Tuesday, August 25, 2026
76% of small businesses now use AI, but only 14% have it built into daily operations. Here's why the gap exists — and what the businesses getting real value are doing differently.
Ninety-one percent of U.S. small business owners plan to invest in growing their business this year. That's the headline from U.S. Bank's 2026 Small Business Owner Perspective Survey, which polled 1,000 owners, including 200 Gen Z owners, earlier this year.
Here's the part that matters more than the 91 percent: what they're actually planning to do with that investment. Sixty percent plan to hire. Fifty-six percent plan to put more capital into the business. Forty-six percent want to launch a new product or service. Thirty percent want to expand into a new geographic market.
Read that list again. That's not a strategy. That's four separate bets, each competing for the same cash, the same hours and the same owner, in the same twelve months.
I understand the instinct. Every one of those four moves is a reasonable thing to do with a growing business. Hiring feels responsible. A new product feels exciting. A new market feels like opportunity you'd be mad to leave on the table. So owners fund a bit of all four, and call that their growth plan.
The enemy here isn't ambition. It's the belief that more initiatives equal more growth. Across the 200+ businesses I've coached one-on-one in 30+ industries, the pattern repeats: the business that tries to hire, launch and expand at once usually ends the year with a half-staffed team, a half-finished product, a half-tested market, and less cash in the bank than when it started. Not because any one of those ideas was wrong. Because none of them got enough oxygen to actually work.
A strategy isn't a longer list of good ideas. It's the discipline to fund fewer of them, properly.
In 2001, strategy professors Donald Hambrick and James Fredrickson published Are You Sure You Have a Strategy? in the Academy of Management Executive. Their argument still holds: most leaders mistake a goal, a budget or a list of initiatives for a strategy. A real strategy, they said, is a set of five integrated choices.
For an SME owner deciding where to put this year's growth dollars, three of those five choices do most of the work.
1. Arenas: where will you actually compete? Not everywhere that looks promising. One market, one customer segment, one category you'll go deep in this year. Every initiative outside that arena waits.
2. Differentiators: how will you win there, specifically? Price, service, speed, relationship, expertise, pick the one your business can genuinely deliver better than the next option your customer is considering, and build this year's initiatives around proving it.
3. Staging: in what order, and how fast? Hiring before you've proven the new product sells is a staging error. Expanding into a new region before your current one is profitable is a staging error. The right moves, done in the wrong order, still cost you the year.
Answer those three before you touch the other initiatives on the survey's wish list, and you'll fund one thing properly instead of four things thinly. It's the same discipline the global brands I worked with at DDB, Ogilvy and Saatchi and Saatchi applied before committing a media budget: choose the arena, then fund it properly.
"Talking with Kevin the first time was so valuable and we were learning so much. Within an hour Kevin had us thinking about our business and our goals in a totally different way. In fact we were supposed to be catching a flight but we decided it was more important that we continued the meeting with Kevin."
— Angus and Cameron, Flatpack Co
Most owners I meet don't disagree with any of this. They nod along. Then they go back to funding all four initiatives anyway. The real obstacle isn't understanding, it's that nobody is making them choose.
Without a coach, a board or a structured planning process sitting across the table, there's no one asking the only question that matters: which one of these are you actually prepared to say no to? Left alone with the decision, most owners default to saying yes to everything, because saying no to a good idea feels like leaving money on the table. It rarely is. It's usually the thing that lets the real opportunity get properly funded.
This is where Simple-Growth's expertise ends and a specialist begins: if choosing a new arena means a new market entry agreement, a partnership or an acquisition, a qualified commercial lawyer should review the structure before you sign anything, NZ Law Society at lawsociety.org.nz is a good place for NZ owners to start. Knowing that boundary is part of building a properly supported business.
Ready to stop funding four initiatives thinly and choose the one arena worth funding properly this year?