Wednesday, October 21, 2026
The share of businesses reporting serious dead stock has doubled since 2024, new research found. Here's why rising revenue can still mean tightening cash, and the three numbers that catch it early.
Most SME owners don't have a productivity problem. They have an org-design problem that a longer to-do list can't fix.
Owners who feel constantly behind usually respond by trying to get more disciplined: a better app, an earlier start, a stricter calendar. It rarely lasts, because the real issue isn't how the owner manages their time — it's how many decisions in the business still require the owner personally, no matter how well organized their day is. You can optimize a calendar that's fundamentally overloaded and still end up overloaded, just more efficiently.
Here's the honest test. List everything that happened in your business this week. For each item, ask: could someone else have made that call without me? If the answer is no more often than it's yes, you haven't built a business — you've built a very demanding job with your name on the building.
Three things move the needle faster than any productivity technique:
When owners tell Kevin they're procrastinating on a specific task, it's frequently not laziness — it's that the task genuinely requires a decision only they're equipped to make, and some part of them knows it's high-stakes. The fix isn't a better habit. It's making sure fewer decisions land solely on their desk in the first place.
Building a business that runs without you in the room is the actual definition of productivity at the owner level. That's the core of the Simple-Growth System™ — get in touch with Kevin D'Ambros-Smith to find out what's still running through you that shouldn't be.
...and you become the owner whose business keeps moving while you're away from the desk.