Is your Business Drowning in Debt?

Most of us have some. Maybe a mortgage or a car loan.

But there are other kinds of debt. Such as owing friends a favour, some obligation to help them because they helped us.

And anyone who's been in IT will have heard the term 'technical debt' and those who've been in IT any considerable time will have numerous stories about the impact of technical debt.Buy them a beer, those stories can be amazing.

I went looking for a precise definition of technical debt, and there isn't one. It varies depending on where you look. ITIL defines it one way, agile methodologies use another.I found something I like and it closely matches my experience. It came from an article in The Enterprisers Project about managing technical debt.

Technical debt is a broad concept that encompasses many of the decisions made and shortcuts taken during the software development cycle. It happens when teams are working through set tasks, updating features, and dealing with bugs – and it sometimes comes with negative consequences.Negative outcomes caused by technical debt typically take the form of badly designed code, deterioration of productivity, additional unplanned costs, delivery delays, and degradation in the quality of the product.

A lot of those shortcuts are made early in a product's lifecycle, when you're just trying to get something working, something shippable, your MVP. Later on, senior developers go back and pay it down, refactoring the code, making it maintainable, scalable, able to fully meet the requirements.

It's a normal cost of growth. Everyone budgets time and headcount for it.

So why do we assume the operations we cobbled together in year one; the workflows, the "just ask Dave" processes, the spreadsheets holding a six-figure business together; will still work once the company has tripled headcount and revenue?

You put time and effort into paying down technical debt. What about your operational debt?

Every decision made under pressure. Every shortcut taken because there wasn't time to do it properly. Every process that was never really designed, just assembled on the fly by a team scrambling to get something out the door.

That's your operational debt. And like technical debt, it doesn't stay quiet. It compounds.

It shows up as bottlenecks only one person can unblock. As onboarding that takes twice as long as it should. As decisions that all still funnel through the founder because no one else has the authority, the context, or a repeatable way to make them. As the same fire being fought every month because nobody ever fixed the process that keeps starting it.

Left unpaid, operational debt does exactly what technical debt does: it slows delivery, drains productivity, drives up unplanned cost, and quietly erodes the quality of what you deliver to customers. And it never resolves itself. Someone has to actively take it on and pay it down.

Senior developers exist specifically to manage technical debt.

Who is managing your operational debt?

For most growing companies, the honest answer is nobody, because it's nobody's full-time job. It sits with the CEO, buried under everything else on their plate, getting worse every quarter it's ignored.

That's not a people problem. It's a resourcing gap.

And it's precisely the gap a fractional COO is built to close: someone who comes in, diagnoses where the operational debt actually lives, and systematically pays it down. Without you needing to make a full-time executive hire before you're ready for one.

Are you drowning in operational debt?

Would you even know if you were?