How do you run and grow a successful business when the challenges seem to mount up every single day? Ahead of our upcoming BSI Members event, we spoke to the key speaker, Quality Management Specialist Sam Somerville, about how management system standards can help SMEs answer that question, her personal light bulb moments, and why keeping it simple is her motto.

Sam Somerville, ISO Management Consultant and Committee Chair

Why do SMEs have so much to gain from a management system standard?

I run an SME myself and work with many small and medium-sized businesses, so I know that more often than not they are exceptionally good at what they do. They might understand their product or service and care deeply about their customers but lack experience or expertise in running a business.

A good management system standard provides a practical framework. It helps you think about risks and opportunities, review how things are working, listen to customers and continually improve. A standard such as ISO 9001 can bring all those elements together and help an SME build a successful business.

How can that framework make an SME more resilient?

It stands to reason that change and disruption hit SMEs harder because they have less capacity to absorb them.

A management system provides a structured way to manage change. It encourages you to plan what you are doing, communicate it clearly and then review the outcome. Did the change work? Did the process deliver what you expected? Did it affect what we thought it would affect? What should you do differently next time?

That discipline helps you adapt and become more resilient. It prevents change from becoming something that simply happens to your organization.

Are standards becoming easier for SMEs to use, less wordy and complicated to understand?

That is certainly the intention. A remarkable amount of thought goes into individual words, including how requirements can be made clearer and easier to understand internationally. Supporting guidance, explanatory publications and other resources can help organizations understand the intent of requirements and what the outputs might look like in practice.

ISO 9001 now includes an annex providing clarifications to support understanding of the requirements,, and a handbook for small enterprises is being revised to provide plain-English explanations and practical examples showing how the standard’s requirements can be applied within even the smallest business. It will be a particularly strong resource for SMEs.

Why are leadership and culture so important?

A management system standard like 9001 will not be effective if it is simply treated as a certification exercise or passed to one person as “Bob’s job”.

Leaders need to own the outcomes and build them into strategic thinking and everyday decisions. People across the business should understand how their work fits into overall objectives and ambitions.

They should also feel safe raising concerns when something is not working. Without that openness, problems can remain hidden and opportunities to improve can be missed. A good management system needs to be embedded in the way the organization actually operates. Its benefits go far beyond having a certificate on the wall.

How can a management system support business growth?

Sometimes businesses treat an opportunity as simply the opposite of a risk. But opportunities deserve deliberate attention in their own right. A management system standard like 9001 encourages leaders to identify them, assess what would be required and decide how they could support the organization’s objectives.

That might mean exploring new products, services, markets, technologies or resources.

And when you do grow, that brings its own challenges, so you need to understand how your processes, controls and resources may need to change.

Where do customers fit into that growth journey?

Customer satisfaction and continual improvement are absolutely central to it. No doubt about it.

Many businesses say they understand their customers, but often they do not actually ask them what they think. You need to know how customers experience your products or services and whether you are meeting their needs.

That cannot be a one-off conversation because expectations change. Regular customer insight can help you decide what to improve and where opportunities might lie.

How do AI and other emerging technologies figure in a management system standard like 9001?

ISO 9001 was deliberately not tied to a specific technology such as AI, as it focuses on the organization, not the technology. AI is attracting attention now, but in a few years, businesses may be focusing on something else entirely. That is why management system standards often refer more broadly to new or emerging technologies.

What matters is having appropriate processes and controls around how resources such as AI are selected, introduced and used. The same framework can therefore help an organization manage different tools and technologies as they emerge.

What is the biggest mistake businesses can make?

Overcomplicating things. My motto is “keep it simple”. I joke that I am going to have it written on my gravestone!

If a system is simple and makes sense, people will use it. That is when you get value from it. If you add documents and activities simply because you think an auditor might ask for them, the system becomes too complex and people disengage.

The standard should support the business, not create an additional burden alongside it.

What are the “light-bulb moments” you see?

I love those moments. The biggest is often when people realize that a management system does not have to be complicated. Much of it is common sense and good business practice.

Leaders begin to see that it gives them better evidence for decisions. Their people understand the organization’s objectives and how their work contributes. The business becomes clearer about its processes, policies and priorities.

What I find is that organizations often discover that they already have many of the necessary elements. The task is to recognize them, connect them and make them more effective.

What would you say to an SME that is still unsure?

Start with the business you already have. You are not developing a separate management system and bolting it onto your organization. You are using the standard as a framework to develop your business.

I have seen clients using ISO 9001 go on to have their most successful years. You cannot attribute that to one factor alone, because they are improving many aspects of the business. But they are making better decisions, engaging their workforce and understanding their organization more clearly.

That is the real value: creating the conditions for sustained success.

Thank you, Sam.

Sam Somerville is an organizational effectiveness consultant and international standards leader. She helps organizations improve performance through management systems and plays a leading role in the development of global quality management standards, most recently BS EN ISO 9001:2026 Quality management systems, where she led the international working group responsible for revising the world’s most widely used standard.

Join the management system standards conversation at BSI HQ in London

At our upcoming BSI Members event, Sam will explore how management system standards can be integrated into everyday business operations without creating unnecessary complexity. Members will have the opportunity to hear practical insights, ask questions and consider how standards could support their own resilience and growth. For more details and to book your place, visit this page.

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