The Christmas Trading Runway: Why Late October Is Already Late

Friday, September 25, 2026

Holiday spending has already shifted to October — and SME owners still planning a November launch are chasing demand that's gone. Here's the 10-week runway that gets ahead of it.

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Every growing SME eventually gets offered a shiny new direction: a new product line, a new market, a new customer segment that looks easier than the one it is already serving. Most owners say yes to at least one of these a year too early, chasing growth that was never actually theirs to chase. Across 9 companies founded or co-founded and 200+ businesses coached one-on-one, Kevin D'Ambros-Smith has seen that the ones that scaled fastest almost always said no to more opportunities than they said yes to.

The Growth That Looks Real and Is Not

Here is the enemy: treating every available growth opportunity as equally worth taking, because turning one down feels like leaving money on the table. Bain and Company's research, tracking more than 1,800 companies through a full decade, found that roughly 90 percent failed to achieve sustained, profitable growth over that period. Of the companies that did succeed, 80 percent got there by focusing hard on their core business before they ever expanded outward.

Source: Bain and Company, Focus on Your Core for Profitable Growth

Collins' Three Circles

Jim Collins built the Hedgehog Concept to answer a simpler question than most strategy frameworks attempt: what is this business actually built to be the best at? It sits at the overlap of three circles.

  • What you are deeply good at - not what you can do adequately, what you are genuinely better at than almost anyone else in your market.
  • What drives your economic engine - the one number, margin per customer, revenue per unit, lifetime value, that moves your profit more than any other.
  • What you are genuinely passionate about sustaining for years - growth you do not believe in gets starved of attention the first time it gets hard.

A growth opportunity that misses even one of those three circles is usually the growth that is not actually yours to chase, however good the revenue number looks on a slide.

"Kevin's knowledge and intellect on all things business, no matter what industry it is, he just seems to find gems that you can focus on. 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

Why Owners Chase It Anyway

Most owners can feel when an opportunity sits outside their hedgehog, and take it anyway, because growth feels like the safer default and saying no to revenue feels reckless with a team depending on them. This is exactly where an outside strategist earns their keep: someone who has sat inside 30-plus industries can usually see, inside one conversation, which opportunities actually sit inside your three circles and which ones are just well-dressed distractions.

Quick Wins Before You Say Yes to the Next Opportunity

  • List every growth opportunity currently on your table, whether a new product, a new market or a new segment.
  • Score each one against the three circles: are you genuinely best at it, does it move your real economic engine, and will you still want to be doing it in three years?
  • Put a hold on anything that fails even one circle, regardless of how good the revenue number looks today.

Key Takeaways

  • Expect most growth bets to fail - Bain's research found roughly 90 percent of companies did not sustain profitable growth over a decade.
  • Focus before you expand - 80 percent of the companies that did succeed grew their core first.
  • Use the three circles - strength, economic engine and genuine passion, not just the deal on the table.
  • Get a second opinion before saying yes - it is faster than finding out the hard way that a year of growth was not actually yours to chase.

If you are not sure which growth opportunities are actually worth your next twelve months, that is exactly the conversation to have first. Become the owner who says yes only to the growth that is yours.

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