Monday, October 12, 2026
New research shows 39% of small business owners blame admin, not the market, for stalling their growth. Here is how to find the real constraint before you spend another dollar fixing the wrong one.
Nearly half of New Zealand's small business owners are already building a plan for the festive trading period, and most of that plan is a discount. MYOB's SME survey found the most common change owners are making for Christmas is running more promotions, followed by extending hours and expanding range. All sensible moves. None of them get a new customer to notice you exist before you've already cut your price to get their attention. Kevin D'Ambros-Smith has spent over 30 years in business, including time at DDB, Ogilvy and Saatchi and Saatchi and nine companies founded or co-founded, and says the loudest discounter rarely wins the season. The owners who do well every December aren't the ones who discount hardest, they're the ones whose name was already front of mind before the sale started.
MYOB's survey of New Zealand SME owners found 37 percent say the holiday period is extremely or very important to their income, and 26 percent expect to beat last year's result. With that much riding on six weeks, discounting your way into visibility is the single most expensive way to be seen, because you're paying for attention with margin instead of earning it with memory. Every competitor on your street is running the same November sale. The only way to stand out inside a chorus of 20 percent off is to already be the name a customer thinks of first, and that has to be built before the sale, not during it.
You don't need a bigger budget to fix this, you need a different order of operations. Three moves make the difference between a business that's remembered and one that's just discounted.
"Kevin has some amazing ideas around marketing, things we would have never thought of ourselves. He also helped us through the process of getting into supermarkets. He has gone above and beyond what he needed to!"
— Amy Nixon, Icehouse Coaching Programme
Most owners know all this. You probably do too. It gets skipped because October is already full, and a promotion is faster to execute than a memory is to build. That's the real execution gap, not a lack of ideas but a lack of the calendar discipline to start building visibility before the pressure of the season hits. It's exactly the kind of gap a second set of hands and a fixed weekly rhythm closes, which is why marketing planning is one of the first things locked into a new client's 90-day plan, well before the busy season arrives.
If your Christmas plan is a discount and nothing else, you can swap it for one that still works in February. Start the conversation with Kevin and become the business your customers remember first.