Thursday, November 05, 2026
Most owners do not lack ideas. They lack a weekly rhythm that turns a plan into action. A five-question check, who Making It Happen ($297) suits, who should skip it, and the real next step. Checked 5 November 2026.
Pull up your last ten marketing spend decisions — the ad set, the sponsorship, the campaign brief — and compare them against the customer list that actually pays your invoices on time and buys again. In most SME businesses Kevin looks at, the two lists barely overlap. You're not failing to get customers because your marketing is bad. You're failing to get the right customers because your marketing is aimed at a version of your buyer that doesn't exist, or stopped existing two years ago. Kevin has built marketing strategy for brands sitting on supermarket shelves next to Nestlé and for two-person trade businesses, and the fix is the same size problem at every scale: nobody has re-checked who they're actually talking to.
Most SME marketing plans are built on a customer persona sketched out once, in the early days, and never revisited. It made sense when the business was small and every customer looked similar. Three years and forty customer cohorts later, that persona is a museum piece — but it's still what's briefed to the ad agency, the social media manager, and every piece of content the business puts out. Meanwhile the customers who are actually the most profitable, the ones who refer the most, buy the most often, and complain the least, have quietly become a different group entirely. Marketing spend keeps chasing the ghost of the original customer while ignoring the one standing in front of the business with money in hand.
Kevin runs this with every client before they spend a dollar on a new channel. It takes an afternoon.
1. Pull the real data — Rank your last 12 months of customers by revenue, repeat purchase, and referral count. This is your real Ideal Customer Profile, not the one in your marketing brief.
2. Find the pattern — Look for what the top 20% actually have in common: industry, size, location, the problem that brought them to you, even the channel they arrived through.
3. Redirect the spend — Move budget and message away from the assumed persona and toward the pattern you just found. Most businesses discover they've been marketing to their second-best customer the whole time.
"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 (11 Food and Beverage Companies)
Owners resist this exercise because it can mean admitting the "dream client" they've been chasing for years isn't actually who pays the bills. It can also mean an uncomfortable conversation with an agency or a marketing hire whose entire campaign strategy is built on the outdated persona. Neither conversation is fun, which is why most businesses keep running the same campaigns to the same imagined customer, wondering why cost per lead keeps climbing. This is exactly the kind of decision that benefits from someone outside the business — someone who isn't attached to the original story and can read the data plainly.
If your marketing has never been checked against who actually buys from you, that's a half-day exercise that changes everything downstream.
...and you become the owner whose marketing speaks to the customers who actually buy.
Sunday, October 04, 2026
AI is saving small business owners 10 to 13 hours a week, and most have no idea what they gained. Here is the four-question method for pointing AI at the hours that matter.
Sunday, October 04, 2026
You nailed the pitch and the buyer loved it, then the deal went quiet. The reason is usually a meeting room you were never invited to. Here is how to sell to a buying committee you cannot see.
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.