Monday, November 02, 2026
Flat out one month, silent the next, and every call is yours alone. Here's why the quiet season is exactly when an outside perspective pays for itself.
You post, you boost, you run the promo. Someone buys. Then six months later that same someone is the one haggling on price, messaging you on a Sunday, or quietly draining an hour of support time for every dollar they spend. You did nothing wrong on delivery. The problem started earlier — in who your marketing was built to attract in the first place.
If half your customers feel like hard work and you can't say exactly why those ones and not the easy ones, this is almost always a marketing question before it's a service question.
Most small business marketing is built around one goal: more leads. Not better-fit leads — more. That goal rewards whichever message reaches the widest audience, which is precisely the message that attracts anyone who'll click, not the people who'll genuinely value what you do. Volume and fit pull in opposite directions, and volume usually wins by default, because it's the easier number to chase.
One of my clients had 123 customers on the books. When we broke down the revenue properly, 8 of them — just 6% of the customer list — delivered $266,240 of the business's $630,220 in revenue. Before we did that work, the marketing was pointed at anyone who looked roughly like a customer. That's exactly the kind of marketing that fills a book with the other 115, the ones who take the time and leave the margin.
Based on Clayton Christensen's Jobs-to-be-Done thinking, paired with Alex Osterwalder's Value Proposition Canvas: instead of asking who looks like our customer, ask what job this customer is actually hiring you to do. When your marketing message speaks to that job precisely, it naturally filters toward the people who value exactly what you're great at — and quietly repels the ones who were only ever going to want it cheaper.
"Kevin came in and spoke with great passion and knowledge. We went away with so many great ideas we wanted to implement. It was a fantastic presentation — we were hanging on every word."
— Scott Pearce, New Zealand Blood Service
Most owners already sense which customers drain them. They keep the broad campaign running anyway, because narrowing the message feels like turning away revenue. It's the opposite: turning away the wrong revenue is how you free the capacity to properly serve the right revenue. Mapping the real job your best customers hire you for is part of what we work through in a Simple-Growth marketing session — it's usually a half-day of clarity, not a rebuild.
This isn't for you if you're running a high-volume, low-touch model where margins can comfortably absorb a few draining customers. If every difficult customer costs you real time and goodwill, this is for you.
You don't need a bigger marketing budget to fix this. You need a sharper filter — and that's a decision you can make this week, not a campaign you have to wait to launch.
Be the owner whose marketing attracts the customers you would happily serve again.
If you can't say in one sentence why your best customers chose you, that's the first thing Kevin will work on with you.
Sunday, October 04, 2026
Customers don't buy products, they hire them to do a job. Here is the framework that explains why an inferior competitor keeps outselling you, and what to fix in your marketing today.
Sunday, October 04, 2026
Most SME owners have one growth plan: get more customers. There are actually four distinct ways to grow, and the cheapest one is usually sitting in your existing customer file.
Sunday, October 04, 2026
Small business confidence just rose, but growth expectations are falling for almost everyone. New 2026 data reveals the one decision separating owners still growing from owners just waiting it out.
Sunday, October 04, 2026
A 1 percent price increase lifts operating profit by an average of 11 percent, McKinsey's Global 1200 research found, far more than an equivalent rise in volume. Here's how to raise prices without losing your best customers.
Sunday, October 04, 2026
Some coaches build a business out of being needed forever. Here's the Graduation Test: three questions that reveal whether your coach is transferring real capability, or just keeping you on retainer.
Sunday, October 04, 2026
Most owners respond to a bottleneck by fixing something else entirely. Eli Goldratt's Theory of Constraints explains why that backfires, and documented case studies show a mean 69 percent lead-time reduction once the real constraint is found.
Sunday, October 04, 2026
Roughly four in ten B2B purchase attempts end in no decision at all. It's rarely about price. Here's Alex Hormozi's Value Equation, in plain English, and why it explains almost every stalled deal in your pipeline.
Sunday, October 04, 2026
41 percent of consumers now always read reviews before choosing a business, and 31 percent won't use one rated under 4.5 stars. Here's the Review Velocity System that turns happy customers into a steady stream of five-star proof.
Sunday, October 04, 2026
64 percent of executives say they're juggling too many conflicting priorities, and most SME strategies die from addition, not ambition. Here's the three-step Strategic Short List that turns six priorities into the one that actually moves the needle.
Sunday, October 04, 2026
A third of small business owners are absorbing this year's cost increases out of their own pocket instead of raising prices. Here's the three-step Margin Audit that turns that guess into a safe, thirty-day pricing test.
Sunday, October 04, 2026
Before you approve the next hire, run the revenue-per-employee test. Some of the growth you are trying to buy with headcount is sitting in tasks AI can already take off the list.
Sunday, October 04, 2026
Owner-dependent businesses sell for roughly half the multiple of businesses that run without them. Dan Sullivan's Who Not How question is the simplest fix most owners never try.
Sunday, October 04, 2026
The tasks only one person in your business can do are a hidden cost waiting to land. Here is how to clear the backlog in an afternoon using a recorder instead of a blank page.
Sunday, October 04, 2026
Chasing every lead in the run to year end is how you end up delivering the deals that cost you the most. Here is the Right-Fit Filter that catches a bad deal before you quote it.
Sunday, October 04, 2026
Big brands never approve a campaign on gut feel alone. Here is the cheap, 48-hour pretest SME owners can run on any piece of marketing before a single dollar goes to media.