Friday, September 25, 2026
Existing customers are 60-70% more likely to buy again, yet most SME sales teams never ask the second question. Here's the add-on framework that fixes it.
More than one in three Australian small business owners don't regularly know whether they made a profit in the previous month. That is the finding from new research commissioned by Xero and conducted by One Picture, surveying 750 small business decision-makers and 500 accountants and bookkeepers, published 14 August 2026. Not revenue. Not customers. Whether the business made money at all.
If you cannot answer that question about the whole business, you almost certainly cannot answer a harder one: which customers are actually making you money. And the second question matters just as much as the first.
Owners default to one growth lever: more customers. More leads, more campaigns, more outreach, more top-line revenue. It feels productive, and it is the easiest number to watch move.
But revenue and profit are not the same metric, and growing the first can quietly shrink the second. Research from the Small Business Expo Research Desk, analysing responses from more than 1,100 US small business owners in early 2026, found a clean pattern hiding in plain sight: businesses earning under 25% of their revenue from repeat customers were unprofitable 29.0% of the time. Businesses earning 51% or more of their revenue from repeat customers were unprofitable just 7.7% of the time, roughly a quarter as often.
Repeat customers are not a nice-to-have loyalty metric. They are the single strongest predictor of profitability in this data, and most owners have never asked why their repeat customers keep coming back, or deliberately gone looking for more of them.
The enemy here is not the new customer. It is the assumption that any customer, chased hard enough, is worth having.
Here is the three-step version of a process Kevin runs with every coaching client before marketing or sales is touched, built on Jobs-to-be-Done thinking from Christensen and Ulwick and Osterwalder's Value Proposition Canvas, adapted through the Simple-Growth System™.
1. Rank by profit, not revenue. Pull your last 15 to 20 customers and rank them by what they actually left in the business after cost to serve, not by invoice size. The order almost always surprises owners. Your biggest customer by revenue is rarely your most profitable one.
2. Find the repeat 20%. Among that list, identify who comes back without being chased, who refers others, and who is easiest to serve well. This is your bullseye customer, the one your whole business should be built around, not an afterthought in a database.
3. Ask them the job, not the feature. Talk to three or four of them directly. What were they trying to get done when they first came looking for someone like you? What frustrated them about the alternative? What would make the experience even better? Their answers, in their own words, usually reframe the offer, the marketing and the next hire, before a single dollar is spent on a new campaign.
"I catch up with Kevin once a week and it is definitely the highlight of my week. He just sees different opportunities so clearly. I would not have considered the B2C market as an opportunity before working with Kevin and now it is a major focus for us."
— John Roberts, Co-owner and COO, Oragene
None of this is complicated, and you probably half-know it already. The gap is not insight, it is accountability. Ranking customers by profit means confronting which relationships to let go of, or at least stop subsidising, and that is an uncomfortable conversation most owners avoid having with themselves, let alone a client.
It also takes someone outside the business to ask the question seriously enough to get a straight answer, because owners are too close to their own customer list to see it clearly. In over 30 years building and advising businesses, including nine companies founded or co-founded, Kevin has seen that the owners who break this pattern earliest are the ones who bring in a second pair of eyes with no stake in any single customer relationship.
If the real blind spot is your own numbers rather than your customer list, that is a conversation for a qualified accountant or a Chartered Accountants ANZ advisor before it is a conversation for a coach.
Want help finding and serving the 20% of your customers who are quietly making you the most money? Become the owner who knows exactly which customers to grow.