Keeping It Simple
The fastest, simplest ways to grow your business - no jargon, no fluff. Practical strategies that actually work for SME owners in the USA, New Zealand, and worldwide.
Monday, October 05, 2026
There is no single best business coach in the USA. Here are five criteria for choosing one, a fair look at the main formats, and why an outside perspective can change what you see in your own business.
Most SME owners write the ad, approve it over coffee in about five minutes, and only find out it did not work when the invoice from the ad platform lands with nothing to show for it. Global brands almost never do this. Before a campaign gets anywhere near paid media, it is tested on real people who look like the actual customer, and the result decides whether it runs at all. Across sixty-plus brands at DDB, Ogilvy and Saatchi and Saatchi, I watched this discipline separate campaigns that worked from campaigns that just felt clever in the boardroom, and it is one of the cheapest, fastest habits an SME can borrow from big-brand marketing.
The Five-Minute Approval That Costs Thousands
The enemy here is not a bad idea. It is the belief that liking your own ad is the same thing as it working. Kantar's research on ad testing found that improving a piece of creative from average to great can lift its return on investment by around 30 percent, and that ads which score well on predicted sales likelihood before launch go on to show an actual sales increase in 76 percent of cases within eight weeks, against just 28 percent for ads that score poorly on the same pretest. The gap between those two numbers is the entire budget most SMEs waste every year on creative nobody outside the business ever validated.
The Pretest Habit of Every Global Brand
You do not need a research department or a five-figure budget to borrow this habit. A pretest that takes half a day and costs next to nothing catches most of the expensive mistakes before they reach a media platform.
- Pick the panel - find 10 to 15 people who genuinely match your ideal customer, not your staff, your friends, or your family, who will always be too polite to tell you the truth.
- Ask three questions, not one - what is this offering, who do you think it is for, and would you actually click or call. Never ask do you like it, because liking is not the same as understanding or acting.
- Score the pattern, not the opinions - if six or more people give a confused or inconsistent answer to what or who, the message has failed the test, no matter how much everyone said they liked it.
"Kevin came in and spoke with great passion and knowledge. We went away with so many great ideas we wanted to implement. It was a fantastic presentation, we were hanging on every word."
— Scott Pearce, New Zealand Blood Service
Why Owners Skip Testing
Pretesting feels slow when a campaign is already running late, and it feels like overkill for what is dismissed as just a social post. That instinct is exactly backwards. The smaller the budget, the less room there is to waste any of it on an untested message, and a half-day pretest is far cheaper than a month of paid media pushing the wrong words to the wrong audience. Kevin's coaching clients build this pretest into the marketing calendar as a standing 48-hour checkpoint before anything goes to paid media, not a one-off exercise reserved for the big campaigns.
Quick Wins
- Before your next piece of paid creative goes live, run it past 10 to 15 real prospects using the three-question test above.
- Block half a day for this in your marketing calendar as a standing step, not an occasional extra.
- Track how often pretested creative gets reused versus binned, and use that as your own evidence the habit is paying off.
Key Takeaways
- Remember liking your own ad is not the same as it working. Test with real prospects, not your inner circle.
- Ask what, who and would you act, never do you like it, since liking predicts nothing about behaviour.
- Treat a confused answer from six or more testers as a fail, whatever the compliments were.
- Build the pretest into your calendar as a standing 48-hour checkpoint before every paid campaign.
If your marketing budget is being spent on messages nobody outside your own head has ever tested, that is where we start.
Kevin D’Ambros-Smith
Kevin is the founder of Simple-Growth and a business growth coach with experience at DDB, Ogilvy, and Saatchi & Saatchi. He has co-founded 9 companies, coached 200+ business owners one-on-one, and holds a 9.5/10 NPS. Every article on this blog reflects real-world experience - no theory, no fluff.
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Monday, October 05, 2026
There is no single best business coach in the USA. Here are five criteria for choosing one, a fair look at the main formats, and why an outside perspective can change what you see in your own business.
Monday, October 05, 2026
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Monday, October 05, 2026
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