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.
Every SME owner carries a mental list of the tasks that would fall over if one particular person took a fortnight off. Most owners never write that list down, and fewer still do anything about it, because documenting a process feels like the least urgent job on a very long list. Then someone resigns, and the business discovers exactly how much of its knowledge was never actually the business's knowledge at all. Across nine companies and two decades of coaching owners, I have watched this exact moment cost more time, money and stress than almost any other single event in a small business.
The Debt You Cannot See on a Balance Sheet
Gallup's benchmark on employee turnover puts the cost of replacing an employee at somewhere between 50 and 200 percent of that person's annual salary, depending on how senior and specialised the role is, with frontline roles at the lower end and managers and technical specialists closer to the top. SHRM's own estimate lands at six to nine months of salary for many positions. The dollar figure gets most of the attention, but the real damage sits underneath it: the institutional knowledge that walks out the door with them, the undocumented context, the client relationships, and the hard-won judgement nobody ever wrote down. That gap shows up later as slower decisions, repeated mistakes, and lessons the business has to relearn the hard way.
Clearing the Backlog With a Recorder, Not a Blank Page
The reason most SOPs never get written is that writing one from a blank page feels like a multi-week project nobody has time for. There is a faster route, and it now sits in almost every owner's pocket.
- List your single points of failure - the handful of tasks only one person in the business can currently do without asking someone else.
- Record, do not write, the first draft - narrate the task out loud while you or that person actually does it, then feed the transcript into an AI tool and ask it to turn the recording into a clear, numbered set of steps.
- File it where the whole team can find it in under thirty seconds, not buried in one person's inbox or a folder nobody else knows exists.
This is exactly the kind of task worth handing to AI rather than a person's spare evening. The tool type is any AI transcription and drafting assistant, the likely saving is turning a multi-week documentation backlog into a single afternoon, and the first step is simply recording yourself doing the task once, narrating what you are doing and why, and asking the tool to turn that transcript into a first-draft SOP you then tidy up.
"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 Owners Keep Putting This Off
Documentation loses every week to whatever is on fire that day, because it never feels as urgent as the actual fire. The businesses Kevin coaches through this treat it differently: a fixed slot each month for clearing one more single point of failure, tracked the same way a sales target would be, rather than left as a someday project that never quite becomes today's project.
Quick Wins
- List your top three single points of failure this week, in order of how much damage each would do if that person left tomorrow.
- Record the first one this month using the narrate-and-transcribe method above.
- Put a recurring slot on the calendar, even just thirty minutes a fortnight, until the list is clear.
Key Takeaways
- Remember replacing an employee typically costs 50 to 200 percent of their salary, and the knowledge loss underneath that figure is the harder cost to recover from.
- List your single points of failure honestly, the tasks only one person can currently do.
- Record a spoken walkthrough and let an AI tool draft the SOP, rather than starting from a blank page.
- Schedule documentation as a recurring slot, not a someday project that never gets done.
If your business would wobble the moment one particular person took two weeks off, that is exactly the kind of fragility we build systems to remove.
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
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