Thursday, November 05, 2026
Before you chase new customers, count how often the ones you have buy. Three numbers, one worked example from Kevin's Know Your Numbers training, and a 30-day test.
Owners love buying a new system to fix productivity. New software, new process, new dashboard. Meanwhile the thing actually draining an hour a day out of the team is something nobody would ever put in a strategy document: the printer that always jams, the approval that requires three people to reply to one email, the report that gets rebuilt from scratch every week because the template never got saved properly.
If you're wondering how to stop being the bottleneck in your business, the answer sometimes has nothing to do with delegation and everything to do with the dozen small frictions nobody has ever bothered to fix.
SMEs are drawn to big fixes because big fixes feel like progress — a new CRM, a new project management tool, a company-wide restructure. But most day-to-day productivity loss doesn't come from missing systems. It comes from dozens of tiny, repeated frictions that are individually too small to justify a project, and collectively expensive enough to quietly cap how much a team can get done in a day.
This is the trap: fixing one big system takes months and often doesn't stick. Fixing twelve small frictions takes a week and compounds immediately, because the team feels the relief the same day.
1. Log it for five days. Every time something takes longer than it should, or someone says "ugh, not this again," write it down. Don't fix anything yet — just collect.
2. Sort by frequency, not size. A five-minute annoyance that happens daily costs more over a month than a one-hour annoyance that happens once. Rank the list by total time lost, not by how dramatic the fix sounds.
3. Fix the top three this week. Most friction points have an embarrassingly simple fix once someone actually owns fixing them — a saved template, a single approver instead of three, a five-minute standing rule that removes a recurring back-and-forth.
Run this quarterly and the compounding effect is real: teams that clear their top frictions consistently report getting meaningfully more done without adding a single new tool or working a single extra hour.
"Kevin had a no-nonsense approach and tackled the issues head on. Accountability was the key."
— Ashley Berrysmith, Icehouse Coaching Programme
Owners usually know their team's biggest frictions in their gut — they just never write them down or prioritise fixing them over the next big initiative. The discipline of stopping to log and fix the small stuff, on a set schedule, is exactly the kind of unglamorous accountability that a coaching relationship is built to enforce when day-to-day pressure would otherwise bury it.
If your last productivity fix was a new piece of software, the frictions actually slowing your team down are still sitting there untouched.
...and you become the owner whose team gets more done because the small frictions are gone.
Thursday, October 22, 2026
Get more from the link that limits your growth before you spend a dollar on it. A 14-day, no-new-spend plan for SME owners.
Thursday, October 22, 2026
Score eight links in your business from 1 to 5 and the weakest, earliest link is usually your constraint. A 20-minute self-check for SME owners.
Thursday, October 22, 2026
Referrals just became small business owners' #1 source of new customers — up from 65% to 83% in a single year. Here's the Dream 100 system that turns word of mouth into a repeatable growth engine.
Thursday, October 22, 2026
Roughly one in four founders report loneliness and isolation running their business. Here's what a coach actually does differently, and why the first session is rarely about strategy.
Thursday, October 22, 2026
NZ small business sales rose 8.6 percent this quarter, but growth ranged from 2.9 to 16.3 percent by industry. Here's the three-number check that tells you whether your growth is actually yours.
Thursday, October 22, 2026
Only 30 percent of business change efforts fully succeed. Here's the three-part diagnosis, borrowed from strategy academic Richard Rumelt, most owners skip before fixing anything.
Thursday, October 22, 2026
Close to six in ten of this year's US holiday shoppers are already buying, in October or year-round. Here are three sales moves to make this week before Black Friday arrives.
Thursday, October 22, 2026
77.6 percent of US consumers used AI to help with a purchase decision in the past six months. Here are three moves that make your small business visible when customers ask AI about you.
Thursday, October 22, 2026
54 percent of US business owners have no real plan, and only 11 percent have anything detailed. Here's the one-afternoon exercise that gives your business a sharper three-year direction than any spreadsheet.
Wednesday, October 21, 2026
Before you spend another dollar on ads, staff or software, find the one step that limits your growth. Here is a one-hour spend-gate test you can run this week.
Wednesday, October 21, 2026
ActionCOACH began in Brisbane, Australia. What does its story tell US owners about where good growth ideas come from, and how to test an outside idea in your own business?
Wednesday, October 21, 2026
SME owner confidence is climbing, but for most, revenue isn't following. Here's why time isn't your real constraint, and the three-step framework that finds the one that is.
Wednesday, October 21, 2026
49% of business owners question monthly whether running the business is worth it, a US survey found. Here's what changes when someone else is asking that question with you.
Wednesday, October 21, 2026
Nearly half of NZ SME owners are planning Christmas trading changes, MYOB research found, and most of it is a discount. Here's how to build memory before you build the offer.
Wednesday, October 21, 2026
46% of New Zealand business owners aren't paying themselves, Xero research found. Here's the Profit First fix that changes the order money moves through your business, not the hours you work.