Thursday, November 05, 2026
Busy one month, silent the next, and no idea which deals were ever real? Neil Rackham's SPIN questions surface the truth weeks before a quiet month does.
Optimism is not revenue. The latest New Zealand survey shows businesses feeling much better about the future while their actual trading over the last three months barely moved. If that sounds like your year, the gap between mood and money is where your next decision should start.
NZIER's Quarterly Survey of Business Opinion for the September 2026 quarter was summarised by Westpac IQ on 6 October 2026 (survey run 9 to 28 September). All figures are seasonally adjusted net balances, with the previous quarter in brackets.
Source: Westpac IQ, NZ first impressions: NZIER QSBO, Sep quarter 2026. Net balances measure the share of firms reporting an increase minus the share reporting a decrease, so they describe the direction of the whole economy, not your business.
When confidence runs ahead of trading, many owners react by spending ahead of the recovery: more staff, more advertising, more stock. Sometimes that is right. Often the real constraint is somewhere else, and extra spend only makes the constraint more expensive.
Notice also that firms still expect to lift prices. If most of your competitors raise prices at the same time, being slightly cheaper stops working as a reason to be chosen. You need a reason that is not price.
You can find these in your accounts or CRM in under an hour.
Then run the five checks in Revenue Flat For A Year? before you hire or advertise.
In our case study on PhysioACTION, an Auckland clinic built its positioning around "A better experience" and then redesigned the experience to match. The limits of what we can claim are stated in the post. The method, five questions answered in an afternoon, is in Big-Brand Positioning on a Small-Business Budget.
Pick one of the three numbers and get it by Friday. If you want a second pair of eyes on which constraint to fix first, book a free 30-minute call with Kevin.
Source checked 6 November 2026. We summarise Westpac IQ's reading of NZIER's survey and have not opened NZIER's own release for this post.
Saturday, October 10, 2026
Most SME owners are confident they will hit this year's goals, and most will not. The fix is not more effort, it is a plan that fits on one page and gets checked every week.
Friday, October 09, 2026
The share of owners blaming the economy for not planning long-term has tripled in a year. Here's the one-page plan that actually fixes it, not excuses it.
Friday, October 09, 2026
A new market, a new product line, a second location: most lose money the same way, by skipping the three numbers that would have told them how big the opportunity really was.
Friday, October 09, 2026
Most people picture coaching as a conversation. The sessions that actually move a business are a loop, repeated every week, until it becomes how the owner thinks.
Friday, October 09, 2026
A forty-item to-do list with none of the three that mattered finished is not a time management problem. It is a filter problem, and the Eisenhower Matrix is the filter.
Friday, October 09, 2026
A good salesperson gets four real conversations a day. A good presentation, given once, can reach four hundred. Here is why most SME sales teams never use it.
Friday, October 09, 2026
Customers do not leave because a competitor shouted louder. They leave because, in the exact moment they needed someone, your brand was not the one they thought of.
Friday, October 09, 2026
Most SME owners track one number: the bank balance. The businesses that compound track four, using Kaplan and Norton's Balanced Scorecard, and catch the problem before it ever reaches the bank account.
Thursday, October 08, 2026
Thursday, October 08, 2026
Nearly half of NZ SME owners plan to raise prices this year. Only 4 percent of companies have a value proposition clear enough to justify it.
Thursday, October 08, 2026
Revenue can climb for years while the actual value of the business barely moves. Here are the eight drivers that decide which one you are really building, and why owner independence usually matters most.
Thursday, October 08, 2026
If every session with your coach leaves you comfortable, that is the warning sign, not the proof it is working. Here is why direct feedback outperforms kind feedback, backed by Gallup's data.
Thursday, October 08, 2026
A global survey of over 10,000 workers found trusted employees nearly twice as productive as distrusted ones. If your calendar fixes keep failing, the real constraint may be trust, not time.
Thursday, October 08, 2026
Most sales conversations present cheapest to most expensive. New research found flipping that order lifted revenue by 10.8 percent, with no price changes at all. Here is how to use it.
Thursday, October 08, 2026
Most SME marketing budgets are weighted toward customers who already buy. The research says that is the smaller lever. Here is where brand growth actually comes from, and how to redirect your spend toward it.