Owning the tech stack: SMB transformation, delivered through Torque
For most of the last decade, a small-medium business that wanted real technology capability had one practical option: rent it. Buy the SaaS tools, retain the agency, hire the contractor - because building or running technology properly meant a dedicated technical team, and a business turning over a few million dollars a year usually couldn’t justify carrying one. That arithmetic is changing. What used to take a specialist engineering function - mapping how a business actually operates, automating the manual work underneath it, deploying AI across live operations - is now something a business itself can commission and run, without ever needing to build that function in-house.
Why this is different now
The constraint was never appetite. SMB owners have always known where their processes were held together by habit and institutional memory rather than anything documented, and always suspected there was time being lost to work a machine could do instead. The constraint was cost and access: building automation, let alone deploying AI against a business’s actual operations, needed technical depth that sat on the other side of a hiring decision most SMBs couldn’t make. AI-assisted development and automation tooling have moved a meaningful share of that work from “needs a specialist team” to “needs the right advisory partner to direct it” - which is a fundamentally different, and much more accessible, proposition for a business at SMB scale.
Ownership over rental
The businesses taking advantage of this shift aren’t just buying another tool off the shelf - they’re taking ownership of their own stack: the dashboards, the automations, the AI deployed across their operations are built around how that business actually runs, not configured around the generic assumptions of someone else’s software. Ownership shows up as a direct, practical difference, not an abstract one - lower ongoing cost than a perpetual licence or retained agency; direct control over the tools and the data behind them, instead of being one configuration option inside somebody else’s product; the speed to change something the day it stops fitting, rather than waiting on a vendor’s roadmap; and, over time, capability that’s actually specific to the business, not generic parity with every other business running the same SaaS. AI has put real technology ownership within reach of a business at SMB scale, on its own terms, for the first time.
AI has put real technology ownership within reach of a business at SMB scale, on its own terms, for the first time.
Delivered through Torque
This is the work McAtamney & Advisors already delivers, on an ongoing basis, through Torque - our sister brand built specifically for smaller and founder-led businesses that need commercial and technical advice on-demand, without carrying the full-time overhead. Torque runs three ways: Subscription (on-demand advice and delivery, a senior advisor on tap), Applied (focussed commercial and technical sprints), and Transform (agentic digital business transformation) - the same three-tier model on the homepage’s own Torque band.
Two engagements delivered through Torque so far show what “owning the stack” actually looks like in practice:
Mapping a business before automating it
A globally-operating student-placement business wanted AI and automation deployed across its operations - but a lot of how that business actually ran lived in individual people’s heads, shaped by local practice across the countries it operated in, not in any documented process. We mapped that tacit knowledge first, so the automation that followed made the business more consistent rather than automating the inconsistency that was already there, then deployed AI and automation across its international operations end to end.
Read the full credential: Supporting AI and automation deployment for a global student-placement business.
Real-time visibility for a regional seafood business
An established regional seafood business was finding out where margin had slipped only after the trading week that caused it was already over - its performance reporting was manual and after the fact. We built a live dashboard pulling directly from its accounting system, covering performance, stock and operations as one connected picture, and automated the highest-frequency manual work sitting underneath it.
Read the full credential: End-to-end transformation for a regional seafood business.
Why it matters
The technology gap between an SMB and a much larger, better-resourced competitor used to be structural - a function of who could afford to build. AI and modern automation tooling are narrowing that gap faster than most SMB owners have had time to notice, which makes this less a question of whether to modernise and more a question of who directs it: a business commissioning its own capability on its own terms, or one still renting a generic version of it. That’s the work Torque exists to do, and the two engagements above are the start of an ongoing stream of it, not a one-off. Explore what Torque offers at torquecommercial.com.au.
