SPOR Group Featured in Croner: What Every Growing Business Needs to Know About Its Tech Stack
- Chris Gore
- 5 days ago
- 4 min read
Author: Chris Gore
Published April, 2026
SPOR Group was recently featured in Croner as part of a wider piece on how growing businesses should approach their technology infrastructure. Alongside other business leaders, Chris shared a perspective that will be familiar to anyone who has scaled a company past the point where the original tools started to feel limiting.
The insight was direct: what works for a business turning over five million pounds does not necessarily work for the same business at ten million. The tools, the platforms, the processes that felt like the right choice at one stage of growth can become a constraint at the next.
The All-in-One vs Modular Decision
All-in-one platforms are appealing for obvious reasons. One subscription, one login, one place for everything. In the early stages of a business, that simplicity has genuine value. The problem comes as operations become more complex and the requirements become more specialised. A platform designed to be everything to everyone starts to feel like it is doing nothing particularly well.
The Croner piece highlighted a pattern that will ring true for a lot of business owners. Teams adopt all-in-one platforms without first defining the processes those platforms are supposed to support. Without agreed stages, fields, ownership and rules, the suite becomes a large set of optional features that nobody uses. Teams end up running parallel systems alongside the main platform, which defeats the original purpose of simplification.
The alternative is a modular approach, where best-in-class tools are integrated to create a stack that gives greater control and deeper functionality in the areas that actually matter. This is not without its own challenges. Strong integrations, open data access and clear workflows are all essential. Without them, the modular approach creates fragmentation rather than solving it.
The Quote That Captures It
This is something SPOR Group has lived through rather than just observed from the outside. The systems and processes that worked when the business was smaller have been replaced, refined and rebuilt as the team has grown and the complexity of what we deliver has increased. It is not comfortable and it is not cheap. But getting the technology infrastructure right at each stage of growth is what allows the business to operate with the efficiency the next stage demands.
The same principle applies directly to the AV and workplace technology we install for clients. The meeting room setup that served a business at fifty people is not the same setup that serves them at two hundred. The monitoring approach that worked for five rooms does not scale to fifty without a proper platform behind it. This is part of why we built SPORTrack the way we did, as a platform that scales with the organisation, not one that has to be replaced when the organisation grows.
What This Means for Your Business
Define your processes before choosing your tools
This is the piece most businesses skip. They see a platform that looks good, sign up, and then try to make their processes fit the software. The better approach is the other way around. Understand what the business actually does, how decisions get made and where information needs to flow. Then find the tools that support those processes rather than ones that try to replace them.
Scale changes what you need
The tools that got the business to where it is now are probably not the tools that will get it to the next stage. This is not a criticism of the original choices. They were the right choices for that moment. The mistake is assuming they will remain the right choices indefinitely. Build with an eye on what the business needs next, not just what it needs today.
You already have more data than you use
The Croner piece made a point that is worth repeating. Most small businesses already have access to more data than they actively use. The challenge is not collecting more information. It is translating what already exists into decisions. Conversion rates. Where deals are lost. Which customer acquisition channels are actually profitable. A small set of high-impact metrics, looked at consistently, delivers more value than expanding the data collection effort.
Simpler is usually better
A future-ready tech stack is usually smaller than people expect. Simplicity, integration and clarity of purpose are more important than the number of platforms. The businesses that operate most efficiently are not the ones with the most tools. They are the ones where every tool has a clear job, connects cleanly to everything else, and does not require a specialist to manage it.
For more on the thinking behind how SPOR Group approaches business technology, read Elon Musk Builds Systems Not Rooms and Buildings Are Broken. Both cover the same principle from different angles: that the right system, properly built and properly managed, outperforms any amount of expensive kit put together without a plan.
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