Ask three people on your team what the business is actually trying to achieve this quarter and you'll usually get three different answers, or a long pause. That's not a communication problem a better all-hands meeting will fix. Harvard Business School's Robert Kaplan and David Norton, the strategists behind the Balanced Scorecard, found that fewer than 5% of employees in a typical organisation understand their company's strategy well enough to act on it. Kevin has spent thirty years building and advising businesses, from the agency floor at DDB and Ogilvy to nine companies of his own, and his view is that number isn't an exaggeration for an SME like yours. If anything, it's optimistic.

The enemy here isn't a lack of ambition. It's the annual strategy day: a facilitator, a whiteboard full of sticky notes, and a beautifully formatted plan that gets printed once, admired once, and never opened again until next year's strategy day rolls around. Research sitting alongside Kaplan and Norton's own findings shows only around 20% of companies successfully complete roughly 80% of their strategic goals, and separately, fewer than half of US employees (47%, per Gallup's most recent engagement data) strongly agree they know what's expected of them at work. Put those two numbers together and the pattern is obvious: most SME strategy fails long before execution, because the plan was never built to be looked at again. A document is not a system. A system gets checked.

Kaplan and Norton built the Balanced Scorecard for corporates with armies of analysts. The version that works for an SME strips it back to four numbers, one from each lens of the business, visible on a single page everyone can see.

Four numbers. One page. Reviewed for fifteen minutes, same time, every single week — not once a quarter when the drift is already baked in.

"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

Here's the part that doesn't show up in the research: most owners have heard of the Balanced Scorecard, or something like it, and built one anyway that quietly died within a month. Not because the framework is wrong, but because a weekly review feels like admin the moment a client calls with a fire to put out, and admin always loses to fires. The fix isn't a better spreadsheet. It's an outside structure that makes the fifteen minutes happen whether the week was quiet or chaotic — which is exactly what a coaching relationship is built to do. The scorecard doesn't need a genius to read it. It needs someone making sure it gets read.

If your strategic plan hasn't been opened since the day you wrote it, that's the first thing you fix with Kevin. Be the owner whose whole team can say the plan in a sentence.