Wednesday, October 28, 2026
Big-brand positioning is a decision, not a budget. Five questions, a one-sentence position and a five-touchpoint audit you can run this week.
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.
Thursday, October 15, 2026
Most SME marketing stops the moment someone buys once. Here is the Value Ladder that gives your best customers an obvious next step, and why 74 percent never get one.
Thursday, October 15, 2026
A growth plan with no diagnosis is just a wish list with a date on it. Here is the three-part test that separates a real strategy from guesswork, before your next budget gets signed off.
Wednesday, October 14, 2026
Everyone in your industry follows the same playbook. Here is why fresh eyes beat it, plus a one-hour exercise to borrow a proven idea from another industry this week.
Wednesday, October 14, 2026
Five lessons from McDonald's own history that a 20-person US business can copy, plus where systems stop and growth questions begin.
Wednesday, October 14, 2026
Different industries hit different growth constraints. Find the Simple-Growth page written for your type of business, plus two free resources on loyalty and exit planning.
Wednesday, October 14, 2026
Nearly a third of small business owners have never taken a full week off, and new 2026 data shows the ones working the longest hours are also the most likely to want out. Here is the three-question test for turning hours into real freedom.
Wednesday, October 14, 2026
Over half of SMEs entering a new market in one UK study hit real problems doing it. The Ansoff Matrix maps the three safer growth routes most owners skip past first.
Wednesday, October 14, 2026
45 percent of business owners in one survey feel trapped running the business they built. Here's how the Theory of Constraints, pointed at the owner instead of the process, finds the real fix.
Wednesday, October 14, 2026
UK SME owners spend six working days a month on admin and 3.6 days on growth, one survey found. Dan Sullivan's Who Not How habit flips which question you ask first.
Wednesday, October 14, 2026
Nearly half of SMEs in a 2026 survey had not raised prices since 2022. Here's the three-sentence script that makes the overdue price conversation simple instead of stressful.
Wednesday, October 14, 2026
76 of 100 B2B brands in a 2026 study fell into a credible-but-indistinguishable Sameness Zone. Here's the four-word positioning test, the Onliness Statement, that pulls a business out of it.
Wednesday, October 14, 2026
Your revenue is up and your margin just fell anyway — here's the planning gap behind it. Four moves that put margin back on the same page as your growth target before next year's numbers are set.
Tuesday, October 13, 2026
A practical playbook for NZ construction and building products owners: the market, the real growth constraints, how to price and win work, and a 90-day plan.
Tuesday, October 13, 2026
53 percent of small business owners say nothing would change if AI vanished tomorrow, and that is not an adoption problem, it is an embedding problem. Here is the three-question test that shows which one your business actually is.
Tuesday, October 13, 2026
New industry research finds most senior consumer goods leaders cannot say whether their last year of promotions actually made money. Here is the Revenue Growth Management discipline that fixes it before Christmas stock ships.