SME owners won’t pay for tech consulting: It’s a sentiment often shared, occasionally whispered, sometimes joked about and yet, rarely unpacked with the seriousness it deserves. And if we’re being honest, most Indian mid-scale businesses do have the ability to pay. What they often lack is the willingness. But that gap isn’t their fault alone; it’s on us, the consultants and advisors, to close it.
The reason this gap exists isn’t because these businesses don’t want to improve. It’s because no one has taken the time to truly explain what a Tech Consultant does. In many SMEs, “tech” still lives inside silos – the website is owned by marketing, the ERP is owned by accounts, and neither truly owns systems in a holistic, outcome-oriented way. The moment someone walks in with a PowerPoint and a retainer fee, the reflex is to see this as an optional spend. The perception is: this person isn’t building anything, not coding, not deploying – just “giving gyaan.” And gyaan, by definition, must either be free or deeply discounted.
But that’s precisely the problem. We’ve spent too long pitching solutions without first building the case for why the role of a techno-functional partner matters in the first place. Until the SME owner sees us as someone who can bridge code with commerce, systems with scale, and technology with team productivity – they will continue to see our work as dispensable, and our fees as avoidable.
Think of how AMFI spent decades shifting the Indian consumer mindset from “why pay an advisor?” to “Mutual Funds Sahi Hai.” It was never just about fund performance or cost ratios. It was about consistent storytelling and category-building. Tech consulting needs that same evangelism, at speed. Because the average SME is far more ready for systems transformation than we give them credit for – they just need someone to meet them where they are, and patiently walk them through the ‘before and after’ picture.
So here’s a nudge to every consultant who’s spent a few years inside code and commerce, who’s worked with both founders and frontend users, who understands that most systems fail not because they’re poorly built but because they’re poorly communicated: spend time with SME business owners. Understand their context. Speak their language. Don’t jump into tech speak. Show them how process clarity can reduce dependency, how data visibility can replace daily chaos, and how automation is not just a buzzword but a strategic advantage.
We all want the ecosystem to evolve. But ecosystems don’t evolve because of large-scale announcements or big-budget reforms. They evolve because individuals, across hundreds of small companies, start making slightly better decisions each day – with the right advice by their side.