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.
Saturday morning, and you're on the phone to the client who pays slowest, complains loudest, and changes the brief three times before every job. Meanwhile the client who actually keeps the business afloat hasn't heard from you in six weeks, because they never make a fuss — they just quietly pay on time and reorder. If that sounds familiar, you're not managing a customer base. You're managing whoever shouts.
The villain is a quiet one: the belief that all revenue is good revenue, so every customer earns the same attention, the same discount flexibility, the same Saturday phone call. It feels fair. It's also why some owners work flat out on turnover that barely moves the bank balance.
What you'll miss if this doesn't change: another year spent servicing the loudest half of your customer list, while the quiet, profitable half slowly drifts toward someone who does call them back.
I worked with a client who had 123 customers on the books. We sat down and actually graded them — not by gut feel, by revenue and margin, properly totted up. Eight customers. Just eight, out of 123. Those eight were worth $266,240 of the $630,220 the business turned over that year — well over 40% of revenue from under 7% of the customer list. Nobody had ever added it up before. The owner had been treating customer 9 and customer 119 as equally important, because on paper they looked the same: both "a customer."
"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
Here's the uncomfortable part: the clients draining your weekends are rarely your worst clients by revenue — they're just the ones who ask the most and pay the least in proportion to the noise they make. The fix isn't firing anyone in a dramatic way. It's simply knowing which eight to call first, and treating the discovery as data, not loyalty.
This isn't for you if you'd rather keep every customer exactly equal and keep working every Saturday to prove it. It is for you if you're ready to find out which eight customers are actually running your business.
If you've never actually graded your customer list, that's the one-hour exercise we'd start with.
Wednesday, October 21, 2026
B2B win rates fell to 19-21% in 2025. Here's why a quiet Q4 pipeline is usually a budget deadline in disguise, and the three moves that use it instead of waiting for January.
Tuesday, October 20, 2026
Chemical and industrial distributors rarely have a product problem. Here is how to find the real constraint, escape the price war and build a 90-day plan.
Tuesday, October 20, 2026
97% of small business owners believe branding matters to their success — only 18% have an actual strategy for it. Here is the 3-question Brand Key test that closes the gap without a rebrand.
Tuesday, October 20, 2026
Roughly 90 percent of companies never achieve sustained profitable growth. Here's Jim Collins' Hedgehog Concept for telling which growth opportunities are actually worth chasing.
Tuesday, October 20, 2026
68 percent of US Google searches now end with no click at all. Here's what that means for small business marketing, and the fix that doesn't depend on getting the click back.
Tuesday, October 20, 2026
Most strategic plans are tactics with better formatting. Here's the one-sentence test, borrowed from Sinek's Golden Circle, that tells you if yours has a real why behind it.
Tuesday, October 20, 2026
A private, unwritten goal succeeds about 35 percent of the time. One with a weekly accountability check-in succeeds more than 70 percent of the time. Here's why that gap exists.
Tuesday, October 20, 2026
Roughly 65 percent of small businesses are tied so closely to their owner they'd struggle to run without them. Here's Gerber's E-Myth framework for finally getting out of the technician's chair.
Tuesday, October 20, 2026
42 percent of B2B businesses do nothing proactive during the pre-Christmas slowdown. Here's what the ones who keep selling do differently, and why January rewards them for it.
Monday, October 19, 2026
Is Vistage worth it? A fair, source-linked look at what peer advisory groups offer US business owners, a checklist for deciding, and how one-on-one coaching differs.
Monday, October 19, 2026
Most small business owners know they don't compete on price, but can't say, in one sentence, what they compete on instead. Here's the three-step framework that fixes it.
Monday, October 19, 2026
A strong December can feel like proof you're growing. It can also be the reason nobody builds the pipeline that carries January. Here's the three-question check to run now.
Monday, October 19, 2026
A good coach doesn't start with your goals. They start with three numbers most owners can't answer on the spot, and that gap tells them exactly where to begin.
Monday, October 19, 2026
Most SME owners have tried an AI tool this year. Few can say, in hours, what it actually saved them. Here's the test that tells the difference, and the first step to take.
Monday, October 19, 2026
By the time a prospect calls you, they've already done most of their own research. Here's the sales approach built for exactly that moment, and why most SME pitches skip it.