Tuesday, October 20, 2026
Roughly 65 percent of small businesses are tied so closely to their owner they'd struggle to run without them. Here's Gerber's E-Myth framework for finally getting out of the technician's chair.
Landing the big account feels like the win that changes everything — and for a while, it is. Then one day that single customer is 40% of revenue, and the business isn't being run by its owner anymore. It's being run by whatever that customer decides next.
Customer concentration is simple to calculate and most SME owners have never actually done it: take your top customer's revenue as a share of total revenue. Above roughly 20%, you're exposed. Above 30%, that customer effectively has a vote on your business's future — a delayed payment, a renegotiated margin, a decision to bring supply in-house, and your numbers move whether you had any say in it or not. Kevin has worked with FMCG founders who landed a major national retail listing, watched revenue triple, and only later realised that one buyer's category review now decided their year.
The warning signs are rarely subtle once you look: a single customer whose head office contact you know better than most of your own team, pricing conversations that increasingly go the customer's way because you can't afford to lose the account, and a growth plan that quietly assumes this relationship continues exactly as it is. If your forecast for next year falls apart the moment one customer's buyer changes their mind, that's concentration risk, not a plan.
The fix isn't to shrink the big account — it's often your most valuable relationship and should stay that way. The fix is building the next two or three accounts deliberately, on a timeline, rather than opportunistically whenever a lead happens to appear. Set a target for what the top account's share should be in twelve months, then work backward to what pipeline has to exist to get there. Treat new-account development as a standing priority with its own numbers, not something that only gets attention when the big customer already feels shaky.
A large anchor customer isn't automatically a risk — it's a risk when it's unmanaged. Businesses that handle this well use the credibility of the big account to open doors elsewhere ("we supply X" is a strong door-opener with a second retailer), while actively working the percentage down over time. The goal isn't to avoid big customers. It's to make sure no single one of them can end your year by changing their mind.
Not sure how exposed your business actually is to one customer or account? Mapping concentration risk and building the diversification plan is standard SME Growth work inside the Simple-Growth System™. Get in touch with Kevin D'Ambros-Smith.
…and you become the owner whose year can't be changed by one customer's decision.