Monday, November 09, 2026
62% of US owners reduced or skipped their own pay in the past year (Bluevine, 2026). David Sandler's qualifying method — and a real client story — show SME owners how to stop chasing the wrong deals.
Last updated 12 November 2026. Published by Simple-Growth (Motherbase Limited). Market: United States.
Revenue's up again this year. You still don't feel any richer, and if someone asked what the business is actually worth, you'd be guessing. You want to be building something with real value, not just a job with more complexity and worse hours than the one you left. What you might actually be building is a business that only works because you personally hold it together every day — which, to anyone looking to buy it, isn't really worth very much at all.
In Cornerstone's 2025 National Study on Selling Your Business, surveying 750 US owners of privately held companies with revenue between $5 million and $100 million, 61% said they had never had their business formally valued. Most owners build for years without ever finding out what, if anything, they've actually built — until the day they need to know, which is usually the worst possible time to find out the answer is “not much without you.”
Entrepreneur and author John Warrillow studied what separates businesses that sell for a strong multiple from ones that don't, and built it into eight value drivers — among them, critically, how much the business depends on the owner personally.
Kevin has founded or co-founded nine businesses — some genuinely successful, some real failures. The lesson he takes from both kinds isn't about hustle. It's that the businesses worth something to someone else were the ones that kept running properly when he stepped back, and the failures were, more often than he'd like to admit, the ones that only ever worked because he personally held every piece of it together. Knowing the difference, he says, is exactly why his job as a coach is to help owners grow — and help them avoid the mistakes that quietly cap what they're building.
Try this test this week: pick one of the three value drivers above and score your business honestly out of ten. If “owner independence” scores low, that's not just a future exit problem — it's the reason you can't take a real holiday now, and the reason growth keeps feeling like more weight on the same person. Fixing it is the same work either way.
“Kevin is an absolute powerhouse! He doubled our business's profits in the first month alone with lots more of his recommendations still to be rolled out.”
Curtis Hacon
Give A Sh!T
Getting a real answer feels like it only matters if you're selling soon, so it's easy to put off indefinitely. This isn't for you if you've already scored well on owner-independence and recurring revenue, and you genuinely know what the business is worth — most owners haven't, and don't. For everyone else, the gap between “growing” and “valuable” is usually hiding in plain sight, in the same three or four places.
Because the same things that make it valuable to a buyer — independence from you, recurring revenue, loyal customers — are what make it less stressful and more profitable to run today.
A framework from John Warrillow scoring a business on eight value drivers, including how dependent it is on the owner, to show what actually makes it worth more.
A formal valuation or a structured value-driver assessment are the two reliable starting points; guessing from revenue alone usually isn't close.
Yes — a business that stops running properly without the owner in the room is typically worth far less to a buyer, whatever its revenue.
Source: Cornerstone, 2025 National Study on Selling Your Business, United States, 750 owners of privately held companies with $5 million to $100 million in revenue. Published by Simple-Growth (Motherbase Limited). Last updated 12 November 2026.
If you've never actually found out what your business is worth, that's a half-hour conversation, not a five-year plan.
Friday, September 04, 2026
If your business needs you in the room to keep functioning, you haven't built a business — you've built a demanding job. Here's how to test and fix that.
Friday, September 04, 2026
Chasing every enquiry equally is why sales teams stay busy and pipelines stay thin. Here's the qualification filter that protects your best sellers' time for leads that will actually close.
Friday, September 04, 2026
A shopper's eye moves across a shelf in under three seconds — if your packaging or marketing needs explaining, it's already lost. Here's what actually earns the second look.
Friday, September 04, 2026
Most growth plans set a revenue number and never check whether the business can actually deliver it. Here's how to build strategy around your real capacity constraint instead.
Friday, September 04, 2026
67% of SME owners fund growth mainly from personal savings, 38% from credit cards, and only 22% from a bank loan. Why that's a risk, not a strategy — and what a real capital plan looks like instead.
Friday, September 04, 2026
67.4% of small business owners know they need a price rise — only 31% have made it. Here's why pricing needs a system, not nerve, and what that system looks like for SME and FMCG owners.
Friday, September 04, 2026
Every scaling SME hits the same transition — from a business that runs on the founder's instincts to one that runs on a team making good decisions without checking first. Here's how the ones that navigate it deliberately do it.
Friday, September 04, 2026
Being "coachable" isn't a fixed trait some owners have and others don't — it's a decision made fresh every week. Here's what actually determines whether coaching sticks.
Friday, September 04, 2026
Your business isn't short of hours — it's short of decisions that don't require you personally. Here's how to find and remove the owner bottleneck, one decision at a time.
Friday, September 04, 2026
Most price objections aren't about the customer's budget — they're about a rep with no confident answer reaching for the easiest lever. Here's how to fix the sales conversation, not just the discount policy.
Friday, September 04, 2026
Chasing brand awareness on a limited budget is the fastest way to spend money without moving revenue. Here's the goal that actually fits a constrained marketing budget, and how to measure it.
Friday, September 04, 2026
Most SME strategy sessions produce energy and an impressive document — and almost no lasting change. Here's what a strategy session actually needs to produce, and how to turn it into real execution.
Friday, September 04, 2026
Only 8% of small business owners say they're fully prepared for succession, and 70% have no formal plan. Here's why succession is a systems problem, not a paperwork one — and the four-question test to check if your business is actually transferable.
Friday, September 04, 2026
Rapid growth kills more SMEs than slow growth does. Here's how overtrading happens, the warning signs owners miss, and how successful scalers fund growth before chasing it.
Friday, September 04, 2026
Scaling a business requires a different identity than starting one did. Here's why coachability, not talent, is the real predictor of who breaks through.