Sunday, November 08, 2026
Coaching is largely unregulated, so the vetting is yours to do. Here are 12 questions to ask any business coach in NZ before you sign, with what a good answer sounds like.
You walk into the negotiation already planning your fallback position. You have decided, before the buyer says a word, what discount you will offer if they push back, what terms you will loosen, what you will give away to keep the deal alive. This is negotiating against yourself, and it is quietly costing SME owners more margin than any buyer ever has.
This shows up hardest in FMCG and retail supply relationships, where a stockist or distributor holds real leverage — shelf space, listing fees, payment terms — and the supplier walks in assuming they must soften the deal to get in the door. The named enemy is not the retail buyer. It is the supplier's own pre-emptive concession, made in their head before the meeting even starts, based on a fear that has never actually been tested in that room.
The pattern is identical in professional services and trades: a founder quotes their real price, senses hesitation that may not even be real, and immediately drops the number — before the prospect has raised a single objection. You have just taught every future buyer that your first price is negotiable, and you have done it for free.
The fix is a disciplined sequence that forces the other side to make the first concession, not you.
1. State the full price first, in full confidence, with no qualifying tone — Say the number and stop talking. Silence after a price is not a problem to fill; it is the buyer doing the thinking you want them to do.
2. Let them name the objection before you respond to one — If they say nothing, the deal may already be closer than you think. If they push back, you now know the real obstacle, instead of guessing and discounting against a fear that was never there.
3. Trade, never give — If a concession is genuinely warranted, it comes attached to something in return: volume commitment, faster payment terms, a longer contract. A concession with nothing attached teaches the buyer that your price was never real.
“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 SME owners know intellectually that they should hold their price. They do it anyway because the fear of losing the deal feels bigger in the moment than the cost of the margin they are quietly giving away. Nobody sees the discount that was never necessary — it simply disappears into a lower number on an invoice, quarter after quarter, until it has cost the business tens of thousands of dollars nobody ever flagged as a loss.
This is where an outside eye on your sales conversations changes the outcome. A coach who has sat on both sides of the negotiating table — buying and selling — can hear exactly where you are conceding before you have even noticed you are doing it.
If you can already picture the number you will drop to before the buyer even objects, that is the first habit Kevin helps you break.
...and you become the owner who holds your price and trades for every concession.
Sunday, October 04, 2026
The coaching industry has more than doubled since 2016 to over 232,000 coaches. With that many choices, here is the single question that tells you who is worth hiring.
Sunday, October 04, 2026
AI is saving small business owners 10 to 13 hours a week, and most have no idea what they gained. Here is the four-question method for pointing AI at the hours that matter.
Sunday, October 04, 2026
You nailed the pitch and the buyer loved it, then the deal went quiet. The reason is usually a meeting room you were never invited to. Here is how to sell to a buying committee you cannot see.
Sunday, October 04, 2026
Customers don't buy products, they hire them to do a job. Here is the framework that explains why an inferior competitor keeps outselling you, and what to fix in your marketing today.
Sunday, October 04, 2026
Most SME owners have one growth plan: get more customers. There are actually four distinct ways to grow, and the cheapest one is usually sitting in your existing customer file.
Sunday, October 04, 2026
Small business confidence just rose, but growth expectations are falling for almost everyone. New 2026 data reveals the one decision separating owners still growing from owners just waiting it out.
Sunday, October 04, 2026
A 1 percent price increase lifts operating profit by an average of 11 percent, McKinsey's Global 1200 research found, far more than an equivalent rise in volume. Here's how to raise prices without losing your best customers.
Sunday, October 04, 2026
Some coaches build a business out of being needed forever. Here's the Graduation Test: three questions that reveal whether your coach is transferring real capability, or just keeping you on retainer.
Sunday, October 04, 2026
Most owners respond to a bottleneck by fixing something else entirely. Eli Goldratt's Theory of Constraints explains why that backfires, and documented case studies show a mean 69 percent lead-time reduction once the real constraint is found.
Sunday, October 04, 2026
Roughly four in ten B2B purchase attempts end in no decision at all. It's rarely about price. Here's Alex Hormozi's Value Equation, in plain English, and why it explains almost every stalled deal in your pipeline.
Sunday, October 04, 2026
41 percent of consumers now always read reviews before choosing a business, and 31 percent won't use one rated under 4.5 stars. Here's the Review Velocity System that turns happy customers into a steady stream of five-star proof.
Sunday, October 04, 2026
64 percent of executives say they're juggling too many conflicting priorities, and most SME strategies die from addition, not ambition. Here's the three-step Strategic Short List that turns six priorities into the one that actually moves the needle.
Sunday, October 04, 2026
A third of small business owners are absorbing this year's cost increases out of their own pocket instead of raising prices. Here's the three-step Margin Audit that turns that guess into a safe, thirty-day pricing test.
Sunday, October 04, 2026
Before you approve the next hire, run the revenue-per-employee test. Some of the growth you are trying to buy with headcount is sitting in tasks AI can already take off the list.
Sunday, October 04, 2026
Owner-dependent businesses sell for roughly half the multiple of businesses that run without them. Dan Sullivan's Who Not How question is the simplest fix most owners never try.