Sunday, September 06, 2026
A 2026 survey of 1,500 business owners found 32% have never taken a full week off. Kevin D'Ambros-Smith on why that's a systems problem, not dedication — and what the regret data reveals about coaching and support.
Seventy nine percent of business owners say they struggle to make a long-term plan stick, according to Small Business Expo Research. If that is you, the problem is probably not your ambition, and it is probably not your strategy either. It is the format you wrote it in.
Most strategic plans are built once a year, usually at an offsite, usually running to thirty or forty pages. They feel great to write. Then March arrives, the firefighting starts, and the plan sits in a drive folder untouched until next January's offsite rolls around.
Here is the part that should worry every SME owner more than the 79 percent figure. Robert Kaplan and David Norton, the researchers who created the Balanced Scorecard, found that most leadership teams spend less than one hour a month actually discussing their strategy. Not writing it. Discussing it. An hour. A month.
That is not a strategy problem. That is an attention problem dressed up as a strategy problem. You cannot steer a business with a document you open twice a year.
The cost of that gap is measurable, not theoretical. Bain and Company found that businesses with genuinely clear strategic priorities cut their decision-making time by 40 percent. Boston Consulting Group found that businesses with well-defined priorities are three times as likely to outperform their peers financially. Clarity is not a nice-to-have. It is a return on investment with a number attached to it.
At Simple-Growth we solve this with a tool we call Strategy on a Page, built on Verne Harnish's One-Page Strategic Plan and Kaplan and Norton's own Balanced Scorecard, simplified for an SME owner who does not have a strategy department. Three moves make it work.
1. One page, not a document. If your strategic plan does not fit on a single page, nobody on your team, including you, will ever open it a second time. Cut it until it does.
2. A small number of 90-day priorities, tied to a three-year number. Three to five priorities, each with one owner and one finish line, each one a visible step toward where you want revenue, profit and your own hours to be in three years.
3. A fifteen-minute weekly check, not an annual retreat. Strategy that only gets reviewed once a year is not being managed, it is being remembered. A short weekly look at the same page keeps it alive.
"Talking with Kevin the first time was so valuable and we were learning so much. Within an hour Kevin had us thinking about our business and our goals in a totally different way. In fact we were supposed to be catching a flight but we decided it was more important that we continued the meeting with Kevin."
— Angus and Cameron, The Flatpack Co
Most owners I coach do not need convincing that a shorter, sharper plan beats a long one. They need a reason it has not happened yet, and it is rarely a lack of insight. It is usually one of three things: nobody in the business owns keeping the page alive, there is no fifteen-minute slot protected in the calendar to check it, or the plan was written for a board or a bank, not for the Monday morning decisions the owner actually has to make.
This is where coaching earns its place, not as a motivational nudge but as the structure that makes a one-page plan survive contact with a real week. An outside perspective that already knows what a working Strategy on a Page looks like can build yours in a single session, instead of the six months most owners spend getting there alone.
If your strategic plan has not been opened since the year began, you can have one that gets checked every week instead, and Kevin will build it with you.
Be the owner who opens one page every Monday and knows exactly what moves the business forward.