Tuesday, October 27, 2026
Confidence up a quarter, down the next, tariffs easing then tightening — waiting for certainty is its own decision, and usually the wrong one. Here's a simple way to keep deciding well when the ground keeps moving.
If you cancelled every meeting on your calendar for the next two weeks, would your business actually slow down — or would some of it speed up? Harvard Business Review's review of meeting research found that about 70% of meetings kept employees from completing the very work the meeting was supposedly about. That figure covers employees generally, not SME owners specifically, but anyone who has sat through a status update that could have been a two-line message knows exactly which category they're in.
After over 30 years running meetings at agencies and inside nine businesses of my own, I've never once seen a business get more done by having more meetings. I've seen plenty get more done by replacing a tangle of ad-hoc catch-ups with one deliberate rhythm.
The enemy here isn't meetings themselves — it's the meeting calendar that grew by accident. A weekly catch-up here, a one-off project update there, a client call that somehow became a standing Tuesday slot eighteen months ago and never got un-booked. Nobody sat down and designed this calendar; it accreted, one "let's just get something in the diary" at a time. By the time a business reaches ten or fifteen people, the owner can lose a third of their working week to meetings that were never actually redesigned once their original reason had passed.
Harnish's Rockefeller Habits sets out a cadence built for fast-growing companies. At SME scale, it collapses to four decisions:
"Specific to my business requirements and takes a systematic approach. Practical, specific, and pertinent to my business."
— Simon Keepa
Redesigning the calendar means telling someone whose standing meeting you're cancelling that it wasn't actually earning its slot — an uncomfortable conversation to have alone. It's a far easier conversation when an outside adviser is the one asking the question, "what is this meeting actually for, now?", because it reads as structural, not personal.
If you can't remember the last time you cancelled a recurring meeting rather than added one, that's worth a look before this year's plan runs out of road.
Wednesday, September 30, 2026
Your best quarter can hide the same problems as your worst one. Here is the five-step Success Audit SME owners use to pressure-test growth before it plateaus.
Wednesday, September 30, 2026
You just gave someone a raise to keep them, and they left anyway. A new US survey shows a 21-point gap between what owners think keeps their team and what actually does.
Wednesday, September 30, 2026
Small Business Saturday falls just 27 days before Christmas this year, one of the shortest holiday windows in years. Here's the three-step margin check to run before Q4 locks in your pricing mistakes.
Wednesday, September 30, 2026
Acquiring a new customer costs five to seven times more than growing revenue from an existing one. Here is the share-of-wallet audit that finds it.
Wednesday, September 30, 2026
Most coaches say yes to everyone who can pay them. Here is the real test for whether a business coach is actually right for your business.
Wednesday, September 30, 2026
The average knowledge worker gets barely an hour of uninterrupted time a day. Here is the meeting-free day protocol that gives your team room to think.
Wednesday, September 30, 2026
A verbal yes is not a closed deal, and more than 40 percent of B2B deals stall in the gap between agreement and signature. Here is how to close it.
Wednesday, September 30, 2026
Ninety percent of blog content gets zero traffic from Google, and most SME blogs are no exception. Here is the content-market fit audit that fixes it.
Wednesday, September 30, 2026
Most SME owners benchmark against competitors whose real numbers they can never see. Here is the same-quarter self-benchmark that actually predicts growth.
Wednesday, September 30, 2026
Organic growth is always category growth plus share change. Here is the Share-of-Growth Audit that shows whether your revenue chart is real outperformance or a rising tide.
Wednesday, September 30, 2026
Habit research shows real change takes an average of 66 days, not three weeks. Here is the Commitment Corridor for judging whether coaching is working before you quit right before it does.
Wednesday, September 30, 2026
Workers lose roughly ten hours a week to manual, repetitive tasks. Before your next hire, run the Automate-or-Hire Filter to find out if the role should exist at all.
Wednesday, September 30, 2026
Half your sales team hitting quota means the other half is being carried by one or two people whose method has never been written down. Here is how to fix that before someone resigns.
Wednesday, September 30, 2026
Seventy six percent of purchase decisions happen at the shelf, not in the weeks of advertising before it. Here is the Shelf Impact Audit for FMCG brands that have never actually tested their own packaging.
Wednesday, September 30, 2026
Your dashboard has too many numbers and no owner for most of them. Here is the Focus Metric Framework SME owners use to find the one number that actually drives growth this quarter.