Sunday, November 01, 2026
Saying yes to every enquiry feels safer than growth. It isn't. Here's the strategic choice — who you're actually playing to win with — that most SME owners never make on purpose.
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.
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.
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
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.
If you can't answer who covers your most critical function tomorrow morning, that's exactly where Kevin starts with you.
...and you become the owner whose business keeps running when any one person is away.
Tuesday, October 13, 2026
New research shows 90 percent of small business owners are preoccupied with work outside normal hours. Michael Gerber's E-Myth explains why, and names the one shift that actually fixes it.
Tuesday, October 13, 2026
Workplace research puts the cost of refocusing after an interruption at around 23 minutes, and the average worker now fields well over 100 messages a day. Here is how to protect the hours that actually move your business.
Tuesday, October 13, 2026
Forrester research finds only 8 percent of B2B buyers name price as the biggest driver of their decision. Here is how to find out what a price objection is actually about, before you reach for a discount.
Tuesday, October 13, 2026
A new Gartner survey finds most B2B buyers would rather research and decide without ever speaking to a salesperson. If your marketing cannot carry the whole sale alone, here is the tool that fixes it.
Tuesday, October 13, 2026
New Gallup data shows only 11 percent of SME owners with staff have a detailed written plan, and most of the rest will try to write next year's in December. Here is the three-date fix to do this week instead.
Monday, October 12, 2026
EOS or Scaling Up? A fair, source-linked comparison for US owners, a five-point checklist to choose, and the growth questions neither operating system answers.
Monday, October 12, 2026
The seven concerns SME owners raise most often in coaching, why each one happens, and what actually helps.
Monday, October 12, 2026
Growth rarely needs you to do more. It needs you to stop five habits that quietly hold your business back.
Monday, October 12, 2026
Seven low-cost ways to lift sales this week, starting with the customers and quotes already in your business.
Monday, October 12, 2026
The 4 real reasons marketing fails for SME owners, and the practical, low-cost fix for each one.
Monday, October 12, 2026
New research shows 39% of small business owners blame admin, not the market, for stalling their growth. Here is how to find the real constraint before you spend another dollar fixing the wrong one.
Monday, October 12, 2026
Only 20-30% of businesses for sale actually sell, often because they can't run without their owner. Here's how to design yours so it can.
Monday, October 12, 2026
Writing your goals down is linked to real gains in achieving them. Here's the Vivid Vision exercise that turns a fuzzy dream into a measurable plan.
Monday, October 12, 2026
Owners using AI with purpose save 6 to 10 hours a week. Here's the simple audit that finds your first three tasks to hand over.
Monday, October 12, 2026
97% of buyers read reviews, but trust in them is falling. Here's how to build the review ask into your sales process, not just your marketing calendar.