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.

Register Your Interest To Work With Kevin  |  Find Out More About Simple-Growth's Online Programmes