Saturday, November 07, 2026
Feast-or-famine months aren't bad luck. The Eisenhower Matrix shows SME owners which important-not-urgent work keeps getting buried by whatever's loudest.
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.
Friday, September 04, 2026
Most FMCG brands that succeed regionally never make the jump to national shelf space. Here's what the brands that do scale nationally build before the big order arrives — capacity, standardisation, and sell-through data — and why the brands that don't fail fast once they win it.
Friday, September 04, 2026
The owners who get the most from coaching don't walk in with good news — they walk in with a real problem. Here's why the progress-report habit quietly wastes coaching sessions, and what to bring instead.
Friday, September 04, 2026
Most productivity advice optimises the calendar you already have. The real fix is deciding what doesn't belong on it. Here's the 90/10 diagnostic for finding — and protecting — the small share of your week that actually drives growth.
Friday, September 04, 2026
Most sales training focuses on the pitch and the close. The outcome is usually decided in the first five minutes. Here's the diagnostic-first opening sequence that changes conversion rates without changing your product or your price.
Friday, September 04, 2026
Most SME marketing leads with product specs. Buyers respond to stories. Here's the system for finding, capturing, and multiplying the customer stories you already have — with an FMCG-specific angle on letting the shelf and repeat-purchase data talk.
Friday, September 04, 2026
Most SME owners treat pricing as a set-and-forget cost calculation. Here's why price is actually the highest-leverage growth lever in your business — and the three-number method for testing whether you're underpriced.
Friday, September 04, 2026
A new study puts SME admin overload at $17,000 per employee a year — and finds AI tools alone aren't fixing it. Why systems have to come before software.
Friday, September 04, 2026
A business can grow revenue 40% in a year and be in more financial danger at the end of it than the start. Here's why fast growth without a cash plan is a warning sign, not a win.
Friday, September 04, 2026
The first ninety days of coaching are almost always productive. Here's why so many engagements quietly plateau around month six, and how to keep them accelerating.
Friday, September 04, 2026
If your business needs you in the room to keep functioning, you haven't built a business — you've built a demanding job. Here's how to test and fix that.
Friday, September 04, 2026
Chasing every enquiry equally is why sales teams stay busy and pipelines stay thin. Here's the qualification filter that protects your best sellers' time for leads that will actually close.
Friday, September 04, 2026
A shopper's eye moves across a shelf in under three seconds — if your packaging or marketing needs explaining, it's already lost. Here's what actually earns the second look.
Friday, September 04, 2026
Most growth plans set a revenue number and never check whether the business can actually deliver it. Here's how to build strategy around your real capacity constraint instead.
Friday, September 04, 2026
67% of SME owners fund growth mainly from personal savings, 38% from credit cards, and only 22% from a bank loan. Why that's a risk, not a strategy — and what a real capital plan looks like instead.
Friday, September 04, 2026
67.4% of small business owners know they need a price rise — only 31% have made it. Here's why pricing needs a system, not nerve, and what that system looks like for SME and FMCG owners.