Fifty-four percent of US business owners with employees have no business plan of any kind, not even an informal one, according to Gallup's Pathways to Wealth research, published in May 2026. Another 29 percent say their plan is informal, and only 11 percent call theirs detailed. If your growth target for next year is last year's number with a hopeful percentage added on top, you are not alone, and that is exactly the problem.

Kevin has spent over 30 years building and advising businesses, from 60+ global brands across DDB, Ogilvy and Saatchi and Saatchi to 9 companies founded or co-founded, and has never once seen a spreadsheet change a business. A clear picture of where your business is going has changed one, every time.

Here is the enemy worth naming: the spreadsheet plan. It lists a revenue target, a cost line and a margin, and calls itself strategy. It is not wrong, it is just incomplete. A spreadsheet tells your team what number to hit. It does not tell them why the number matters, what the business will look like when they get there, or what they personally gain from the climb. Numbers motivate accountants. Pictures motivate people.

Gallup's survey of 5,926 US adults, including 3,501 business owners and self-employed workers, found that owner-employers with no plan at all outnumber those with anything detailed roughly five to one. That gap does not close with a better spreadsheet. It closes with a different kind of document entirely.

Cameron Herold, the entrepreneur and former COO who scaled 1-800-GOT-JUNK, built a simple fix for this gap: the Vivid Vision. It is a written, present-tense description of exactly what the business looks, sounds and feels like three years from now, covering the customer experience, the team, the financials and the culture, in enough sensory detail that anyone reading it can see it. Herold's own test for a Vivid Vision is whether a new employee could read it on their first day and understand, immediately, what the business is building toward. A spreadsheet cannot pass that test. A good Vivid Vision always does.

Building one for your own business takes a focused afternoon, not a strategy offsite:

This is the exercise I run with owners inside the Simple-Growth System, because a target without a picture is just a number waiting to be missed.

"He really got our vision from the beginning and has been a huge help in putting together a clearer plan and strategy for the next five years. Working with Kevin D'Ambros-Smith has given us the space to pause and reflect, on where we are now, where we want to be and how we get there."

— Gabby Kirk, Papier Hq

Most owners do not skip this because they think it is a bad idea. They skip it because nobody made them sit still long enough to write it. Running the business consumes every hour that writing about its future would take, so the three-year picture stays a loose idea in the owner's head instead of a shared document the whole team can pull toward. The plan 54 percent of owners are missing was never going to come from one more late night with a spreadsheet. It needed someone to protect the hour, ask the right questions in the right order, and hold the owner to finishing it. That is the part a coach does that a template never will.

If your growth target for next year is last year's number with a hopeful percentage on top, that is the first thing Kevin will help you fix.

Be the owner who can describe, on one page, exactly where your business is going.