There is a number in the latest all-island business survey that I haven’t been able to put down.
Of the small and medium businesses facing rising costs this year, 36% absorbed the increase themselves. 29% passed it on to their customers. And 33% — a full third — took no action at all.
Nothing. Costs went up, and the business carried on exactly as it had the week before.
If you’ve never run a small business, that looks like negligence. If you have run one, you know precisely how it happens. And it is worth being honest about, because the gap between “I know I should look at this” and “I looked at this” is where an awful lot of Irish small businesses are quietly losing their margin.
What the research actually says
The figures come from InterTradeIreland’s All-Island Business Monitor for Q2 2026, published on 14 September. It covers firms north and south, and it’s one of the more useful reads available because it asks businesses what they did, not just what they’re worried about.
The headline finding is energy. 49% of SMEs named energy costs as their number one challenge — nearly half the businesses surveyed, ahead of every other concern.
But the finding underneath it is the one that matters more. 47% of businesses now say they’re uncertain whether their profit margins will hold. Seven years ago, in 2019, that figure was roughly one in ten.
So: costs are up, confidence in margins has collapsed and a third of firms have made no operational change in response.
Meanwhile the Small Firms Association reported in June that small firms’ costs have risen 44.4% since 2023. Not 4.4%. Forty-four.
Put those two facts beside each other and the picture is uncomfortable. A 44% increase in the cost of doing business, met in a third of cases by no change in how the business is run.
Why “did nothing” isn’t laziness
Here’s what I’d say to anyone tempted to read that 33% as complacency.
I’ve sat across kitchen tables and cluttered desks from a lot of owner-managers. Not one of them didn’t know their costs were rising. They could tell me to the euro what the electricity bill had done. They knew.
What they didn’t have was an hour.
Because in an owner-run business, you are the sales department, the credit control department, the HR department and the person who covers the shift when someone rings in sick at ten to eight. The work that shouts gets done. “Review the cost base” never shouts. It has no deadline, no customer chasing it and no consequence that lands this week. So it slides to next week, and next week has its own fires.
There’s a second reason, and it’s more human. Looking properly at where money leaks out of a business you built is not a neutral exercise. It means finding out that a process you designed is wasteful, or that a supplier you’ve been loyal to for twelve years is overcharging you, or that your second-biggest customer is losing you money. Most people would rather not know that on a Tuesday.
Neither of those is laziness. Both of them are expensive.
The two responses that look like action but aren’t
Look again at the other two thirds of that survey.
36% absorbed the cost. That means the margin took it. You’re doing the same volume of work for less money, and hoping it’s temporary. It’s a decision, but it’s a decision to shrink quietly.
29% passed it on. Sometimes that’s exactly right. But price rises spend goodwill, and goodwill is finite. Do it twice in eighteen months in a competitive local market and you find out how loyal your customers actually are.
What almost nobody does is the third option: take the cost out of how the work runs, so you don’t have to eat it or charge for it.
That’s not a slogan. In most small businesses I look at, somewhere between four and ten hours a week are going into work that produces nothing a customer would ever pay for. Re-typing information that already exists in another system. Producing a report nobody reads. Chasing an approval from a person who approves everything anyway. Maintaining a spreadsheet that exists because a system couldn’t do one specific thing in 2019.
Nobody chose any of that. It accumulated. Which is exactly why it can be removed without anyone defending it.
Three things you can do this week without spending a cent
If the honest answer is that you’re in the 33%, start here. None of this requires software, a consultant, or a budget. All three fit in an afternoon.
1. Print every direct debit and subscription leaving the account
Not the big ones you already know about. All of them. Twelve months of bank statements, every recurring payment, listed on one page.
Then go line by line and ask a single question: who used this in the last month, and what would break if it stopped?
Nearly every business I look at is paying for at least one tool nobody has opened since the person who championed it left. Software licences for a headcount you no longer have. A subscription that renewed annually four times after the project it was bought for ended. Two products that do the same job because two different people bought them.
This is the easiest money in your business. It takes an hour and it recurs forever.
2. Time the job you hate most
Pick the administrative task that annoys you or your team more than any other. Usually it’s the one where the same information gets typed into two different places.
Don’t fix it yet. Just time it, honestly, for one week. Write the minutes down each time.
The number at the end of the week will make the decision for you. Three minutes, four times a day, is an hour a week. An hour a week is more than six full working days a year. Owners consistently underestimate these by a factor of three or four, because each individual instance feels trivial. In aggregate they’re a part-time salary.
3. Work out which of your two biggest customers is actually profitable
By revenue, you know who your biggest customers are. By profit, most owners are guessing.
Take the top two. Add up everything that goes into serving them — not just materials and direct labour, but the meetings, the revisions, the late-night calls, the payment terms you’d never accept from anyone else, the special-case process that exists only for them.
It is remarkably common for the biggest name on the sales ledger to be the least profitable relationship in the business. You cannot fix what you haven’t measured, and this one is usually measurable in an afternoon with the figures you already have.
The part that compounds
Here’s why this matters more in 2026 than it did in 2019.
Research from Trinity College Dublin and Microsoft Ireland this year found that SMEs investing in their own efficiency report 18% significant productivity gains, against 8% for large firms. Small businesses actually have the advantage here — fewer layers, faster decisions, no change-management committee. When an owner decides something changes on Monday, it changes on Monday.
But the same research found SMEs are twice as likely to have had no formal training in the tools they’re using. The advantage is real and largely unclaimed.
Every week you don’t re-type that information is a week saved, permanently. Every subscription you cancel is cancelled forever. Efficiency compounds in a way that a price increase never does — a price rise is a one-off you have to spend goodwill on again next year, while an hour removed from a weekly process is an hour you get back every week for the life of the business.
Frequently asked questions
Where do the figures in this article come from? The 49% energy figure and the 36% / 29% / 33% cost-response split are from InterTradeIreland’s All-Island Business Monitor for Q2 2026, published 14 September 2026. The 44.4% cost increase since 2023 is from the Small Firms Association, June 2026. The productivity comparison is from Trinity College Dublin and Microsoft Ireland’s 2026 AI Economy research.
I genuinely don’t have a spare afternoon. What’s the single highest-value thing? The subscription sweep. It takes an hour, it needs no input from anyone else, and it’s the only one of the three that puts money back in the account this month rather than time back in your week.
Isn’t cutting costs just a race to the bottom? Cutting costs badly is. Cutting waste isn’t. There’s a real difference between reducing spend that creates value — training, maintenance, good people — and removing work that no customer would ever pay for if you itemised it on an invoice. The first weakens the business. The second frees it up.
My business is only four people. Is this worth doing at that size? More so, not less. In a large firm there’s a function whose job is to join the systems together and question the processes. In a four-person business that job belongs to nobody, which is why the workarounds pile up faster in small firms than in big ones.
Where I come in
I run a small business myself, so I know what happens to the item on the list that has no deadline. It stays on the list. And next quarter the same hours disappear again, and the costs go up again, and you’re still in the 33%.
That’s what EfficiencyDoctors exists to solve.
If you’d like a second pair of eyes on your business, email me directly at tom@efficiencydoctors.ie for a business checkup.
Tell me the one process that’s driving you mad and I’ll tell you straight whether it’s worth a day of my time. If it isn’t, I’ll say so — that’s a five-minute email and it costs you nothing.
You’ve probably been thinking about a particular process since the third paragraph of this article. Start with that one.
EfficiencyDoctors — I give owners their week back. Practical efficiency for businesses right across Ireland.
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