Monday, November 09, 2026
Sales are up but the bank balance isn't following. Here's Marc Benioff's V2MOM — the one-page tool that turns a wish-list strategy into the few moves that actually protect your margin.
You will spend the next few weeks writing an ambitious plan for next year. By late January, most of it will be dead — not because the plan was wrong, but because nobody built the weekly system that was supposed to keep it alive. This is the January Cliff, and it claims more good strategies than bad competitors ever do.
The pattern is remarkably consistent. Q4 planning happens with real energy — a day off-site, a whiteboard full of good ideas, genuine enthusiasm. Then the business heads into the year-end rush, the January reset, the first fires of a new year, and the plan quietly slides off the calendar. By February, nobody can quite remember what the "one big priority" was supposed to be.
The named enemy is not laziness or a lack of commitment. It is the absence of a weekly mechanism that forces the plan back into view before it has a chance to be forgotten. A plan reviewed once a quarter, or worse, once a year, will always lose to the urgency of whatever email arrived this morning.
This is a fifteen-minute ritual, done every single week without exception, that keeps the plan alive between the big planning sessions.
1. Name the one thing — Every Monday, write down the single action, this week, that moves the quarter's priority forward. Not five things. One.
2. Check last week's one thing — Before naming this week's action, be honest about whether last week's got done. If it did not, ask why before adding anything new to the list.
3. Protect the block — Put a non-negotiable 90-minute slot in the calendar for that one action, before the week fills up with everyone else's priorities.
Fifteen minutes a week is the entire cost of keeping a strategy alive. It is also the fifteen minutes almost nobody actually protects.
"Kevin had a no-nonsense approach and tackled the issues head on. Accountability was the key."
— Ashley Berrysmith, Icehouse Coaching Programme
Owners do not abandon the plan because they stop caring about it. They abandon it because nobody outside their own head is checking whether last week's "one thing" actually happened. Self-accountability has a short half-life once the operational noise of running a business kicks back in — and by the time an owner notices the plan has drifted, months of the year are already gone.
There is also a quieter reason: reviewing a plan weekly means confronting, every seven days, whether you actually did what you said you would do. That is an uncomfortable habit to build alone, which is exactly why most owners let it slide the first time a genuinely busy week gets in the way — and then never pick it back up.
This is precisely the mechanism a good coach provides — not motivation, but a fixed weekly checkpoint that makes drifting off the plan uncomfortable enough that it stops happening.
The owners who close this tab and do nothing will still be re-explaining this year's plan in February next year. The ones who build the weekly checkpoint won't be.
...and you become the owner whose plan is still alive in February.
Tuesday, October 27, 2026
Most SME owners are fixing the wrong problem. Here's the 3-step method that finds the one constraint actually holding your growth back, before you spend another dollar.
Tuesday, October 27, 2026
A third of US small business owners say they don't know whether they have the tools — AI included — to grow next year. That's not a confidence problem, it's a visibility one, and it's fixable in an afternoon.
Tuesday, October 27, 2026
Confidence up a quarter, down the next, tariffs easing then tightening — waiting for certainty is its own decision, and usually the wrong one. Here's a simple way to keep deciding well when the ground keeps moving.
Tuesday, October 27, 2026
There's one role almost every SME owner has avoided filling for a year or more — while quietly doing it themselves instead. Here's the Who Not How framework, and the three-step test that makes the hire obvious.
Tuesday, October 27, 2026
They nodded, asked great questions, said it's exactly what they need — then disappeared. Here's why warmth isn't a buying signal, and the three-message sequence that gets stalled deals talking again.
Tuesday, October 27, 2026
Most SME marketing describes the product and targets a demographic — and both miss why people actually buy. Here's the Jobs To Be Done framework, and how to find the job your business is really being hired to do.
Tuesday, October 27, 2026
Nearly half of businesses miss the target they set for themselves — and it's rarely because the team didn't try hard enough. Here's the three-number check that builds a 2027 target you can actually hit.
Monday, October 26, 2026
ActionCOACH, an EOS Implementer or an independent coach? A fair, source-linked guide for US owners, with a six-question test to match the help to your biggest constraint.
Monday, October 26, 2026
Gallup's 2026 global workplace data shows manager engagement is collapsing faster than everyone else's. Here's the research-backed 3-step fix for SME owners wearing the manager hat too.
Monday, October 26, 2026
Only about a third of seasonal businesses hold enough cash to cover their leanest months before the slow season hits. Here's the ten-minute reserve check before this year's peak trade.
Monday, October 26, 2026
A well-known coaching ROI study found a $7.90 return per $1 spent. Here's an honest look at where that number comes from, and what actually transfers to an SME owner.
Monday, October 26, 2026
Only around 20% of companies complete 80% of their strategic goals, and fewer than half of employees know what's expected of them. Here's how OKRs fix that at SME scale.
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.
Monday, October 26, 2026
A 2026 Gartner survey found SMEs put just 12% of marketing spend into brand-building, against the 60% long-term research recommends. Here's what that costs you eighteen months from now.
Monday, October 26, 2026
Fewer than 5% of employees understand their company's strategy well enough to act on it. Here's the one-page scorecard that fixes it, reviewed in 15 minutes a week.