Monday, September 21, 2026
Most small business marketing budgets chase the customers who already love you. Category Entry Point Mapping shows why that caps your growth — and where the real customers are hiding.
Ask most SME owners how the business is tracking and you will get one answer: the bank balance, or last month's revenue. That is the scorecard a lot of New Zealand and US businesses run on, and it is the reason so many only find out they have a strategy problem the same week they have a cash problem. A plan checked against one number is not a plan, it is a hope. After 30-plus years building and advising businesses, from boardroom strategy work on 60-plus global brands to nine companies of his own, Kevin has seen the pattern repeat every time: the businesses that compound quarter after quarter are the ones measuring four things, not one.
The enemy here is not laziness, it is simplicity that went too far. A Censuswide survey of more than 250 UK SMEs, commissioned by Geckoboard, found 49 percent of owners had not identified a single Key Performance Indicator for their business, and almost four in ten missed every growth target they had set that year. The businesses that did track their numbers in real time were not just a little ahead, they were almost twice as likely to hit every growth target they had set. The number that finally gets an owner's attention, the bank balance, is always the last number to move. By the time it moves, the decision that caused it was made months earlier.
Robert Kaplan and David Norton built the Balanced Scorecard to answer a question most management teams get wrong: if you only chase the financial number, you find out something was broken long after it mattered. Instead of one lagging number, the Scorecard puts four linked perspectives on a single page, each with its own target.
Most SME owners already have a version of box one. The businesses that compound are the ones with a live number in boxes two, three and four as well, reviewed on the same cadence as the bank balance.
"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. He has opened up so many new opportunities for us."
— John Roberts, Co-owner and COO, Oragene
Owners do not skip boxes two, three and four because they doubt them. They skip them because nobody put a number next to a date on a calendar, so the moment a fire needs fighting, which is most weeks, the review slips. This is exactly the gap a second pair of eyes closes: not telling you what the boxes should say in theory, but sitting with you to choose the three or four numbers that actually predict your next quarter, and holding the discipline to check them when you would rather not. That is a different conversation to a coach who only wants to talk mindset. It is a strategic one, and it is where a structured Simple-Growth strategy session starts.
If your business strategy is tracked by one number and a gut feeling, that is the first thing Kevin helps you fix, and you become the owner who sees problems coming before they reach the bank account.