Monday, November 02, 2026

One third-party guide puts an EOS Implementer at $20,000 to $45,000 a year for two years. Here is what that buys, who it suits, and six questions to ask before you sign.

An invoice tips into overdue, then further overdue, and somehow it's you, again, drafting the awkward follow-up email between everything else on your plate. You tell yourself you'll build a proper system for this once things quiet down, and then they don't, and the overdue list just gets a new name added to it.

A 2026 Bluevine survey of US small business owners found 41 percent name the gap between money coming in and bills going out as their single biggest stressor, ahead of taxes and payroll. Read the study. Most owners treat that gap as a cash problem. Usually, it's an ownership problem wearing a cash problem's clothes.

The Enemy Isn't Slow-Paying Clients. It's That No One Actually Owns Collections

Here's the pattern: an invoice goes out, and chasing it becomes whoever-has-five-minutes' job, which in most small businesses means it becomes the owner's job, fitted in after everything that feels more urgent. By the time you personally get to it, it's already overdue, already awkward, and already costing you an evening you didn't have to lose.

I've built nine companies, and I've had real failures inside some of them, not just wins, the kind where you learn more from what went wrong than from what went right. One of the clearest lessons: the moment a task has no single named owner, it becomes everyone's job and therefore nobody's job, and in a small business that task is very often collecting your own money.

The Accountability Chart: One Job, One Name

A simple model used across well-run small businesses, built around the idea that every function needs exactly one owner, works here better than any amount of extra hustle. In my own words, applied to the overdue list specifically:

  • Name the seat — "who owns collections" is a real role in your business, even if it's only two hours a week of someone's time, including yours for now.
  • Name the trigger — an invoice gets a follow-up call or email on day one past due, not day thirty, with no exceptions and no "I'll get to it."
  • Name the escalation — if it's still unpaid after the second follow-up, it comes straight to you, with the full history attached, so you're deciding, not chasing.

None of that is complicated. What it does is take the overdue list out of your head, where it sits doing nothing useful, and put it into a system that runs whether you remember to think about it or not.

"What we achieved in the last 3 months working with Kevin would have taken 2 years. Kevin's assistance has been very inspirational to our staff. We have achieved changes and changes of thought patterns it could have taken 2 years in normal trading conditions."

— Chris, Global Culture

Why Most Owners Know This and Still Chase It Themselves

The real obstacle is rarely time. It's that handing collections to someone else, even for two hours a week, feels like losing control of the one thing that scares you most. So it stays with you, half-done, between everything else, and the overdue list keeps growing back.

This is exactly where an outside system, and someone to hold you to using it, changes the pattern, not by chasing harder, but by making sure the chasing happens on day one, by a named person, every single time.

This isn't for you if you're determined to keep every job in the business running through you personally. It is for you if you're ready to let one part of it run without you.

What Your Overdue List Could Look Like in Three Months

Picture opening that tab three months from now and finding it mostly empty, not because clients suddenly got better at paying, but because every invoice gets followed up on day one, by someone whose job it actually is. That's not a promise. It's a genuinely reachable possibility, built on one page and one named owner.

If nobody in your business owns getting you paid on time, including you, that's the first thing we'd fix together.

Wednesday, October 14, 2026

Five lessons from McDonald's own history that a 20-person US business can copy, plus where systems stop and growth questions begin.

Wednesday, October 14, 2026

Different industries hit different growth constraints. Find the Simple-Growth page written for your type of business, plus two free resources on loyalty and exit planning.

Wednesday, October 14, 2026

Nearly a third of small business owners have never taken a full week off, and new 2026 data shows the ones working the longest hours are also the most likely to want out. Here is the three-question test for turning hours into real freedom.

Wednesday, October 14, 2026

Over half of SMEs entering a new market in one UK study hit real problems doing it. The Ansoff Matrix maps the three safer growth routes most owners skip past first.

Wednesday, October 14, 2026

45 percent of business owners in one survey feel trapped running the business they built. Here's how the Theory of Constraints, pointed at the owner instead of the process, finds the real fix.

Wednesday, October 14, 2026

UK SME owners spend six working days a month on admin and 3.6 days on growth, one survey found. Dan Sullivan's Who Not How habit flips which question you ask first.

Wednesday, October 14, 2026

Nearly half of SMEs in a 2026 survey had not raised prices since 2022. Here's the three-sentence script that makes the overdue price conversation simple instead of stressful.

Wednesday, October 14, 2026

76 of 100 B2B brands in a 2026 study fell into a credible-but-indistinguishable Sameness Zone. Here's the four-word positioning test, the Onliness Statement, that pulls a business out of it.

Wednesday, October 14, 2026

Your revenue is up and your margin just fell anyway — here's the planning gap behind it. Four moves that put margin back on the same page as your growth target before next year's numbers are set.

Tuesday, October 13, 2026

A practical playbook for NZ construction and building products owners: the market, the real growth constraints, how to price and win work, and a 90-day plan.

Tuesday, October 13, 2026

53 percent of small business owners say nothing would change if AI vanished tomorrow, and that is not an adoption problem, it is an embedding problem. Here is the three-question test that shows which one your business actually is.

Tuesday, October 13, 2026

New industry research finds most senior consumer goods leaders cannot say whether their last year of promotions actually made money. Here is the Revenue Growth Management discipline that fixes it before Christmas stock ships.

Tuesday, October 13, 2026

New research shows 90 percent of small business owners are preoccupied with work outside normal hours. Michael Gerber's E-Myth explains why, and names the one shift that actually fixes it.

Tuesday, October 13, 2026

Workplace research puts the cost of refocusing after an interruption at around 23 minutes, and the average worker now fields well over 100 messages a day. Here is how to protect the hours that actually move your business.

Tuesday, October 13, 2026

Forrester research finds only 8 percent of B2B buyers name price as the biggest driver of their decision. Here is how to find out what a price objection is actually about, before you reach for a discount.