Thursday, November 12, 2026
Strategic Coach publishes a price and an eligibility bar. Here is what the Signature Program offers, who it suits, who should look elsewhere, and six questions to ask before you choose.
Last updated 15 November 2026. Published by Simple-Growth (Motherbase Limited). Market: United States.
This is a story about an owner who wants to be remembered — but whose ads, website and socials could quietly be swapped with a competitor's and nobody would notice the difference. You've posted. You've boosted. You've even paid someone to "make it pop." It still doesn't land, and you've started to suspect the problem isn't the budget. It's that nothing about what you're putting out actually looks, sounds or feels like it could only be you.
A 2026 US survey of 1,000 small business owners and workers found 52.5% say their marketing has at some point looked cheap enough that they suspect it cost them customers (UPrinting, US, 2026). "Cheap" rarely means poorly made — it usually means forgettable: the same stock photo style, the same three colours every competitor uses, the same generic claim about quality and service that every business in the category also makes. Customers can't choose a brand they can't tell apart from the one next to it.
Jenni Romaniuk's work on distinctive brand assets, built on the evidence base behind how brands actually grow, makes a deceptively simple case: the sensory, specific details customers can spot from across the room — a colour, a sound, a shape, a line — do more for recall than another clever headline ever will.
Kevin's seen a distinctive asset work in its most literal form. A light-and-sound installations team, competing in a crowded, technical category where every competitor's site looked identical, put one sign on their wall: "We Are Big In Japan." It wasn't a mission statement. It wasn't a value proposition. It was odd enough that every client who walked in asked about it — and every one of them remembered the business because of it, long after they'd forgotten which competitor they'd also gotten a quote from.
"Kevin, you distilled business, marketing and sales strategy into powerful simple concepts and actions with real life stories of your start-up business and corporate life. You walk the talk with empathy and passion. Feedback has been off the charts. The energy in the room was palpable."
Nikki
MahiTahi / Colab
Something odd and specific feels riskier in the room than something safe and polished, even though safe and polished is exactly what's failing to get remembered. This isn't for you if you've already got a distinctive asset customers mention unprompted — some owners have built that without ever naming it, and it shows in how easily people refer them. It's for the owner whose marketing could be screenshotted, have the logo removed, and nobody in the industry could tell you whose it was.
You don't need a bigger budget to be remembered. You need one specific thing, repeated on purpose, until it's unmistakably yours.
A specific, sensory detail — a colour, sound, shape or phrase — that customers associate with a brand strongly enough to recognise it even without the logo attached, drawing on Jenni Romaniuk's research into how brands build recall.
A logo only works if someone's already looking at it. A distinctive asset works in the background — in a sound, a colour, a turn of phrase — and gets noticed even when a customer isn't actively paying attention to your marketing.
Screenshot it, remove your logo and name, and ask whether a customer in your industry could still tell you whose it was. If the honest answer is no, that's the gap this post is about.
If your marketing could belong to any competitor in your category, that's the first thing worth fixing.
Friday, September 04, 2026
Most SME owners treat pricing as a set-and-forget cost calculation. Here's why price is actually the highest-leverage growth lever in your business — and the three-number method for testing whether you're underpriced.
Friday, September 04, 2026
A new study puts SME admin overload at $17,000 per employee a year — and finds AI tools alone aren't fixing it. Why systems have to come before software.
Friday, September 04, 2026
A business can grow revenue 40% in a year and be in more financial danger at the end of it than the start. Here's why fast growth without a cash plan is a warning sign, not a win.
Friday, September 04, 2026
The first ninety days of coaching are almost always productive. Here's why so many engagements quietly plateau around month six, and how to keep them accelerating.
Friday, September 04, 2026
If your business needs you in the room to keep functioning, you haven't built a business — you've built a demanding job. Here's how to test and fix that.
Friday, September 04, 2026
Chasing every enquiry equally is why sales teams stay busy and pipelines stay thin. Here's the qualification filter that protects your best sellers' time for leads that will actually close.
Friday, September 04, 2026
A shopper's eye moves across a shelf in under three seconds — if your packaging or marketing needs explaining, it's already lost. Here's what actually earns the second look.
Friday, September 04, 2026
Most growth plans set a revenue number and never check whether the business can actually deliver it. Here's how to build strategy around your real capacity constraint instead.
Friday, September 04, 2026
67% of SME owners fund growth mainly from personal savings, 38% from credit cards, and only 22% from a bank loan. Why that's a risk, not a strategy — and what a real capital plan looks like instead.
Friday, September 04, 2026
67.4% of small business owners know they need a price rise — only 31% have made it. Here's why pricing needs a system, not nerve, and what that system looks like for SME and FMCG owners.
Friday, September 04, 2026
Every scaling SME hits the same transition — from a business that runs on the founder's instincts to one that runs on a team making good decisions without checking first. Here's how the ones that navigate it deliberately do it.
Friday, September 04, 2026
Being "coachable" isn't a fixed trait some owners have and others don't — it's a decision made fresh every week. Here's what actually determines whether coaching sticks.
Friday, September 04, 2026
Your business isn't short of hours — it's short of decisions that don't require you personally. Here's how to find and remove the owner bottleneck, one decision at a time.
Friday, September 04, 2026
Most price objections aren't about the customer's budget — they're about a rep with no confident answer reaching for the easiest lever. Here's how to fix the sales conversation, not just the discount policy.
Friday, September 04, 2026
Chasing brand awareness on a limited budget is the fastest way to spend money without moving revenue. Here's the goal that actually fits a constrained marketing budget, and how to measure it.