Tuesday, November 03, 2026
AI tools are making every small business sound the same. Here is the 3-step Distinctive Brand Assets method for standing out even when a machine wrote the first draft.
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.
Friday, September 04, 2026
The owners who get the most from coaching don't walk in with good news — they walk in with a real problem. Here's why the progress-report habit quietly wastes coaching sessions, and what to bring instead.
Friday, September 04, 2026
Most productivity advice optimises the calendar you already have. The real fix is deciding what doesn't belong on it. Here's the 90/10 diagnostic for finding — and protecting — the small share of your week that actually drives growth.
Friday, September 04, 2026
Most sales training focuses on the pitch and the close. The outcome is usually decided in the first five minutes. Here's the diagnostic-first opening sequence that changes conversion rates without changing your product or your price.
Friday, September 04, 2026
Most SME marketing leads with product specs. Buyers respond to stories. Here's the system for finding, capturing, and multiplying the customer stories you already have — with an FMCG-specific angle on letting the shelf and repeat-purchase data talk.
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.