Monday, November 09, 2026
Nearly three in four NZ businesses have no employees. If you are one of them, here is the order to spend on advice, AI training and coaching, who each suits, and a 30-day plan you can run alone.
Last updated 12 November 2026. Published by Simple-Growth (Motherbase Limited). Market: United States.
Revenue's up again this year. You still don't feel any richer, and if someone asked what the business is actually worth, you'd be guessing. You want to be building something with real value, not just a job with more complexity and worse hours than the one you left. What you might actually be building is a business that only works because you personally hold it together every day — which, to anyone looking to buy it, isn't really worth very much at all.
In Cornerstone's 2025 National Study on Selling Your Business, surveying 750 US owners of privately held companies with revenue between $5 million and $100 million, 61% said they had never had their business formally valued. Most owners build for years without ever finding out what, if anything, they've actually built — until the day they need to know, which is usually the worst possible time to find out the answer is “not much without you.”
Entrepreneur and author John Warrillow studied what separates businesses that sell for a strong multiple from ones that don't, and built it into eight value drivers — among them, critically, how much the business depends on the owner personally.
Kevin has founded or co-founded nine businesses — some genuinely successful, some real failures. The lesson he takes from both kinds isn't about hustle. It's that the businesses worth something to someone else were the ones that kept running properly when he stepped back, and the failures were, more often than he'd like to admit, the ones that only ever worked because he personally held every piece of it together. Knowing the difference, he says, is exactly why his job as a coach is to help owners grow — and help them avoid the mistakes that quietly cap what they're building.
Try this test this week: pick one of the three value drivers above and score your business honestly out of ten. If “owner independence” scores low, that's not just a future exit problem — it's the reason you can't take a real holiday now, and the reason growth keeps feeling like more weight on the same person. Fixing it is the same work either way.
“Kevin is an absolute powerhouse! He doubled our business's profits in the first month alone with lots more of his recommendations still to be rolled out.”
Curtis Hacon
Give A Sh!T
Getting a real answer feels like it only matters if you're selling soon, so it's easy to put off indefinitely. This isn't for you if you've already scored well on owner-independence and recurring revenue, and you genuinely know what the business is worth — most owners haven't, and don't. For everyone else, the gap between “growing” and “valuable” is usually hiding in plain sight, in the same three or four places.
Because the same things that make it valuable to a buyer — independence from you, recurring revenue, loyal customers — are what make it less stressful and more profitable to run today.
A framework from John Warrillow scoring a business on eight value drivers, including how dependent it is on the owner, to show what actually makes it worth more.
A formal valuation or a structured value-driver assessment are the two reliable starting points; guessing from revenue alone usually isn't close.
Yes — a business that stops running properly without the owner in the room is typically worth far less to a buyer, whatever its revenue.
Source: Cornerstone, 2025 National Study on Selling Your Business, United States, 750 owners of privately held companies with $5 million to $100 million in revenue. Published by Simple-Growth (Motherbase Limited). Last updated 12 November 2026.
If you've never actually found out what your business is worth, that's a half-hour conversation, not a five-year plan.
Thursday, September 17, 2026
If your best salesperson or only bookkeeper vanished tomorrow, would the business survive? Here's the audit that finds your hidden risk points.
Thursday, September 17, 2026
Coaching only works if you say the thing you'd rather not. Here's why the polished update is quietly wasting your sessions — and how to fix it.
Thursday, September 17, 2026
More headcount isn't the same as more growth. Here's why the fastest-scaling SMEs hire fewer, more capable people — and how to test your own team.
Thursday, September 17, 2026
NFIB's newest data shows small business profit trends falling twice as fast as sales, even as owners raise prices. Here's the three-step test to find where your margin is actually leaking.
Thursday, September 17, 2026
Most growth strategies don't fail because the market changed — they fail because nobody tested the assumptions underneath them. Here's the four-question audit that catches the weak spot before it costs you a year.
Sunday, September 13, 2026
FMCG suppliers just got scored on 38 retailer-relationship competencies — and the results reveal a growth capability gap hiding behind operational excellence. Here's the two-bucket audit to fix it before your next category review.
Thursday, September 10, 2026
82% of small business owners are confident about growth — but 53% say a lack of customer demand is their biggest obstacle right now. Here's the framework to tell which one you're building.
Thursday, September 10, 2026
Export feels like the natural next step for a ranged FMCG brand — but it's a different business, not a bigger version of the same one. Here's the validation sequence that protects you.
Thursday, September 10, 2026
A certificate proves someone studied coaching — not that they've built or fixed a real business. Here's the vetting checklist that actually predicts results.
Thursday, September 10, 2026
Your calendar isn't a record of what you value — it's a record of what you haven't said no to. Run the audit that shows the real gap and how to close it.
Thursday, September 10, 2026
Most stalled SME deals aren't lost to a competitor — they're lost to silence. Here's the Urgency Ladder framework that turns "went quiet" into a real answer.
Thursday, September 10, 2026
Your website works 24 hours a day, yet most SME sites haven't been touched in years. Run the five-minute audit that shows exactly where it's losing you customers.
Thursday, September 10, 2026
Most SME owners make their biggest calls alone, with no one qualified to challenge them. Here's how to build a "kitchen cabinet" that gives you real strategic pushback — without a formal board.
Wednesday, September 09, 2026
Revenue is climbing and you feel like you're winning — until you check what's actually left over. Here's the simple two-number habit that stops growth from quietly eating your margin.
Wednesday, September 09, 2026
Your accountant, a podcast, a mastermind group and a mate all just told you something different about your business. Here's how to audit that noise and consolidate around one voice that actually knows your numbers.