Andrew Harris, chief sales and marketing officer, DCC Technologies.
Speed has become a badge of honour in ICT. Everyone wants to move faster, respond faster, deliver faster. Yet the longer I work in this industry, the clearer it becomes that speed on its own is one of the easiest ways to undermine long-term growth. Being fast feels productive. Being smart is what actually compounds value.
If anything, the South African ICT sector’s growth tells this story clearly. According to ICASA’s 2025 State of the ICT Sector Report, the market continues to expand steadily, with mobile services alone growing to serve 88.7% of households and ICT revenue tracking upward year on year.(1)
But here is the nuance we often miss: this growth is not fuelling urgency. It is urgency that is fuelling the growth. Organisations are investing heavily in technology because they feel pressure; from customers, from competitors, from economic uncertainty and from rising operational demands. That urgency creates reactive behaviour, and reactive behaviour often disguises itself as progress.
I have seen this pattern many times. A reseller races to adopt a new solution because a customer mentions it. A sales team pushes out a rapid response without stepping back to check whether the underlying systems can support the promised turnaround. I made these mistakes earlier in my career, saying yes quickly and dealing with the consequences later. It may win the moment, but it does not build resilience.
Being smart requires something speed does not tolerate. A pause. A moment to ask whether we are scaling for today’s excitement or tomorrow’s reality.
For me, smart scaling rests on three principles.
1. Strength before acceleration
Growth exposes every weakness in an organisation. If your internal processes cannot absorb increased volume, faster will break you. South Africa’s broader tech environment illustrates this well.
Yet many businesses still operate on fragmented systems and thin capacity. Scaling before strengthening is how delays, errors and friction multiply. Smart growth begins with foundations: stable processes, clear roles and systems that speak to each other.
2. Context beats velocity
ICT is not a race; it is an interpretation challenge. What do partners really need? How do customers behave? What is changing beneath the surface? This is where I have seen the channel struggle. The pressure to respond quickly often overrides the need to understand deeply. But depth is what prevents waste, confusion and rework.
I often remind my team that a well-considered decision made today saves 10 rushed decisions tomorrow. Smart is slower at the start, but it is faster over time.
3. Partnership multiplies intelligence
No distributor, including us, succeeds alone. The smartest outcomes I’ve seen in the past year came from slower, more deliberate collaboration, not from sprinting ahead. When resellers, vendors and distributors take the time to align expectations, skills and capacities, the path forward becomes clearer and significantly more manageable.
This is one reason we invest so heavily in listening before building. We cannot scale wisely if we do not understand the lived realities of the partners who depend on us.
As we look to this year, I believe the organisations that thrive will be the ones that resist the urge to sprint and instead choose to scale with intention. We’re committed to taking that path with our resellers, building the infrastructure, insights and partnerships that make growth sustainable, not stressful.
If your goal is to grow confidently rather than chaotically, then perhaps it is time to consider whether speed is serving you, or steering you. Sometimes the smartest move you can make is simply to slow down long enough to choose the better path.
References
1. Source: Independent Communications Authority of South Africa (ICASA), The State of the ICT Sector Report 2025:https://www.icasa.org.za/pages/state-of-ict-sector-report
