Thursday, November 05, 2026
Vistage puts you in a group of 12 to 16 owners with a Chair. Simple-Growth is one owner-run coach who finds your constraint first. Here is who each suits, what is public on cost, and six questions to ask. Checked 5 November 2026.
It's 11pm on a Thursday and you're still turning it over. Take the new premises. Fire the client who drains every Monday morning before you've had coffee. Launch into the second region. Drop the product line that barely breaks even. You've had the information for three weeks. You've run the numbers twice. And you still haven't pulled the trigger, because what if you're wrong, and it costs you the thing you've spent years building?
Here's what actually gets owners unstuck. Not more confidence. A five-question test built in 1979 for strategists running the world's biggest companies, that works just as well on a two-million-dollar business as it did on the ones it was built for.
I've made this exact mistake nine times over, in nine different companies I've founded or co-founded. The ones I regret aren't the launches that failed. They're the eighteen months I spent not deciding.
The advice SME owners get on big decisions is almost always some version of "trust your gut" or "just commit." That's the enemy here, not fear, not caution. Gut instinct built your business to where it is. It will not, on its own, tell you whether a decision is actually risky or just unfamiliar.
Bluevine's 2026 research into small-business stress found that 68% of US owners have delayed or avoided a major decision such as hiring or expansion in the past year, and 21% have done it four or more times (Bluevine, 2026). That's not a confidence problem shared by one in five owners. That's a missing tool, shared by most of them.
Michael Porter built this at Harvard to answer one question before any big move: is this environment actually worth entering, defending or leaving? Five forces, five honest answers, no spreadsheet required.
Score each one honestly, out of five, for the decision sitting on your desk. Most owners find the fear was pointed at the wrong force entirely. It's rarely the competitor they were worried about.
"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
Here's the real obstacle. Knowing the five forces exist doesn't stop you running them alone, at 11pm, with no one to argue the other side. You'll score your own business generously. You'll underweight the force that's actually inconvenient to admit. That's not a character flaw — it's just what happens when the person scoring the decision is the same person who has to live with it.
That's the gap a second, outside set of eyes closes. Not someone who tells you the decision is safe. Someone who's run this exact test on thirty-plus industries and will tell you honestly which force you're underscoring.
This isn't for you if you're after a guarantee before you'll move — no framework hands you that, and anyone who promises it is selling something else. It is for owners who are ready to make the decision properly, rather than not make it at all.
Run the five forces on tonight's decision and you'll likely still choose to act. But you'll know why, and that's the difference between a decision and a guess you got lucky on.
If the decision you're avoiding has been sitting there for more than a fortnight, that's the first thing we'd look at together.
Sunday, October 04, 2026
You nailed the pitch and the buyer loved it, then the deal went quiet. The reason is usually a meeting room you were never invited to. Here is how to sell to a buying committee you cannot see.
Sunday, October 04, 2026
Customers don't buy products, they hire them to do a job. Here is the framework that explains why an inferior competitor keeps outselling you, and what to fix in your marketing today.
Sunday, October 04, 2026
Most SME owners have one growth plan: get more customers. There are actually four distinct ways to grow, and the cheapest one is usually sitting in your existing customer file.
Sunday, October 04, 2026
Small business confidence just rose, but growth expectations are falling for almost everyone. New 2026 data reveals the one decision separating owners still growing from owners just waiting it out.
Sunday, October 04, 2026
A 1 percent price increase lifts operating profit by an average of 11 percent, McKinsey's Global 1200 research found, far more than an equivalent rise in volume. Here's how to raise prices without losing your best customers.
Sunday, October 04, 2026
Some coaches build a business out of being needed forever. Here's the Graduation Test: three questions that reveal whether your coach is transferring real capability, or just keeping you on retainer.
Sunday, October 04, 2026
Most owners respond to a bottleneck by fixing something else entirely. Eli Goldratt's Theory of Constraints explains why that backfires, and documented case studies show a mean 69 percent lead-time reduction once the real constraint is found.
Sunday, October 04, 2026
Roughly four in ten B2B purchase attempts end in no decision at all. It's rarely about price. Here's Alex Hormozi's Value Equation, in plain English, and why it explains almost every stalled deal in your pipeline.
Sunday, October 04, 2026
41 percent of consumers now always read reviews before choosing a business, and 31 percent won't use one rated under 4.5 stars. Here's the Review Velocity System that turns happy customers into a steady stream of five-star proof.
Sunday, October 04, 2026
64 percent of executives say they're juggling too many conflicting priorities, and most SME strategies die from addition, not ambition. Here's the three-step Strategic Short List that turns six priorities into the one that actually moves the needle.
Sunday, October 04, 2026
A third of small business owners are absorbing this year's cost increases out of their own pocket instead of raising prices. Here's the three-step Margin Audit that turns that guess into a safe, thirty-day pricing test.
Sunday, October 04, 2026
Before you approve the next hire, run the revenue-per-employee test. Some of the growth you are trying to buy with headcount is sitting in tasks AI can already take off the list.
Sunday, October 04, 2026
Owner-dependent businesses sell for roughly half the multiple of businesses that run without them. Dan Sullivan's Who Not How question is the simplest fix most owners never try.
Sunday, October 04, 2026
The tasks only one person in your business can do are a hidden cost waiting to land. Here is how to clear the backlog in an afternoon using a recorder instead of a blank page.
Sunday, October 04, 2026
Chasing every lead in the run to year end is how you end up delivering the deals that cost you the most. Here is the Right-Fit Filter that catches a bad deal before you quote it.