Saturday, November 07, 2026
Revenue can climb for years while your business gets more dependent on you, not less. The Business Model Canvas shows SME owners which blocks only work because of them.
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, September 06, 2026
Most sales training focuses on the pitch and the close. The call is usually already lost in the first five minutes. Here's the agenda-set and diagnostic sequence that fixes it — at the team level, not just for one rep.
Sunday, September 06, 2026
Delegation doesn't fail because your team can't do the work — it fails because nobody defined what "done" looked like before the task started. Here's the four-part handoff that fixes it.
Sunday, September 06, 2026
Self-funded expansion runs out of capital and management bandwidth before it runs out of market opportunity. Here's the franchise-readiness test and how to compare licensing against scaling it yourself.
Sunday, September 06, 2026
Business coaching has borrowed a lot from therapy's language, and it's blurred an important line. A coach uses psychology to find what's blocking you — then converts it into a dated business action, every time. Here's where the line sits.
Sunday, September 06, 2026
A 2026 survey of 1,500 business owners found 32% have never taken a full week off. Kevin D'Ambros-Smith on why that's a systems problem, not dedication — and what the regret data reveals about coaching and support.
Sunday, September 06, 2026
Most SME growth plans have one forecast and no backup. Here's how to build a 90-day roadmap with base, stretch, and contraction scenarios — plus the trigger points that tell you when to act.
Friday, September 04, 2026
New 2026 data shows only 6% of SME owners feel ready to grow. Kevin D'Ambros-Smith breaks down why the barriers everyone blames are shared by every owner — and what actually separates the 6% who feel ready.
Friday, September 04, 2026
88% of business leaders are confident about growth in 2026 — the highest since 2019. But 74% worry about cybersecurity and only 12% plan on a rolling basis. Here's why confidence without a planning system is exposure, not readiness.
Friday, September 04, 2026
Landing the big account feels like the win that changes everything. Here's how to spot customer concentration risk before one client's decision decides your year.
Friday, September 04, 2026
"It felt useful" isn't a return on coaching. Here's how to actually measure whether a business coaching engagement is working — and what to do if it isn't.
Friday, September 04, 2026
Decision fatigue, not hours worked, is what wrecks an owner's judgment by Thursday. Here's how to batch routine decisions and protect the ones that actually need you.
Friday, September 04, 2026
The highest-probability sale in your business is sitting in your existing customer file. Here's how to systemise cross-sell and upsell instead of leaving it to chance.
Friday, September 04, 2026
Claims about your own business don't convert — customer proof does. Here's how to systemise the kind of proof that actually moves prospects, on any marketing budget.
Friday, September 04, 2026
A new 2026 survey of 1,305 owners found only 20% would trust AI alone with a major growth decision — most still want a human in the room. Here's what that, and what owners really call "winning," means for your business.
Friday, September 04, 2026
Most owners build strategy around growth targets, not whether the business would survive a buyer's due diligence. Here's why the exit-ready test is the sharpest strategy audit you're not running.