Friday, November 06, 2026
Revenue's up and the bank balance still isn't. Jim Collins's Hedgehog Concept shows SME owners why saying yes to everything is the real margin leak.
You closed three deals this month and you still haven’t paid yourself properly. You tell yourself it’s a cash-flow timing thing, but you know, if you’re honest, that at least one of those deals cost you more in time and discounting than it ever paid back. This is a story about someone who wants more sales, but the obstacle isn’t closing more — it’s closing the right ones.
You’re far from the only owner skipping your own pay to keep the business moving. In the US, 62% of small business owners reduced or skipped their own pay at least once in the past year, and 21% did so four or more times (Bluevine, Feb–Mar 2026, 781 owners). A good chunk of that comes from deals that were never going to be profitable in the first place.
I’m not here to tell you to chase harder. I’m here to show you how to qualify before you chase at all.
Most SME sales teams are taught to pursue every lead with equal energy — follow up fast, follow up often, never let one go cold. It sounds like diligence. It’s actually how you end up quoting, discounting and delivering for people who were never going to pay properly or stay loyal, while your best-fit prospects wait in the queue behind them.
The real enemy isn’t a slow pipeline. It’s treating every enquiry as equally worth your time, when some of them are quietly the reason you can’t pay yourself.
David Sandler built an entire sales methodology on a simple reversal: instead of selling harder, you ask better questions earlier, and let the prospect sell themselves on whether they’re a fit. Sandler’s “pain funnel” means digging into the real cost of the problem before you pitch anything — if there’s no real pain and no budget to fix it, you find out in minute five, not week five.
I had a client whose hardest-won account came from exactly this kind of patience — not a pitch, a relationship. A notoriously hard-to-read agency boss and a would-be supplier found themselves talking at a field hockey match, not about the deal at all. Months of genuine rapport, built with no pressure and no agenda, did more for that contract than any proposal document ever could. By the time business came up, the trust was already there. That’s Sandler’s whole point: people buy from people who understood them first.
"Dynamic, empowering, and absolutely transformative! Kevin leaves every audience armed for victory."
— Darilyn Kane, Coaching and Advisory Lead, The Icehouse
You know some leads aren’t worth the chase. The reason you keep chasing them anyway is that saying no to revenue feels wrong when you’re worried about the gap between what’s coming in and what’s going out. Building a qualifying process you actually trust — one that lets you walk away early without the guilt — is exactly the kind of system a coach helps you build once, so you stop rebuilding your confidence every single sales call.
This isn’t for you if you’d rather keep every lead alive just in case. Sandler’s approach only pays off if you’re willing to lose the wrong deals on purpose, early, before they cost you anything.
If you’re closing deals but still not paying yourself properly, that’s a qualifying problem, not a hustle problem — and it’s fixable.
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.
Sunday, September 06, 2026
Most sales training focuses on the pitch and the close. The call is usually already lost in the first five minutes. Here's the agenda-set and diagnostic sequence that fixes it — at the team level, not just for one rep.
Sunday, September 06, 2026
Delegation doesn't fail because your team can't do the work — it fails because nobody defined what "done" looked like before the task started. Here's the four-part handoff that fixes it.
Sunday, September 06, 2026
Self-funded expansion runs out of capital and management bandwidth before it runs out of market opportunity. Here's the franchise-readiness test and how to compare licensing against scaling it yourself.
Sunday, September 06, 2026
Business coaching has borrowed a lot from therapy's language, and it's blurred an important line. A coach uses psychology to find what's blocking you — then converts it into a dated business action, every time. Here's where the line sits.
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.
Sunday, September 06, 2026
Most SME growth plans have one forecast and no backup. Here's how to build a 90-day roadmap with base, stretch, and contraction scenarios — plus the trigger points that tell you when to act.
Friday, September 04, 2026
New 2026 data shows only 6% of SME owners feel ready to grow. Kevin D'Ambros-Smith breaks down why the barriers everyone blames are shared by every owner — and what actually separates the 6% who feel ready.
Friday, September 04, 2026
88% of business leaders are confident about growth in 2026 — the highest since 2019. But 74% worry about cybersecurity and only 12% plan on a rolling basis. Here's why confidence without a planning system is exposure, not readiness.
Friday, September 04, 2026
Landing the big account feels like the win that changes everything. Here's how to spot customer concentration risk before one client's decision decides your year.
Friday, September 04, 2026
"It felt useful" isn't a return on coaching. Here's how to actually measure whether a business coaching engagement is working — and what to do if it isn't.
Friday, September 04, 2026
Decision fatigue, not hours worked, is what wrecks an owner's judgment by Thursday. Here's how to batch routine decisions and protect the ones that actually need you.
Friday, September 04, 2026
The highest-probability sale in your business is sitting in your existing customer file. Here's how to systemise cross-sell and upsell instead of leaving it to chance.
Friday, September 04, 2026
Claims about your own business don't convert — customer proof does. Here's how to systemise the kind of proof that actually moves prospects, on any marketing budget.
Friday, September 04, 2026
A new 2026 survey of 1,305 owners found only 20% would trust AI alone with a major growth decision — most still want a human in the room. Here's what that, and what owners really call "winning," means for your business.