Thursday, September 10, 2026
Most SME owners make their biggest calls alone, with no one qualified to challenge them. Here's how to build a "kitchen cabinet" that gives you real strategic pushback — without a formal board.
If you cannot remember the last time your leadership team sat down and talked about where the business is actually going - not the budget, not the roster, not this week's problem - you are not alone, and you are not lazy. You are normal. Harvard Business Review research found that 85 percent of leadership teams spend less than one hour a month on strategy, and half spend no time on it at all. The other 99 percent of the calendar goes to running the business, which feels like progress and is actually the opposite: a business that is only ever run and never steered ends up wherever the market decides, not wherever the owner decides.
If you searched something like "why isn't my business growing" or "strategic planning template for a small business" to land here, you already know the feeling: busy every day, no clearer on direction at the end of the year than you were at the start. That is not a strategy problem you can fix with a better template. It is a time problem wearing a strategy costume.
The conventional advice tells owners to block out an annual strategy day, usually a weekend retreat with a whiteboard and good intentions. It rarely survives contact with Monday. The real enemy here is not a lack of planning frameworks - most owners have sat through a dozen of them. The enemy is the belief that strategic thinking is a luxury activity that happens once the urgent list is empty. It never is. Growing businesses do not find spare time for strategy; they take it, on a fixed schedule, whether the week has been kind or not.
Kevin has sat in boardrooms from McDonald's to IBM to businesses with three staff and a spreadsheet, and the pattern holds at every size: the businesses that steer well protect a small, non-negotiable amount of time for strategic thinking every single month, and the businesses that plateau treat that time as the first thing sacrificed when things get busy - which, for an SME, is always.
Here is the fix, and it has nothing to do with finding more hours. It is called the Strategic Non-Negotiable, and it works because it treats strategic time exactly like a client commitment: fixed, protected, and never the first thing to move.
1. Lock the date before the month starts. Pick one 90-minute block, the same week every month, and put it in the calendar as if it were a client you cannot afford to lose - because it is.
2. Ban operational language for the first 60 minutes. No rosters, no invoices, no "can we just quickly cover." The only questions allowed: what changed in your market this month, what did you learn, and does your direction still make sense.
3. Write down one commitment and one kill. Every session ends with one thing the business will start doing and one thing it will stop doing. If nothing gets killed, the list only grows and the strategy session becomes theatre.
4. Report before you plan again. Open the next session by reading last month's commitment and kill out loud. Accountability is what separates a Strategic Non-Negotiable from a meeting that quietly stopped happening.
"Kevin D'Ambros-Smith presented on the Icehouse Owner Manager Programme and he was brilliant… it was the most notes I have ever taken from any speaker."
- Steve Holloway, Founder, Between Two Beers Podcast (Winner, Best Business Podcast, NZ Podcast Awards)
Most owners reading this will nod along and then not do it, and the reason is not discipline - it is accountability. There is no one checking whether the Strategic Non-Negotiable actually happened last month, so it quietly slides the first time a big order or a staff crisis lands in the same week. That is the real obstacle: not knowing what to do, but having no one who will notice if you don't.
This is where the right coach earns their fee before they have said a single clever thing. A good coach does not run your strategy session for you; they are the person who asks, every single time, "did the session happen, and what did you kill?" and will not let the answer slide. That accountability is not a nice-to-have bolted onto coaching. For most SME owners, it is the entire mechanism by which strategic thinking survives contact with a busy month.
If your business strategy is built on hope rather than a structured roadmap, that's the first thing Kevin helps you fix.
...and you become the owner who steers the business, instead of letting the market decide where it ends up.