Tuesday, October 27, 2026

Most SME marketing describes the product and targets a demographic — and both miss why people actually buy. Here's the Jobs To Be Done framework, and how to find the job your business is really being hired to do.

Owners ask me a version of the same question almost every week: should I get a coach, or just join a mastermind, a peer group, or a workshop? It's usually asked as if the two are interchangeable — different packaging around the same thing. They're not. They solve different problems, and picking the wrong one is why a lot of owners try one, don't see the shift they expected, and conclude "coaching doesn't work for me," when the real issue was the format, not the idea.

I run both: one-on-one coaching with individual owners, and group workshops and masterclasses for rooms of fifty, a hundred, more. After over 30 years in business, and 200+ businesses coached one-on-one across 30+ industries, here's exactly what each one is actually for.

What a Room Full of Peers Is Genuinely Good At

A workshop or a peer group is built for three things: exposure to ideas you wouldn't have gone looking for yourself, the relief of hearing someone else describe your exact problem out loud, and energy — the kind that's hard to manufacture alone in your own head on a Tuesday afternoon. What it isn't built for is your specific business, with your specific numbers, your specific team, and your specific blind spot. A room of fifty owners can hand you forty-nine useful general ideas and zero accountability for whether you actually act on any of them next week.

What One-on-One Coaching Is Genuinely Good At

One-on-one coaching does the opposite. It's slower by comparison — there's no instant hit of a room's energy — but it's built entirely around your business: your actual numbers, your actual team, the one constraint genuinely holding you back versus the three you think are. And it's built around accountability that follows you out of the room: someone who knows what you said you'd do by next Thursday, and asks.

The Three-Check Way to Pick

  • You don't yet know your real problem. Start in a room with peers — exposure to other owners' problems will surface yours faster than sitting alone with a coach guessing.
  • You already know the problem and keep not fixing it. You don't need more ideas. You need someone checking whether you actually did the thing.
  • Your business is genuinely unusual — a niche model, a messy ownership structure, a family business issue. One-on-one almost always wins here, because the advice a group gives has to be general enough to apply to everyone in the room.

"Kevin is a master of his craft. From creating and facilitating high-impact 'Grow Your Business in 1-Day' workshops to elite sessions for our flagship Owner Manager Programme — Kevin delivers excellence across the board. He is a powerhouse presenter and facilitator who brings an explosive blend of energy and expertise to every room he steps into. Participants don't just sit and listen; they leave buzzing with breakthrough ideas and simplified, highly effective growth strategies. Most importantly, Kevin leaves people profoundly inspired, fully equipped, and fiercely motivated to drive their businesses forward. He is the standard-setter!"

— Darilyn Kane, Coaching and Advisory Lead, The Icehouse

Why Owners Often Pick the Wrong One Anyway

Here's the part most owners get wrong: they pick the format that feels less exposing, not the one their actual problem calls for. A room is easier to hide in. One-on-one coaching means someone is looking directly at your numbers and your excuses, with nowhere for either of you to look away. That discomfort is often exactly the signal that it's the right format.

Key Takeaways

  • Match the format to the problem: a peer room for exposure and energy, one-on-one for accountability on your specific numbers.
  • Use a peer room when you don't yet know your real constraint.
  • Use one-on-one coaching when you already know the problem and keep not fixing it.
  • Watch for picking the format that feels less exposing — that's rarely the one your business actually needs.

Whichever format fits where you are, Simple-Growth runs both — and the first conversation is about working out which one actually solves your problem, not which one we'd rather sell you.

Tuesday, September 22, 2026

Two businesses can grow 30% the same year and end up in opposite positions. Here's the Funding Source Audit that shows which kind you're building.

Tuesday, September 22, 2026

Hired a coach, saw a spark, then stopped renewing? The problem usually isn't the coach — it's the switching. Here's why coaching compounds.

Tuesday, September 22, 2026

Eleven hours worked, exhausted by 7pm — but how much of it actually moved the business forward? Here's the two-question Impact Filter.

Tuesday, September 22, 2026

Most lost sales die in the first four minutes, not on price. Here's the four-question Discovery-First Framework that fixes it.

Tuesday, September 22, 2026

If your marketing stops the moment you stop paying for it, you're only funding half the job. Here's the audit that fixes the balance.

Tuesday, September 22, 2026

Your 40-page strategy document isn't working because nobody can recall it. Here's the one-page, four-box plan that replaces it — and actually gets run.

Monday, September 21, 2026

You're tracking the wrong competitors. The business quietly stalling your growth is solving your customer's problem a completely different way — and it's not on your spreadsheet.

Monday, September 21, 2026

The cheapest audience in your market isn't strangers — it's your competitors' unhappy customers. Here's how to build a marketing campaign that speaks directly to them.

Monday, September 21, 2026

Winning deals teaches you what worked once. Losing deals, reviewed properly, reveals exactly where your sales process breaks — and keeps breaking until someone looks.

Monday, September 21, 2026

Big systems feel like progress but rarely fix productivity. The dozen small daily frictions nobody's bothered to remove are usually the real cost.

Monday, September 21, 2026

The cheapest coaching option is often the most expensive one once you count the year it fails to fix. Here's what a coaching engagement should actually deliver for the price.

Monday, September 21, 2026

The fastest way to grow isn't always a bigger ad budget — it's borrowing the trust a complementary business has already earned with your exact customer.

Monday, September 21, 2026

Dollar sales are up 0.8% but real unit demand fell 1.7% in the latest US retail data. If your revenue growth is just a price story, here's how to find out — and fix it.

Monday, September 21, 2026

Most business plans are fiction the moment they're printed. Here's the 3-step Resource Alignment Audit that reveals the strategy you're actually running — and how to close the gap before it costs you another quarter.

Monday, September 21, 2026

Most small business marketing budgets chase the customers who already love you. Category Entry Point Mapping shows why that caps your growth — and where the real customers are hiding.