Thursday, November 12, 2026
Profit First fixes where your cash goes. A coach finds which problem to fix first. A plain guide to what Profit First is, what is free, who it suits, and how to choose.
Last updated 13 November 2026. Published by Simple-Growth (Motherbase Limited). Market: United States.
You posted again this week. You boosted it, you tagged it, you even paid for the ad. A few likes, maybe a comment from someone who was never going to buy. You want your marketing to pull in customers who actually want what you sell, without you having to shout louder every week. What you've actually built is a message aimed at "anyone," which is why it lands with almost no one — including, most expensively, the people who drain your time and never convert.
A 2026 industry report from COSMarketing Agency found small businesses in the US are wasting up to 40 cents of every marketing dollar on leads that were never a fit in the first place (COSMarketing Agency, 2026). That's not a budget problem. It's a targeting problem wearing a budget costume. When you market to "anyone who might want this," you spend real money attracting the half of your inquiries who were always going to be slow to pay, hard to please, or gone after one job — and you never free up the time or money to go looking for the customers who actually make the business worth running.
Marketer Russell Brunson's Hook, Story, Offer framework — built out as a Value Ladder — starts from a single, specific buyer rather than a broad audience, then stacks offers from a small first step up to the real relationship. In plain terms:
Kevin saw this done properly with the physiotherapy brand PhysioAction and with Ellis Co, a facilities and solutions business. Neither started with a slogan. Kevin had them sit down with real customers and ask, plainly, why they'd actually chosen and stayed. The positioning that came out the other side wasn't written in a boardroom — it was lifted almost word for word from the customers who already loved the business. It worked precisely because it wasn't written for everyone; it was written for people who sounded exactly like the ones already in the room.
Try it this week: pull up your five best customers from the last twelve months and write down, in their words if you can, why they picked you. That sentence — not a brainstorm, not a rebrand — is your new hook.
"Kevin has some amazing ideas around marketing, things we would have never thought of ourselves. He also helped us through the process of getting into supermarkets. He has gone above and beyond what he needed to!"
Amy Nixon
Icehouse Coaching Programme
Narrowing the message feels like turning away business, so most owners widen it instead and hope volume covers the gap. This isn't for you if you're genuinely running a true commodity business where nobody cares who they buy from — a handful of categories work that way. For everyone else, the fix isn't a bigger audience. It's a sharper one, built from the customers you'd clone if you could.
A sequence of offers, from a small first step to the full relationship, built around one specific buyer rather than a broad audience — a structure popularised by marketer Russell Brunson.
It feels riskier but usually isn't — a broad message is already failing to convert most of the audience it reaches; a narrow one converts far more of a smaller, better-fit group.
From your own best customers. Ask five of them, in their words, why they chose and stayed with you, and use that language directly.
If you can't name your five best customers by face, that's the exercise we start with.
Sunday, October 11, 2026
Burger King once sold a one-cent Whopper only to people standing next to a McDonald's. Here is the under-$5k version any SME owner can run, and what a 1760s potter teaches about removing buying risk.
Saturday, October 10, 2026
Most small business owners feel confident about their sales pipeline right now. New research shows that confidence is measuring the wrong thing entirely.
Saturday, October 10, 2026
Rising revenue and a shrinking bank balance usually mean the same thing: one account doing the job of four. A simple account split fixes it before it becomes a crisis.
Saturday, October 10, 2026
A coaching style that worked in your first month can quietly become the wrong one by your twelfth. The best coaches change how they coach you as you change.
Saturday, October 10, 2026
Managers now spend over a fifth of their working week in meetings, and senior leaders admit most of it is wasted. A fixed meeting rhythm fixes more than your calendar.
Saturday, October 10, 2026
Most SME owners set ad budgets and discount limits by gut feel. One number, worked out properly, tells you exactly what a customer is worth and what you can afford to spend to win one.
Saturday, October 10, 2026
Most small businesses pour their whole marketing budget into this week's sale. The research on 30 years of advertising says that is exactly the wrong ratio.
Saturday, October 10, 2026
Most SME owners are confident they will hit this year's goals, and most will not. The fix is not more effort, it is a plan that fits on one page and gets checked every week.
Friday, October 09, 2026
The share of owners blaming the economy for not planning long-term has tripled in a year. Here's the one-page plan that actually fixes it, not excuses it.
Friday, October 09, 2026
A new market, a new product line, a second location: most lose money the same way, by skipping the three numbers that would have told them how big the opportunity really was.
Friday, October 09, 2026
Most people picture coaching as a conversation. The sessions that actually move a business are a loop, repeated every week, until it becomes how the owner thinks.
Friday, October 09, 2026
A forty-item to-do list with none of the three that mattered finished is not a time management problem. It is a filter problem, and the Eisenhower Matrix is the filter.
Friday, October 09, 2026
A good salesperson gets four real conversations a day. A good presentation, given once, can reach four hundred. Here is why most SME sales teams never use it.
Friday, October 09, 2026
Customers do not leave because a competitor shouted louder. They leave because, in the exact moment they needed someone, your brand was not the one they thought of.
Friday, October 09, 2026
Most SME owners track one number: the bank balance. The businesses that compound track four, using Kaplan and Norton's Balanced Scorecard, and catch the problem before it ever reaches the bank account.