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.
Ask most SME owners which marketing activity actually drives their sales and you'll get a confident answer. Ask them to prove it and the confidence usually evaporates. Nationally, 85% of marketers say they feel confident about their return on marketing spend — yet only 32% actually measure ROI across both digital and traditional channels, and 38% name attribution as their single biggest analytics headache, according to industry research compiled by Sci-Tech Today. Translation: most business owners aren't wrong about what's working. They just don't actually know — they're guessing with confidence, and confident guessing is exactly how good budget ends up funding the wrong channel for another twelve months.
Feel is not a metric. The Facebook ad that got a lot of likes, the sponsorship that "raised the profile," the flyer drop that "seemed to bring people in" — these all feel productive because they're visible. What's invisible is the customer who found you through a Google search after a friend mentioned your name at a barbecue, or the one who saw your ad three times before finally calling. SME owners consistently over-credit the loudest, most recent, most visible marketing activity and under-credit the quiet, compounding ones — because the loud one is the one they remember approving.
You don't need enterprise marketing software to fix this. You need one habit, applied without exception, for ninety days.
1. Ask every new customer one question — "How did you first hear about us?" — at the point of sale, in the booking form, on the invoice. No skipping it because it feels awkward. It's the single highest-value question in your business.
2. Log it in one place — a simple spreadsheet column is enough. You are not building a data warehouse; you are building a pattern over time.
3. Tag every campaign with a unique link or code — so "saw it online" becomes "clicked the Instagram story" versus "clicked the Google ad," not just a vague bucket.
4. Review monthly, not annually — attribution data is only useful if you act on it before the budget cycle that generated it is long finished.
Inside the Simple-Growth System, this sits alongside the wider marketing framework Kevin builds with clients — because knowing what's working matters far less if you don't also know why it's working.
"Kevin came in and spoke with great passion and knowledge. We went away with so many great ideas we wanted to implement. It was a fantastic presentation — we were hanging on every word."
— Scott Pearce, New Zealand Blood Service
Most owners know they should be tracking this. They don't, because it feels like admin, and admin loses to the next urgent thing every single time. The real obstacle isn't knowledge — it's that nobody in the business is accountable for asking the question consistently, week after week, when there's no immediate reward for doing it. This is exactly the kind of unglamorous discipline that evaporates without someone external checking whether it actually happened, not just whether it was a good idea in the meeting.
If you're spending on marketing without knowing which part of it actually earns its keep, that's exactly where Kevin starts with you.
...and you become the owner who knows which marketing earns its keep.
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.