Wednesday, September 30, 2026
Twelve million American businesses worth nearly $10 trillion need new owners within a decade - and most of them, as currently run, cannot be sold. Here is the three-part test that tells you whether yours is one of them, and what to fix first.
Every marketing plan Kevin sees from an SME owner starts with the same assumption: growth means finding people who've never heard of you. That's the expensive way to grow. The cheapest, fastest-converting audience in your entire market is sitting inside your competitors' customer base right now, quietly unhappy, and nobody is marketing to them on purpose.
If you've been asking how to get more customers without spending more on ads, this is the answer most SMEs skip past: you don't need a bigger audience, you need a better-targeted one — people already proven to buy in your category, who are already looking for a reason to leave where they are.
Most SME marketing is built to be liked by anyone who happens to see it. That's a comfortable brief and a weak strategy. A switcher — someone actively frustrated with their current supplier — isn't looking for likeable. They're looking for a specific, credible reason to move, and most marketing never gives them one because it's too busy trying not to offend the middle of the market.
Switching-cost research consistently shows the same pattern: customers overestimate the pain of switching until someone makes the alternative concrete and low-risk. That's a marketing job, not a sales job — by the time a switcher talks to your sales team, the decision to look elsewhere has usually already been made emotionally.
Building a genuine switch campaign — as opposed to generic "why choose us" content — comes down to three moves:
1. Name the friction, not the feature. Find the two or three specific complaints customers in your category actually voice about incumbents (slow response, price creep after year one, poor communication) and speak directly to those, not to your own feature list.
2. Remove the switching cost in public. Whatever makes switching feel risky — contract lock-in, onboarding hassle, data migration — state exactly how you handle it. "We migrate your account in 48 hours" beats "seamless onboarding" every time, because it's specific enough to be believed.
3. Give them a low-commitment first step. Switchers rarely jump straight to "sign me up." A no-obligation audit, a side-by-side comparison, or a short trial gives them a way to test the water before they burn the bridge with their current supplier.
"Kevin, you distilled business, marketing and sales strategy into powerful simple concepts and actions with real life stories of your start-up business and corporate life. You walk the talk with empathy and passion. Feedback has been off the charts. The energy in the room was palpable."
— Nikki, MahiTahi / Colab (11 Food and Beverage Companies)
Owners usually know exactly what their competitors' customers complain about — they hear it in every sales conversation. What's missing is the discipline to build that intelligence into an actual campaign instead of letting it live as anecdote. That gap between knowing the friction and marketing against it deliberately is exactly where a structured system, not another ad spend increase, makes the difference.
If your marketing is built to be liked by everyone, it's converting no one — a switch campaign built around real competitor friction fixes that fast.
...and you become the owner who gives unhappy customers of your competitors a clear, low-risk reason to move to you.