Open a strategy deck for almost any SME marketing campaign and you'll find a version of the same line: "our product helps busy people save time." It's accurate, and it's also nearly useless, because it describes the product instead of the reason anyone actually buys it. The fix isn't a bigger ad budget — it's knowing the job your customer is really hiring you to do.

Kevin spent years inside DDB, Ogilvy and Saatchi and Saatchi working across 60+ global brands before he ever coached an SME owner, and the single idea that travels best from boardroom to small business is this one: your customers don't buy products. They hire them.

Most small business marketing starts with who the customer is — their age, income, industry, job title — and builds a message around that profile. It feels rigorous. It's also why so much SME marketing says something true about the audience and nothing useful about why they'd choose you over the next option, including doing nothing at all.

Demographics describe who someone is. They don't explain the moment that made them go looking for a solution in the first place — and that moment is where every buying decision actually starts.

Jobs To Be Done is built on one idea, popularised by Harvard Business School's Clayton Christensen and developed in parallel by innovation consultant Tony Ulwick: customers don't buy a product for what it is, they "hire" it to make progress on a job in their life. Christensen's team famously studied why McDonald's milkshakes weren't selling better despite constant flavour and price tweaks. It turned out a huge share were bought by solo commuters in the early morning, who weren't choosing between milkshakes and other desserts — they were choosing between a milkshake and a boring commute. A bagel was messy, a banana vanished in three bites, a donut was gone too fast. The milkshake was the only thing that filled the actual job: something one-handed that lasted the whole drive. McDonald's wasn't competing in the milkshake market. It was competing for the commute.

Once you see your own business this way, three moves follow:

"Kevin D'Ambros-Smith was the first coach that helped us and he was so great. He understood the business straightaway, was able to identify some of the areas where we could grow it, and some of the things to park. I don't think the ROW branding would be nearly as strong without his input. He was just brilliant."

— Sarah McGuinness, Founder and CEO, Revolutionaries of Wellbeing (ROW)

Owners usually know their customers' demographics cold — age, location, spend — because that data is easy to pull from a CRM or an ads dashboard. The job-to-be-done is harder to find because it only shows up in a real conversation, asked the right way, by someone who isn't trying to sell anything in that moment. That's precisely the work a brand-literate outside eye does well, and it's usually a single workshop's worth of interviews that changes an entire marketing message. You can read more detail on how Christensen's team worked this out in the origin story of the Jobs To Be Done framework.

If you've never sat down and asked your last ten customers what job they really hired you for, that's a one-afternoon fix with a big payoff for you — and Kevin will start there with you.

Be the owner whose customers know exactly why they chose you.