The Hidden Growth Constraint – Why Mid-Market CEOs Must Rethink Tech Talent Now
- 1 day ago
- 6 min read
Jane Jawad helps SME owners turn operational chaos into enterprise value through AI, automation, and strategic dealmaking that drives 15-25% EBITA Growth and exits worth 2-3x more.
Most mid-market CEOs do not think they have a tech talent problem. They think they have a growth problem. A margin problem. A speed problem. A complexity problem that keeps getting worse despite good people working hard to fix it. But here is what the data and the businesses that are quietly pulling ahead keep revealing. In most cases, those problems share a common root. The business does not yet have the technology capability it needs to support the next stage of growth, and that gap is now too expensive to ignore.
The World Economic Forum's Future of Jobs Report 2025 found that skills gaps are the single biggest barrier to business transformation for 63% of employers, with 39% of current skills expected to become obsolete by 2030. OECD research confirms that SMEs are disproportionately exposed, even as generative AI becomes more accessible and more widely used across the market.
For CEOs leading businesses through scale, operational complexity, AI adoption, or exit preparation, this is no longer a background IT issue. It is a leadership issue that belongs at the top of the agenda.
The real problem is not headcount
One of the most common mistakes I see from leaders at this stage is the assumption that tech talent is mainly about hiring more developers, bringing in a better IT manager, or outsourcing a few projects. That is rarely what the business actually needs.
The real issue is capability. Do you have the right people, skills, structure, and operating discipline to make technology commercially useful? Can your teams improve workflows without creating chaos? Can they choose the right tools instead of just collecting expensive ones? Can they automate intelligently, use data properly, manage cyber risk, and implement AI in ways that genuinely free up time and improve performance?
Because if the answer is no, growth becomes heavier than it should be. Good people end up doing low value work. Commercial teams chase information across disconnected systems. Operational knowledge stays locked inside a handful of individuals. Reporting becomes slow and debatable. AI gets trialed in pockets but never scaled, and the business starts to feel more complex than it should for its size.
Why this is getting harder to ignore
The pressure is building from both sides simultaneously. On one side, the market is accelerating. AI, automation, cybersecurity, data, and digital workflows are no longer topics reserved for large corporates. OECD research shows that generative AI is already in use across 31% of SMEs in surveyed countries, and among those using it, 65% report improved employee performance.
On the other side, most mid market businesses are still building skills informally. The same OECD data shows that only around half of SMEs have any kind of digital skills programme. Where training does exist, it is typically peer led rather than structured. Only 8% report internal digital skills training. Just 6% report external training.
That gap matters enormously. Because technology is now moving too quickly for a business to rely on accidental capability. If your people are learning by firefighting, experimenting in silos, or depending on one technical individual to interpret everything, you do not have an adaptive model. You have fragility dressed up as flexibility.
The UK government's 2025 AI Labor Market Survey reinforced the same point from another angle. Twenty eight percent of organizations said technical skills shortages had already affected their ability to achieve business goals, while 88% were relying on the job training rather than structured development. Once skills shortages begin affecting execution, they are no longer simply a people issue. They become a ceiling on growth.
What mid market CEOs often get wrong
The first mistake is treating tech talent as someone else's problem. It gets delegated to HR to recruit, IT to manage, or an external supplier to solve. But the critical question is not who owns the technology. It is whether the leadership team is genuinely clear on which capabilities the business needs to reach its next stage.
The second mistake is over focusing on specialist hires while underinvesting in broader organisational capability. Yes, you may need stronger technical leadership. Yes, you may need better data or automation expertise. But most businesses do not stall because they lack brilliant specialists. They stall because they have weak process ownership, poor systems discipline, unclear decision rights, and insufficient commercial understanding of what good technology should actually deliver.
The third mistake is waiting too long. By the time the pain becomes visible, it is usually already showing up as slow delivery, inconsistent reporting, avoidable operational friction, recruitment strain, or AI experiments that never scale beyond a single department. If the business is moving toward investment, succession, or sale in the next few years, those weaknesses become significantly more visible and significantly more costly.
What good looks like instead
The strongest mid market businesses do not try to become technology companies overnight. They do something more strategically sound. They get precise about the handful of capabilities that matter most to commercial performance.
That typically means building strength deliberately across six areas:
Technology leadership. Someone must be able to connect business goals to systems, data, priorities, and delivery, not simply manage suppliers.
Process and systems thinking. Before automation comes clarity. Businesses need people who understand how work genuinely flows, and where value quietly leaks.
Data capability. Not endless dashboards. Clean ownership, trusted reporting, and the ability to make better decisions faster.
AI and automation capability. The real prize is not novelty. It is freeing strong people from repetitive work, improving responsiveness, and reducing friction in how decisions get made.
Cyber and governance discipline. As digital dependency increases, so does the cost of weak controls.
Change adoption. A business only captures value from new tools when people use them properly, consistently, and with confidence.
This is why the most effective CEOs at this stage stop asking "Do we need more tech people?" and start asking something much sharper. What capabilities must this business build so that growth becomes easier, not harder?
The leadership shift required now
The businesses that will pull meaningfully ahead over the next few years are unlikely to be the ones with the biggest technology budgets.
They will be the ones whose CEOs understand that technology capability is now part of core business design, not a support function that occasionally intersects with strategy.
That means moving beyond reactive hiring and one off transformation projects. It means treating tech talent and skills as genuine drivers of value creation. It means being honest about where the business is too dependent on manual effort, too reliant on a few individuals, too unclear in its data, or too fragile in its digital foundations to scale with confidence. It means building that capability deliberately, not waiting for the pressure to force the issue.
Three practical moves for the next 12 months
Map the capability gaps, not just the vacancies. Identify the technology, data, automation, and decision making capabilities your business genuinely needs for its next stage of growth. Look beyond job titles. The gap you need to close is rarely the one on the recruitment dashboard.
Prioritize one or two high value use cases. Choose areas where stronger capability would clearly improve margin, speed, customer experience, or management control. Build momentum and proof of concept there first before attempting to scale broadly.
Stop relying on informal learning alone. Experimentation matters. But it is not a workforce strategy. Build structured capability into the business through leadership hires, external partners, internal development, or a blended model. Relying too heavily on informal training leaves execution vulnerable precisely when the business needs it most.
The question worth asking today
For many mid market businesses, the next ceiling will not be determined by market demand alone. It will be determined by whether the organization has the capability to absorb complexity, deploy technology with discipline, and turn modern tools into genuine commercial advantage.
That is why tech talent deserves a fundamentally different conversation in your boardroom. Not as an IT support issue. Not as a recurring recruitment headache, and not as a side discussion delegated comfortably elsewhere. But as one of the clearest leading indicators of whether your business is genuinely ready for what comes next.
The gap between businesses that scale with momentum and those that strain under their own complexity is rarely what it appears on the surface. If you are a CEO navigating that inflection point, the conversation about capability is one worth having now, before the constraints become visible to everyone else.
Read more from Jane Jawad
Jane Jawad, Co-founder of Centaura Group and Strategic Adviser
Jane Jawad is co-founder of Centaura Group, where she helps established SMEs unlock hidden value and prepare for high-multiple exits through AI, automation, and strategic deal advisory. With nearly two decades leading transformations for major corporates, she now channels that expertise exclusively toward £10m-£75m businesses across the UK, Europe, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia. Jane works with owner-led firms to eliminate founder dependency and engineer EBITDA growth that translates directly into valuation uplift. She co-founded the SME Innovation Network and writes about AI strategy and building companies that buyers actually want to buy.
