In the first edition of our tech debt series, we outlined what tech debt is. It’s similar to credit card debt for adults, except that tech debt collectors show up as fragile systems, weak insecure code, old processes and more. Uncontrolled tech debt will cause a company to fold. In this installment of the series, we explore why tech debt should matter to everyone in your company.

One of the biggest problems is that there are companies out there which will run for two, three or four years, steal market share and strangle other companies because they are willing to accumulate the tech debt, and then they sell or shut down because they know they have created a massive amount of debt. It forces competitors to have to chase them, which is one of the reasons it’s impossible to completely avoid tech debt.

However, tech debt should be treated the same as a credit card that you pay off every month. Businesses should be balancing a the debt against their budget internally. Execs can’t just say, “We’ll do that later,” and leave it at that. The budget has to be balanced and there has to be a scheduled time to pay off the debt the business is accumulating now. If you don’t build that into your system, if you don’t allow for getting current, you will always be in debt and eventually you will essentially run out of credit.

Tech debt should matter to everyone in the company. The more debt you take on, the interest you take on, raises the risk score of the business. This is akin to a credit score. When someone looks at a credit report and sees that a person has 15 credit cards with big balances on them and they only make the minimum payment every month, even if they don’t miss a payment, their credit score goes down. It’s called a debt-to-income ratio. With business, your risk score goes up rather than your credit score going down. The higher your risk score, the more likely you are to hit an technology event that forces you to go under.

Let’s say you’re a startup with great products and great customers who you can work with. The technology you’ve created is making waves, so another company wants to acquire you. Not just for your customers, they want your tech. It’s not uncommon for a buyer to do a technical review and say, “Don’t touch that, it’s a toxic asset. It’s ballooning and by the time we get everything to a place where it’s secure and stable where we can grow it even more, we will be dead in the water.”

This is why your tech debt should matter to everyone in your company. Every time you make those choices, you are devaluing your business and changing the amount of time it will take in the future to move forward.

Think about it this way, every time you say to do something quick and dirty or put it off until “later” (which never comes), you’re making a charge on your tech debt card. Which means that in a year from now, two or three years from now, the quickest quick and dirty you can go has now doubled or tripled or grown longer by some even worse multiple. Which means you cannot go as quickly as you were going before because you haven’t kept the system current and clean. So now it’s fragile and insecure and you have no choice to modernize, update, fix. And it will be expensive, more expensive than if you had kept up with the maintenance as you went.

Be sure to stay tuned for the third installment of this series, which will cover how to keep up with and stay on top of tech debt.