Saturday, November 07, 2026
91% of US small business owners plan at least one growth move this year, but the plan reads like three separate bets, not one strategy. Here is the three-choice framework that turns a wish list into a plan you can fund properly.
FMCG category value grew 3.4% across Western Europe in 2025. Ask most brand owners and they'll tell you it was a solid year. Ask NielsenIQ what actually drove that growth, and the story changes: innovation — new products, new formats, new flavours — fell 5.8% in unit volume over the same 12 months. The growth was real. It just wasn't coming from anything new. It was coming from price.
If you've launched a product this year and quietly wondered why the boardroom excitement never showed up in the sell-through numbers, this is why. FMCG brands are innovating harder than ever and moving fewer new units than ever. That's not bad luck. It's a symptom, and every SME and mid-market FMCG owner needs to look at it before the next launch goes into production.
Not every category told the same story in 2025. NielsenIQ's analysis found real bright spots: Confectionery and Snacks, Personal Care and Home Care all kept growing on genuine new demand. Food and Beverage — by far the largest category — dragged the overall number down. Shoppers there simply stopped rewarding “new” the way they used to.
NIQ's own language for it is blunt: “good enough is no longer good enough.” A slightly different flavour, a slightly smaller pack, a slightly greener label — none of that reads as innovation to a shopper anymore. It reads as noise. Retailers noticed first. NIQ found private label expanding its own innovation specifically in Non-Alcoholic Beverages, Confectionery and Snacks and Food — the exact categories where branded innovation was weakest — filling the relevance gap brand manufacturers left behind.
This is the real enemy here. Not the economy, not private label, not the consumer. It's what Kevin calls Innovation Theatre: launching product to look innovative, without doing the harder work of proving anyone actually wants it more than what's already on shelf.
Kevin spent years in rooms at DDB, Ogilvy and Saatchi and Saatchi deciding what got called “innovation” for brands like McDonald's, Nestlé, Unilever and Heineken, and what got killed before it reached shelf. The launches that survived never asked “is it new?” They ran three harder checks first. It's the same structure he now builds into the Simple-Growth System™ for the SME owners he coaches.
1. The Relevance Check. Is this genuinely more relevant to a real, named customer problem — or just different for the sake of being different? If you can't name the specific shopper and the specific reason they'll pay more, it's not relevance, it's decoration.
2. The Cannibalization Check. Is this launch stealing sales from your own existing full-price range, or finding real incremental demand? Run the numbers on your last launch's first 90 days against the product line it sits beside — not just total category sales.
3. The Price Independence Check. Strip out any price increase you've taken this year. Does the unit volume trend still say yes? If the only thing propping up “growth” is the price on the shelf tag, you haven't launched a product. You've relabelled inflation.
Most launches fail all three checks. They get built anyway because someone above the person building it needed “news” for the quarter.
“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.”
— Nikki, MahiTahi / Colab (11 Food and Beverage Companies)
Most FMCG and SME owners Kevin works with already sense, deep down, which of their last three launches were real growth and which were just repackaged price rises. The gap isn't knowledge. It's structure. Three things are usually missing:
This is exactly where a structured advisory relationship earns its place — not as a pitch, but as the missing accountability layer between “we should probably check this” and actually checking it, every single time, before the production line runs.
1. Pull the unit volume — not dollar value — on your last three product launches, net of any price increase taken since.
2. Ask your sales team, honestly: which of your “new” products would still sell at full price, with zero promotion behind it?
3. Run the Real Innovation Test on whatever's next in your pipeline, before it goes into production — not after.
If your last “successful” launch grew revenue but not units, it's worth finding out which of the three checks it would have failed — before your next production run repeats it.
...and you become the owner whose next launch earns its place on the shelf.
Wednesday, September 09, 2026
At five people, the founder is the system. At twelve, that system breaks. The Ten-Employee Wall is a predictable structural failure — and here's the Systems Reset framework that gets you through it.
Wednesday, September 09, 2026
January is the hardest month to sell in — and the work that prevents the January gap needed to start in September. Here's the 90-Day Pipeline Bridge framework that fills the gap before it opens.
Wednesday, September 09, 2026
Category managers at major retailers are making their Q1 2027 ranging decisions right now. Most FMCG founders find out too late. Here's the Buyer-Ready Proof Pack framework that gets you into the conversation.
Wednesday, September 09, 2026
Most businesses plan for Q4 in January — after it's already over. The owners who consistently outperform their peers write their Q4 plan in September, while there's still time to act on what they find.
Wednesday, September 09, 2026
A new survey shows the average small business owner is running five jobs at once — and burning 200+ hours a year proving it. Here's the two-hat framework that gets your time back within 90 days.
Tuesday, September 08, 2026
New 2026 consumer data shows most shoppers are value-seekers, not bargain hunters — yet 95% still rate brand trust as important. Here's the six-point test your FMCG brand must pass to earn the sale without discounting.
Tuesday, September 08, 2026
New 2026 grocery data shows branded FMCG products are being promoted twice as often as private label — and still losing share and loyalty. Kevin D'Ambros-Smith on why discounting harder is the wrong fix, and what pricing architecture looks like instead.
Monday, September 07, 2026
A 2026 Fed survey of 6,525 small businesses found owner confidence at a 6-year low — while actual revenue, employment and profitability held steady. Why the gap, not the economy, is the real risk for SME and FMCG owners.
Sunday, September 06, 2026
Burst campaigns reset to zero every time. Here's why a sustainable weekly cadence beats an intense one-month push, and how to protect it through the slow months.
Sunday, September 06, 2026
Most SME sales forecasts are built by adding up pipeline value — and it's almost always wrong. Here's how exit criteria, deal age, and weighted forecasting fix it.
Sunday, September 06, 2026
Most of what fills an owner's calendar isn't driving results. Here's how to run a structured 80/20 audit that identifies the real 20% — and what to do with the rest.
Sunday, September 06, 2026
One-on-one coaching diagnoses and designs strategy. A peer accountability group enforces it. Here's why the combination produces follow-through that neither achieves alone.
Sunday, September 06, 2026
Organic growth isn't the only path. Here's how well-chosen SME acquisitions can compress years of growth into one transaction — and where most owners get the due diligence wrong.
Sunday, September 06, 2026
Most SME roadmaps fail from what they never remove, not what they add. Here's the three-question kill list to run before your next planning cycle — and why pruning, not adding, is what actually frees up growth capacity.
Sunday, September 06, 2026
Paid social and search rent attention you don't own. Your email list is the one channel most SMEs already have permission to use — and almost never invest in properly. Here's how to turn it into a real asset.