the director engineer who used to know your tenant becomes unreachable. Documentation rots faster than it's written. Change windows get ignored because the queue is too deep. Ticket prioritisation depends on which client complained loudest last week. Renewal forecasts arrive a week before the renewal. Security baselines get applied at onboarding and never reviewed again.
The common thread is the same: the operating model that worked at twenty clients stops working at sixty. The fix isn't always to find a bigger provider — sometimes it's to find a smaller one, with a different operating model entirely. Boutique practices deliberately don't scale that way. That's the point.