I've worked with businesses from Kaitaia down to Wellsford and beyond. Trades, tourism, retail, horticulture, professional services. Different industries, same five mistakes, over and over.
None of these are technical. That's the point. They're all decisions made at the top of the business, usually years before anyone calls me.
1. Treating IT as a liability
This is the one that causes the other four.
IT gets filed under expenses. Something to minimise, defer, or avoid. Get the cheapest quote, do the bare minimum, spend nothing until something breaks. All the while they don't blink at financing the 2026 model 4wd.
But your systems aren't a cost you tolerate. They're the platform you do business on. Your customers find you, judge you, order from you and pay you through technology. Your staff can't work without it. Your compliance depends on it. Your ability to compete with someone in Auckland who's better organised depends on it.
Businesses that budget for it do better. Not because they spend more overall, but because they spend deliberately instead of reactively. A line in the annual budget for hardware refresh, licensing, security, backups and website work means you're never making a critical decision in a panic with no money set aside.
Nobody runs a fleet without budgeting for tyres and servicing. Same principle. You just can't see the wear.
2. Getting sold to by "Google specialists"
You know the call. Someone who found you on a list, who has never set foot in Northland, telling you your Google listing needs urgent attention.
Two grand later you've got a badly structured Ads campaign burning budget on broad match, or a template website with your logo dropped in the corner. Then the calls stop. When you try to get changes made, you're a low priority account in a queue somewhere else entirely.
They don't know your business. They didn't ask. They don't know your margins, your best customers, your busy season, or that half your work comes from one particular type of enquiry. So they can't possibly build something that generates it.
Invest locally with someone who takes the time to understand what you actually do. Start small. Give them a defined piece of work, see how they handle it, see whether they explain things properly and turn up when they say they will. Then grow it.
A good local provider will tell you when not to spend money. That alone is worth more than the two grand.
3. A casual approach to systems and security
This is the one that keeps me up. Not because it's complicated, but because it's so consistently ignored until the day it isn't.
What I walk into regularly:
No two factor authentication. Not on email, not on banking, not on the accounting system. One phished password and someone is inside your business reading everything and sending invoices as you.
Passwords in a spreadsheet, or a notebook, or all the same. A password manager costs a few dollars per person per month and removes an entire category of risk.
Spaghetti junction in the comms cupboard. No labelling, no documentation, half of it running through a consumer router from 2016. When it fails, and it will, diagnosing it costs hours that shouldn't exist.
"Someone in the office manages the IT." There are rare exceptions where this genuinely works, usually where that person actually is a technician. Mostly it means one staff member with an interest is holding together systems they don't fully understand, with no backup plan for when they leave. And they will leave.
No .nz domain registered. You own the .co.nz but not the .nz, or the other way around. Twenty dollars a year each. Register both, plus the obvious misspellings, before someone else does. This has already bitten NZ businesses this year.
"We've run fine for twenty years without a proper website." You ran fine because your competitors hadn't sorted theirs either. That's changed. The customer under 45 checks you online before they call, and if what they find looks abandoned, they don't call.
None of this is expensive. It's just boring, which is why it doesn't get done.
4. Taking it out on the technicians
I'll be blunt about this one because someone needs to be, and it's a well known topic among technicians.
When something breaks, the person fixing it is not the person who broke it. They're usually the only one in the room who can put it right.
Disrespect them once, with the wrong tone or an accusation you can't back up, and you go to the bottom of the pile. That's not petty. It's how it works. Good technicians are in demand and they choose their clients. If you're difficult, there's a queue of businesses who aren't.
We're already carrying the load of keeping complex systems running for people whose livelihoods depend on them, often under real pressure, often at hours nobody sees. What we don't need is a client who treats every fault as evidence of incompetence.
If you don't understand something, ask. Politely. Any decent provider will explain it properly, and most of us enjoy doing it.
The pattern I see is the business that's on their third IT provider in six years. Every one of them was "hopeless". At some point that stops being bad luck. They never build the relationship where a provider knows their systems well enough to prevent problems instead of just responding to them, so everything stays reactive and expensive forever.
Your provider knowing your business is worth more than any hourly rate you'll negotiate.
5. Sitting out on AI
This is the newest one and it's moving fastest.
The economy is tight. Margins are thin. And there is now a set of tools that meaningfully changes how much one person can get done in a day. Quoting, documentation, customer correspondence, rostering, reporting, marketing content, data entry, first line support. Real, unglamorous work that eats your week.
Businesses adopting this properly are pulling ahead right now, quietly. Their overheads are flatter. They're responding to enquiries faster. They're not drowning in admin.
I'm not saying replace your people. I'm saying the businesses that don't engage with this at all are going to find themselves competing, in five years, against outfits doing the same work at a structurally lower cost. In a fragile economy that gap is the difference between surviving and not.
Be an early adopter, carefully. Start with one process. Measure it. Then do the next one.
The mistake is not moving too fast. It's assuming this one will pass.
What to do about it
Have you been neglecting your IT, or want an open discussion about where current and future possibilities may lay? Book a call and let's see where things are at.