The latest MYOB Business Monitor came out in November, and one number has stuck with me since I read it.
41% of Australian SMEs have no online presence at all.
Not a bad website. Not an outdated one. No presence.
The gap is bigger than most people think
It is easy to read that stat and assume it does not apply to you. Your business has a website, maybe a LinkedIn page, maybe you are experimenting with AI tools. And on those metrics, you are ahead of a meaningful chunk of the market.
But “ahead” covers a lot of ground.
The same report tracked AI adoption across Australian SMEs over a six-month window. Usage jumped from 23% to 29%, faster growth than general IT investment in the same period. And 82% of the businesses that integrated AI reported seeing immediate benefits: less admin, more time, better output.
That sounds like the technology is working. Except the report also found that 71% of employers are not prioritising AI skills when hiring. And 46% of SMEs do not measure productivity at all, with 74% of those saying they do not think measurement is necessary.
So we have rapid adoption of tools that are delivering results for the businesses that use them thoughtfully, alongside a majority of businesses that have no way of knowing whether anything is working at all.
That is the real divide. Not just online versus offline. But businesses that are building on a foundation versus businesses that are adding tools to a fog.
What the barriers actually are
MYOB asked businesses what is stopping them from moving faster. The answers were honest.
21% said cost is the primary barrier. 17% said they are simply too busy running the business to set anything up. 14% found the setup process too confusing, and 18% said they do not yet understand how these tools would help their specific situation.
These are not excuses. They are accurate descriptions of how this actually feels from the inside of a business. When you are stretched, any new system looks like a project. And most of the advice available: vendor content, listicles, LinkedIn thought leadership. None of it is designed to help you think through your specific situation. It is designed to sell you on a category.
The result is paralysis, or worse: adoption without intention. Businesses pick up tools because they feel like they should, without first identifying what problem the tool is meant to solve or how they will know if it is working.
The businesses that are pulling ahead are doing something different
They are not moving faster. They are moving more deliberately.
Before a new system, they ask: what specific part of this business, if it ran better, would actually change our numbers? Not “we should get more efficient” but “this quoting process takes four hours per job and it only needs to take one.”
That specificity matters because it makes everything else tractable. The right tool becomes obvious. Success criteria are clear. The measurement question (which 46% of the market is currently skipping) answers itself.
Businesses with a website already outperform those without on brand credibility (37% higher) and inbound enquiries (35% higher). That is not because a website is magic. It is because having one requires thinking clearly about how you present the business and who you are trying to reach. The same logic applies to every system you build after it.
If you are sitting with that fog right now
Start with the diagnosis before the tool.
Map the parts of your business that feel the most manual, the most dependent on one person, or the most likely to create problems when someone is sick or overloaded. Rank them not by how annoying they are, but by how much leverage fixing them would create downstream.
Once you have that, the tool question is almost mechanical.
If you want a second set of eyes on where to start, that is specifically what we do at Encubed Solutions. We are a small, senior team in Australia, and we work with SMBs to identify the processes worth fixing and build software or automation that actually fixes them.
No obligation. If the conversation helps you think more clearly, it is worth having.