Monday, October 12, 2026
The seven concerns SME owners raise most often in coaching, why each one happens, and what actually helps.
Forty-six percent of New Zealand business owners aren't paying themselves. Not can't, not won't, just aren't, because the business always finds something more urgent to do with the cash first. If that sentence landed somewhere uncomfortable, you're not alone, and you're not bad at business. You've simply built a business that pays everyone before it pays you, which is the opposite of how a profitable one is supposed to work. After time at DDB, Ogilvy and Saatchi and Saatchi, nine companies founded or co-founded, and over 30 years in business watching good operators run themselves dry, Kevin D'Ambros-Smith checks this lever first with every new coaching client, before touching pricing, marketing or headcount. The fix isn't a bigger number. It's a different order.
Most owners treat their own wage as whatever is left over after suppliers, staff, tax and the EFTPOS fees are paid. Xero's Money Matters research among New Zealand small and medium businesses found 46 percent of owners weren't paying themselves to keep the business running, and 60 percent of sole traders were in the same position. That isn't a cash flow problem you can out-hustle, it's a sequencing problem. Every dollar is spoken for before profit ever gets a turn, so profit never happens, it just gets planned for, indefinitely, every single month. The enemy here isn't the economy or the slow-paying customer. It's the spreadsheet logic that puts profit last in the queue, where it's guaranteed to be the first thing cut.
Author and small business advisor Mike Michalowicz built a simple system around one reversal: take your profit and your pay out of every dollar of revenue the moment it lands, then run the business on what's left. It sounds almost too simple to work, which is exactly why most owners dismiss it before they've tried it. In practice it runs on three moves.
"What we achieved in the last 3 months working with Kevin would have taken 2 years. Kevin's assistance has been very inspirational to our staff. We have achieved changes and changes of thought patterns it could have taken 2 years in normal trading conditions."
— Chris, Global Culture
Almost every owner Kevin coaches has heard of Profit First before they start. Few have actually run it for more than a month. The reason isn't laziness, it's that doing it alone means no one is checking whether this month's temporary exception becomes next month's new normal. That's the part a spreadsheet can't do and a coach can. Inside the Simple-Growth System, fixing the order money moves through your business is one of the first and fastest wins in an owner's 90-day plan, because it changes the business's financial behaviour before it changes a single strategy slide. Most owners don't need more financial literacy, they need someone outside the business holding the new rule steady for the first ninety days, until it's simply how the business runs.
If the only time your business pays you is whatever's left over, that's the first thing to fix. Start the conversation with Kevin and become the owner who gets paid first.