Sunday, August 23, 2026
Private label now owns 52% of UK grocery sales. Here's why SME FMCG suppliers are losing range reviews — and the six-point system that fixes it.
Every business has a bottleneck, the one constraint quietly capping everything else, no matter how hard the rest of the system works. Most owners search for it in their supply chain, their sales pipeline, or their team. Few look in the mirror. And yet in business after business Kevin has coached, the constraint turns out to be the owner's own capacity, not anything downstream of it.
A 2024 US survey of 3,000 business owners found 45 percent saying they sometimes want to quit but feel trapped running the business they built, with time management named by 39 percent as the single biggest driver of that feeling. That is nearly half of business owners caught inside a business that was supposed to buy them freedom, instead running on their time.
This is usually a side effect of ordinary overwork, and it responds to structural change, not to working longer hours, which is often the thing making it worse. If what you are feeling tips over into something heavier than overwork, that is a conversation worth having with a GP or a service such as the Mental Health Foundation of New Zealand or Beyond Blue in Australia, rather than something coaching alone should carry.
Physicist-turned-management-thinker Eli Goldratt built the Theory of Constraints to find and fix the one bottleneck limiting an entire system, on the logic that improving anything other than the constraint is wasted effort. It is usually applied to a factory line or a sales process. The sharper application for an SME is to apply it to the owner: find the one thing only you are doing that is capping everything else, fix that first, and ignore every other improvement until it is fixed.
"Kevin has been a game changer for us. I had tried a couple of high-profile US entrepreneur programs but found these just talked about mindset, whereas Kevin gives practical advice to grow your business that you can implement immediately."
— Brett Abeille
Finding the bottleneck in your own supply chain is hard enough with full information. Finding the bottleneck in yourself, while you are the one inside it every day, is close to impossible without someone outside the business asking the questions you have stopped asking yourself. That is the single most practical thing a good coach does, not motivation, not theory, a second pair of eyes finding the actual constraint and holding you accountable to fixing it first.
If you suspect you might be the constraint in your own business, that is exactly the conversation Kevin starts with you, and you become the owner who finds the constraint instead of working around it.