Sunday, November 08, 2026
Vistage, EO and YPO each decide who may join. Here are the entry rules, who each suits, and when a one-on-one coach is the better fit.
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.
Sunday, October 11, 2026
Everyone agrees December is too close to Christmas to prospect. One sales agency's own client data says the businesses that kept going saw 19 percent more leads the following January.
Sunday, October 11, 2026
Most SME owners can describe next year's budget in detail and go quiet the moment you ask about year ten. A UK study of over 1,000 companies found that gap predicts success almost on its own.
Sunday, October 11, 2026
Most SME owners build their people plan around courses. The research behind the 70-20-10 model says courses are the smallest lever you have, and it is worth knowing how shaky that research actually is.
Sunday, October 11, 2026
A lead called within five minutes is up to 100 times more likely to be contacted and 21 times more likely to qualify than one called 30 minutes later. Almost nobody does it.
Sunday, October 11, 2026
Most SME owners think a logo is a brand. The agencies behind the world's biggest brands have never worked that way. Here is the five-layer model they actually use.
Sunday, October 11, 2026
Nearly half of SMEs have run a SWOT analysis in the last two months, yet most cannot say it changed a single decision. Here is the simple matrix that turns the list into action.
Sunday, October 11, 2026
Burger King once sold a one-cent Whopper only to people standing next to a McDonald's. Here is the under-$5k version any SME owner can run, and what a 1760s potter teaches about removing buying risk.
Saturday, October 10, 2026
Most small business owners feel confident about their sales pipeline right now. New research shows that confidence is measuring the wrong thing entirely.
Saturday, October 10, 2026
Rising revenue and a shrinking bank balance usually mean the same thing: one account doing the job of four. A simple account split fixes it before it becomes a crisis.
Saturday, October 10, 2026
A coaching style that worked in your first month can quietly become the wrong one by your twelfth. The best coaches change how they coach you as you change.
Saturday, October 10, 2026
Managers now spend over a fifth of their working week in meetings, and senior leaders admit most of it is wasted. A fixed meeting rhythm fixes more than your calendar.
Saturday, October 10, 2026
Most SME owners set ad budgets and discount limits by gut feel. One number, worked out properly, tells you exactly what a customer is worth and what you can afford to spend to win one.
Saturday, October 10, 2026
Most small businesses pour their whole marketing budget into this week's sale. The research on 30 years of advertising says that is exactly the wrong ratio.
Saturday, October 10, 2026
Most SME owners are confident they will hit this year's goals, and most will not. The fix is not more effort, it is a plan that fits on one page and gets checked every week.
Friday, October 09, 2026
The share of owners blaming the economy for not planning long-term has tripled in a year. Here's the one-page plan that actually fixes it, not excuses it.