Keeping It Simple
The fastest, simplest ways to grow your business - no jargon, no fluff. Practical strategies that actually work for SME owners in the USA, New Zealand, and worldwide.
Ask most SME owners “what happens if you got sick for a month” and they can answer for themselves — reluctantly. Ask them the same question about their best salesperson, their only bookkeeper, or the one team member who understands the ordering system, and most go quiet. Search “how to stop being the bottleneck in my business” and the advice is almost always about the owner. It rarely mentions that the owner is often just the first single point of failure a business finds — not the only one.
The Enemy: Assumed Redundancy
Most owners believe their business has more redundancy than it does, because day to day nothing goes wrong. That's not evidence of resilience — it's evidence the failure hasn't happened yet. A single-person dependency in any critical function — sales, production, a key supplier relationship, even the person who knows the passwords — behaves exactly like a structural risk on a balance sheet, except nobody's auditing it until it's tested.
The Framework: The Absence Test
1. List the Critical Functions — Sales, delivery, finance, key supplier relationships, IT/systems knowledge. Not roles — functions that must happen every week for the business to run.
2. Name the Single Point — For each function, is there genuinely more than one person who could carry it for two weeks with no notice? Be honest.
3. Build the Bridge — For every function with a single point of failure, document the minimum knowledge a second person would need, and assign someone to learn it this quarter.
“Specific to my business requirements and takes a systematic approach. Practical, specific, and pertinent to my business.”
— Simon Keepa, Icehouse Coaching Programme
The Execution Gap
Owners usually know exactly where their single points of failure sit — they just haven't prioritised fixing them because nothing has broken yet. This is a discipline problem, not a knowledge problem, and it's precisely where a coach's outside accountability turns “we should really document that” into a dated task that actually gets done.
Quick Wins
- Run the Absence Test on just your three most critical functions this week.
- Ask each key person to write a one-page “if I disappeared” handover note — fifteen minutes, not a full manual.
- Cross-train one back-up for your single highest-risk function within 30 days.
Key Takeaways
- List every critical function your business depends on weekly.
- Test whether each one survives a key person's sudden two-week absence.
- Document the minimum knowledge needed to build a second person into each function.
- Prioritise the single highest-risk gap and close it within 30 days, not “eventually.”
If you can't answer who covers your most critical function tomorrow morning, that's exactly where we'd start.
Kevin D’Ambros-Smith
Kevin is the founder of Simple-Growth and a business growth coach with experience at DDB, Ogilvy, and Saatchi & Saatchi. He has co-founded 9 companies, coached 200+ business owners one-on-one, and holds a 9.5/10 NPS. Every article on this blog reflects real-world experience - no theory, no fluff.
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