Thursday, October 29, 2026
HBR's review of meeting research found about 70% of meetings kept employees from the work they were meant to enable. Here's Verne Harnish's meeting rhythm, sized for an SME before year-end.
Payday's Friday. Payroll's due. And the invoice you were counting on still hasn't landed, because the customer who promised "end of month" meant their end of month, not yours. You chase it with a polite email, then a less polite one, and you tell yourself next time you'll get better at follow-up.
Here's the uncomfortable answer: better follow-up isn't the fix. The follow-up email is damage control for a decision you made weeks earlier, at the point of sale, when the terms got set — or didn't.
You're not alone in the stress of it. Bluevine's 2026 survey of US small business owners found that 41% name the gap between money coming in and bills going out as their single biggest stressor — ahead of tax, ahead of payroll itself. The chase isn't the real problem. It's the symptom.
Most SME sales processes are built entirely around getting the yes. What happens after the yes — deposit, terms, when the clock starts — gets handled on the fly, or copied from whatever the last client happened to accept. That's the actual villain here: treating "they said yes" as the finish line, when the finish line is "the money's in the account."
I've made this exact mistake, more than once, in businesses I've built myself. Sometimes you win, sometimes you learn — and some of those lessons came from real losses, not hypothetical ones. The ones that stung weren't about a bad product or a bad client. They were about terms I'd never actually pinned down before the work started, because asking felt awkward and the sale felt too good to risk slowing down.
"I have grown my business 5x since working with Kevin. Everything Kevin told me to do was the complete opposite of what I had been doing. Working with Kevin has truly been a complete game changer."
— Richard, Chem Suppliers
Every owner I've worked with already knows they should say the terms out loud. Most still don't, because in the moment it feels like the one thing that could cost them the sale. It won't. A genuine customer respects a business that's clear about getting paid — it tells them you run a real operation, not a favour. The ones who push back hardest on terms are usually the same ones who'll push back hardest on the invoice.
This isn't for you if your sales process is already tight and your real issue is one slow-paying outlier — that's a collections conversation, not a system rebuild. But if this is the third month in a row you've chased a payment you never properly pinned down, the fix starts before the sale, not after it.
You can run a business where payday isn't a gamble on someone else's promise. It takes one slightly awkward sentence, said early and said every time — and that's a habit you can build starting with your very next sale.
If you're tired of chasing money you already earned, that's the first thing we fix together.
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.
Monday, September 21, 2026
More leads won't fix a slow sales pipeline. Learn the sales velocity formula SME owners rarely calculate — and the one lever that moves revenue faster than any lead-gen campaign.