For years, we have observed the same pattern in our work with SMEs: advisory services are used mostly by a small minority of leaders whose companies are already relatively strong. By contrast, the SMEs that could often benefit the most from structured support are frequently the least likely to seek it.
In our experience, the share of leaders who regularly invest in external expertise remains quite small. We believe this helps explain part of the productivity, competitiveness, and transformation challenges facing many Quebec SMEs.
In more fragile companies, difficulties are often attributed first to external factors: a slowing market, competitive pressure, labor shortages, government decisions, rising costs, or constantly changing rules. When most problems are seen as coming from outside the company, investing in advisory services can easily seem secondary, or even unnecessary.
Fatigue, limited financial room to manoeuvre, and one sentence we hear often also play a role: “We know what we need to do.” But having a general sense of what should change is very different from knowing how to fundamentally transform a strategy, business model, governance structure, or way of operating.
Running a business day to day requires one set of skills. Transforming it in depth requires another. Those capabilities are built through experience across many companies, business models, approaches, and transformation contexts.
There is also a more personal dimension. In some entrepreneurial cultures strongly shaped by the idea of being “self-made,” asking for help can feel like admitting a limitation. Yet we often see the opposite among leaders who regularly use external expertise: they view it as a strategic investment in the company, not as a challenge to their ability to lead it.
In a metacrisis that is likely to persist, the real question for an SME is probably no longer, “How do we hold on until things get better?” It is becoming, “How do we use today’s shocks, and the ones still ahead, to transform our company and make it more robust?”
Leaders who take that question seriously usually recognize that deep transformation requires perspective, a systemic view, and sometimes external support that can challenge assumptions, structure choices, and accelerate decision-making.
The question then becomes simple: do we wait for the environment to become more favorable, or do we invest now to build a company that can navigate differently?
