Thursday, November 05, 2026
Vistage puts you in a group of 12 to 16 owners with a Chair. Simple-Growth is one owner-run coach who finds your constraint first. Here is who each suits, what is public on cost, and six questions to ask. Checked 5 November 2026.
Revenue's up on last year. You should be celebrating. Instead you're staring at the bank balance wondering where it all went, because somewhere between saying yes to every job that came in the door, the margin quietly evaporated. More revenue was supposed to feel like more room to breathe. It feels like running faster for the same result.
Xero's 2026 research found rising costs are cited by 44% of US owners as a leading stress driver (Xero Emotional Tax Return, 2026). But rising costs are only half the story for a lot of owners. The other half is saying yes to everything, because nobody's ever written down, in one sentence, what this business is actually best at.
I've founded or co-founded nine companies, and the ones that grew their margin, not just their turnover, all had one thing in common: they knew exactly what they wouldn't do.
It feels risky to turn work away when revenue already feels tight. So owners say yes to the client outside their specialty, the rush job that blows the schedule, the discount to win the deal that was never going to be profitable anyway. Each yes feels harmless alone. Together, they're exactly why revenue climbs and margin doesn't.
Jim Collins studied what separated genuinely great companies from merely good ones, and found they could all answer one question with total clarity: where do three things overlap?
Where those three genuinely overlap is where this business should be saying yes. Everywhere else is where the margin is quietly leaking out.
"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
One of the businesses I founded, Sign60, was built around a single-sentence promise: a signpost up in 60 seconds. Not every kind of signage. Not every kind of install. One sharp overlap between what we could genuinely be fastest at, what actually made money, and what the team cared about doing well. We ran it against a 100-day action plan so the focus didn't drift back to "yes to everything" within a month of writing it down.
Writing the Hedgehog sentence is the easy part. Saying no to the next client who doesn't fit it, while the bank balance is still tight, takes a kind of nerve most owners don't have alone — because the downside of saying yes feels immediate, and the upside of saying no only shows up months later in the margin line. That gap is exactly where having someone outside the business, holding you to the sentence you wrote, earns its keep.
This isn't for you if you'd rather keep every type of job coming through the door than risk a quiet month while you refocus. It is for owners ready to trade some revenue for a business that's actually worth running.
More revenue was never the actual goal. A business that's good at one thing, and paid properly for it, is.
If you've never written down the one sentence this business should say yes to, that's the first thing we'd build together.
Sunday, October 04, 2026
You nailed the pitch and the buyer loved it, then the deal went quiet. The reason is usually a meeting room you were never invited to. Here is how to sell to a buying committee you cannot see.
Sunday, October 04, 2026
Customers don't buy products, they hire them to do a job. Here is the framework that explains why an inferior competitor keeps outselling you, and what to fix in your marketing today.
Sunday, October 04, 2026
Most SME owners have one growth plan: get more customers. There are actually four distinct ways to grow, and the cheapest one is usually sitting in your existing customer file.
Sunday, October 04, 2026
Small business confidence just rose, but growth expectations are falling for almost everyone. New 2026 data reveals the one decision separating owners still growing from owners just waiting it out.
Sunday, October 04, 2026
A 1 percent price increase lifts operating profit by an average of 11 percent, McKinsey's Global 1200 research found, far more than an equivalent rise in volume. Here's how to raise prices without losing your best customers.
Sunday, October 04, 2026
Some coaches build a business out of being needed forever. Here's the Graduation Test: three questions that reveal whether your coach is transferring real capability, or just keeping you on retainer.
Sunday, October 04, 2026
Most owners respond to a bottleneck by fixing something else entirely. Eli Goldratt's Theory of Constraints explains why that backfires, and documented case studies show a mean 69 percent lead-time reduction once the real constraint is found.
Sunday, October 04, 2026
Roughly four in ten B2B purchase attempts end in no decision at all. It's rarely about price. Here's Alex Hormozi's Value Equation, in plain English, and why it explains almost every stalled deal in your pipeline.
Sunday, October 04, 2026
41 percent of consumers now always read reviews before choosing a business, and 31 percent won't use one rated under 4.5 stars. Here's the Review Velocity System that turns happy customers into a steady stream of five-star proof.
Sunday, October 04, 2026
64 percent of executives say they're juggling too many conflicting priorities, and most SME strategies die from addition, not ambition. Here's the three-step Strategic Short List that turns six priorities into the one that actually moves the needle.
Sunday, October 04, 2026
A third of small business owners are absorbing this year's cost increases out of their own pocket instead of raising prices. Here's the three-step Margin Audit that turns that guess into a safe, thirty-day pricing test.
Sunday, October 04, 2026
Before you approve the next hire, run the revenue-per-employee test. Some of the growth you are trying to buy with headcount is sitting in tasks AI can already take off the list.
Sunday, October 04, 2026
Owner-dependent businesses sell for roughly half the multiple of businesses that run without them. Dan Sullivan's Who Not How question is the simplest fix most owners never try.
Sunday, October 04, 2026
The tasks only one person in your business can do are a hidden cost waiting to land. Here is how to clear the backlog in an afternoon using a recorder instead of a blank page.
Sunday, October 04, 2026
Chasing every lead in the run to year end is how you end up delivering the deals that cost you the most. Here is the Right-Fit Filter that catches a bad deal before you quote it.