SME Insights — Season 2, Article 4 of 4
A while ago I took a call from the owner of a business about an hour up the road. She’d made her mind up before she dialled. She wanted a custom system built, she knew roughly what it should do, and she was ready to spend the money. From where I sit, that should have been a good phone call.
Instead I asked her the question I ask everyone: “Before we talk about building anything — what’s the actual problem you’re trying to solve?” There was a pause. Then: “Well. The software’s rubbish.”
I’ve had some version of that conversation more times than I can count. And over this series, we’ve been circling the reason why. In the first article, I argued that when your software doesn’t fit your business, it usually isn’t your fault. In the second, we looked at the hidden tax that mismatch quietly charges your team every single day. In the third, we watched what happens when a system starts changing your processes instead of supporting them.
Three articles of the same underlying story. And here’s the thing they have in common: none of those outcomes were really chosen. They happened by default — a tool bought in a hurry, a workaround that became permanent, a “we’ll sort it properly later” that never got sorted. The damage wasn’t done by bad code. It was done by a decision nobody quite made.
So this final article is about the decision itself. Because almost every software choice you will ever make comes down to three options — and it helps enormously just to be able to name them.
The three words
You can buy something off the shelf that already exists. You can build something custom, made for you. Or you can bodge: patch together what you’ve already got, bridge two things that don’t talk to each other, and press on.
That’s it. That’s the whole framework. Buy, build, or bodge. Once you can see which one you’re actually choosing, you can choose it on purpose instead of drifting into it. And most of the businesses I meet are, whether they’d admit it or not, in the middle of a bodge.
“Temporary” is the most dangerous word in business
The bodge is seductive because it’s cheap, it’s fast, and it feels like progress. The spreadsheet someone built to bridge the gap between two systems. The shared inbox doing the job of a CRM. The weekly meeting that only exists because there’s no other way to know what’s going on.
None of these were mistakes when they started. They were sensible, resourceful fixes for a real problem in front of a capable person. The trouble is that they were meant to be temporary — and “temporary” has a habit of quietly becoming “how we do things.” Each bodge adds a little complexity, a little fragility, a little more knowledge that lives in one person’s head. Individually they’re harmless. Together they become the very mismatch this whole series has been about.
A bodge is a perfectly legitimate choice. It’s only dangerous when you make it without admitting that’s what you’re doing.
Buy is the sensible default
For most businesses, most of the time, the right answer is to buy. Somebody has already built the thing you need, they maintain it, they fix it, they improve it, and thousands of other businesses share the cost of all that with you. You don’t get points for building from scratch what you could have bought properly.
The mistake people make with “buy” isn’t buying — it’s choosing based on the wrong things. Famous isn’t the same as right. Free isn’t the same as cheap. The question is never “what’s the best software?” It’s “what’s the best software for the way this business actually works?”
Build is for the thing that makes you you
So when should you build? When the thing you’re trying to do is genuinely particular to your business — the process that is the reason customers choose you over the firm down the road. That’s worth building for, because there’s nothing off the shelf that does it, and bending your best process to fit someone else’s platform would cost you the very thing that makes you good. You don’t build to save money. You build because the thing is yours, and it’s worth it.
Here’s the part that should reassure you
If all of this feels like it requires you to be technical — it doesn’t. And that’s the whole point. Writing the software is not the complicated part. The complicated part is knowing what you actually need, being honest about the problem, and deciding — deliberately — which of the three roads you’re taking. Those are business judgements, not technical ones. You already have everything you need to make them well.
Where it helps to have someone in your corner is on the technical judgement that sits alongside the business one — is this really a buy, or is a salesperson steering you towards a build? Is that “quick integration” actually a bodge waiting to happen? That’s exactly the gap a fractional CTO fills: senior technical judgement on tap, without carrying a full-time CTO salary. Someone who can sit on your side of the table, translate the jargon, and stress-test the decision before you commit — so the choice stays yours, made with your eyes open. It’s a large part of what we do for the businesses we work with.
The businesses that get burned are almost never the ones who chose wrong. They’re the ones who never really chose at all — who bodged when they should have bought, or bought when they should have built, because nobody stopped to put the decision into words.
So what do you actually do?
Next time something in the business hurts and the instinct is “we need software for this,” pause before you spend anything. Get specific about the problem — where the time really goes, what it’s costing, what “fixed” would look like. Then ask yourself the three-word question: am I buying, building, or bodging this — and is that the choice I’d make on purpose, in the cold light of day?
If you can answer that honestly, you’ve already avoided the trap that catches most businesses. The goal was never to use software. It’s to run a better business. Sometimes software helps; sometimes something simpler helps more. Either way, make it a decision.
This series draws on ideas from my forthcoming book, Buy, Build or Bodge — a plain-English guide to making software decisions that don’t come back to bite you.
We’re Maly IT Solutions — based in Suffolk, working with SMEs across Suffolk and Essex. As well as building and integrating systems, we act as a fractional CTO for growing businesses — the technical head you can lean on for exactly these buy, build, or bodge decisions, without hiring one full-time. If any of this sounds familiar, we offer a free 30-minute call — no sales pressure, just a practical conversation about where the friction is and what a realistic fix might look like.
📧 hello@maly.co.uk 📞 01473 934672 🌐 maly.co.uk