Monday, October 26, 2026
Bain research shows winning a new customer can cost up to 25 times more than keeping one you already have. Here's the CLV/CAC discipline that flips where your sales effort goes.
There's one hire almost every SME owner has been avoiding for at least a year. Not because the business doesn't need it — because the owner has quietly decided they can't afford it, right before spending another week doing the job themselves instead of running the business. A 2023 study of US founders found they spend 36% of their working week on admin tasks — invoicing, scheduling, data entry, research — almost none of which is the reason they started the business in the first place.
Across more than 200 businesses Kevin has coached one-on-one, the owners stuck at the same revenue three years running almost always have one thing in common: they're still personally doing the job they should have handed off twelve months ago.
That sentence is true in the moment and ruinous over a year. The same research found 25% of founders say it's faster to do a task themselves than to hand it off, 27% keep tasks because they enjoy them, and 17% say they have no one to delegate to. Every one of those reasons is real — and every one of them is also how an owner ends up running a job instead of owning a business.
The research, a 2023 Time Etc / Censuswide survey of 251 US founders, also found founders with strong delegation habits ran businesses averaging roughly a third more revenue than founders who held on to everything. Delegation isn't a nice-to-have. It's a growth lever with a number attached.
Strategic coach Dan Sullivan and psychologist Dr. Benjamin Hardy built a simple reframe around this exact trap: when you hit a task you don't want to do, stop asking "how do I do this?" and start asking "who could do this for me?" The first question keeps you the bottleneck forever, because there's always another "how" to learn. The second question treats your time as the scarce resource it actually is.
Here's how to put it to work this week, with an AI-era twist: before you hire a human "who," check whether a tool is already a good enough "who" for the lowest-value slice of the task.
"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
Owners almost always price the hire against their wage, not their value. A $30-an-hour admin task feels expensive to outsource when you're staring at a quiet bank balance — right up until you calculate what your own hour is worth doing the one thing only you can do: sell, lead, or decide. That reframing rarely happens alone, in the middle of a busy week. It's exactly the kind of outside, unemotional maths a coach brings to the table.
You get Kevin's big-brand thinking applied to your business, so the next dollar goes where it counts.
Be the owner who finally hands off the job you've been holding for a year, and spends your week on the work only you can do.
Sunday, October 04, 2026
Owners feel busy all day and still don't move the business forward. The research says task-switching is the hidden cost - here's the Three-Block Day that gets the best hours back.
Sunday, October 04, 2026
Owners chase new leads every Q4 while a cheaper, warmer list of past customers sits untouched. Here's the four-step Win-Back Sequence and the real economics behind it.
Sunday, October 04, 2026
SME websites and pitches default to telling their own story. The research says customers skim past most of it looking for themselves - here's the StoryBrand framework that fixes it.
Sunday, October 04, 2026
Most SME growth plans default to out-competing everyone else on the same crowded turf. Blue Ocean Strategy's own data says that's the lower-profit path - here's the four-question grid that finds the faster one.
Sunday, October 04, 2026
Most SME owners blame a lost customer on price. New 2026 research says it is almost always one unresolved issue instead. Here is the three-step audit to find your real loyalty leak.
Sunday, October 04, 2026
Revenue is not the same as profit, and a small slice of your customer base may be quietly cancelling out your best accounts. Here is how to find out which ones.
Sunday, October 04, 2026
The coaching industry has more than doubled since 2016 to over 232,000 coaches. With that many choices, here is the single question that tells you who is worth hiring.
Sunday, October 04, 2026
AI is saving small business owners 10 to 13 hours a week, and most have no idea what they gained. Here is the four-question method for pointing AI at the hours that matter.
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.