Monday, November 09, 2026
US owners lose 33 working days a year to financial stress (Xero, 2026). Sean Ellis's North Star Metric shows SME owners how to grow without it costing their evenings.
Last updated 12 November 2026. Published by Simple-Growth (Motherbase Limited). Market: New Zealand and the United States.
Someone drops the ball on the same handover, again. You fix it, you move on, and three months later it happens again with a different customer. You want a team that gets better every time something goes wrong, so the same mistake never costs you twice. What you've actually built is a team that solves problems in the moment and then forgets them completely, because nothing you do captures the lesson anywhere it can actually be reused.
You won't. Neither will they. A fix that lives only in someone's head, or buried in a message thread from February, isn't a system — it's a coin flip on whether the right person remembers at the right moment. Properly systemised businesses don't rely on memory. They build the lesson into how the next piece of work actually gets done, so it survives staff turnover, busy weeks, and everyone's naturally bad memory for process.
Talent researchers Morgan McCall, Robert Eichinger and Michael Lombardo found that the vast majority of how people genuinely get better at their job comes from doing the work itself, a meaningful chunk from watching and being challenged by others, and only a small slice from formal training — roughly 70% on-the-job, 20% from others, 10% formal.
Kevin built his own business, Sign60 (a signpost up in sixty seconds), around exactly this principle. Every client runs through a documented 100 Day Action Plan, tracked step by step in project software, not because paperwork is satisfying but because a plan that only lives in someone's head dies the moment that person's on leave, distracted, or gone. The lesson from client one gets built into the template for client two. Nobody has to remember it. The system remembers it for them.
Try this on the next problem your team fixes this week: before everyone moves on, ask one question — “where does this lesson live now, so the next person doesn't have to relearn it?” If the honest answer is “in my head,” you haven't actually fixed it yet. Build it into the checklist, the template or the induction, and the fix finally survives longer than your memory of it.
“Specific to my business requirements and takes a systematic approach. Practical, specific, and pertinent to my business.”
Simon Keepa
Icehouse Coaching Programme
Capturing a lesson properly takes five extra minutes you don't feel like you have in the moment. This isn't for you if your business is small and simple enough that everything genuinely stays in one person's head without cost — some businesses are. For everyone else, growth is exactly what breaks that model, usually around the same time you've hired someone who wasn't there for the first three times the problem happened.
A framework from researchers McCall, Eichinger and Lombardo showing most real learning (roughly 70%) comes from doing the job itself, 20% from others, and 10% from formal training.
Usually because the lesson from the last time lived only in someone's memory, not in the actual workflow.
Build the fix into a checklist, template or induction step so the next person can't skip it.
No — most of the fix is built into daily work, not formal training.
This is a method article and does not rely on a market statistic. Published by Simple-Growth (Motherbase Limited). Last updated 12 November 2026.
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