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.
If your Christmas trading campaign is still "something we'll sort out in November," you are already behind — and the data backs that up, not just gut feel. The holiday marketing season now effectively begins in October, not November, and the brands still waiting for Black Friday to launch are competing for whatever demand is left over. For NZ and AU SME owners heading into peak summer trading, and US/UK owners heading into the true holiday season, the question isn't "when should I start" — it's "how far behind am I already."
The named enemy here is what Kevin calls the November Ambush — the habit of treating Black Friday and the run-up to Christmas as the starting gun for holiday marketing, rather than the halfway point. Early sales events (Amazon's October deal days chief among them) have trained consumers to shop early, and the spending data proves it: according to Gallup polling cited by eMarketer, consumer holiday spending intentions dropped from $1,007 in October to $778 in November — the largest month-on-month decline Gallup has recorded. That is not a seasonal dip. That is demand being pulled forward, permanently, into October.
You can read the full analysis on eMarketer's holiday marketing breakdown. If your campaign calendar still has "launch" pencilled in for late November, you are planning for a season that no longer exists.
Every SME Kevin works with in a trading-heavy business — retail, FMCG, hospitality, professional services with a Q4 rush — runs the same simple runway before peak trading. Right now, in late September, you have exactly enough time to do it properly.
1. Weeks 1–2 — Lock the offer: decide now what you are actually promoting, and resist the urge to discount everything. A clear hero offer outperforms a scattergun sale every time.
2. Weeks 3–6 — Build the warm-up: content, email list growth, and retargeting audiences need six weeks minimum to build before they convert. This is the stage most SMEs skip entirely.
3. Weeks 7–10 — Launch early, escalate later: soft-launch in October to the warm audience you just built, then escalate spend and urgency messaging into November and December as the wider market wakes up.
"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 owners know Christmas is coming. What trips them up is that Q4 is also the busiest operational quarter of the year — the marketing calendar loses every internal argument against fulfilling existing orders, hiring seasonal staff, and closing out the current year's numbers. The campaign that needed to start in September gets pushed to "when things calm down," which is usually the week before it needed to already be live. This is exactly where a second set of eyes, dedicated to the growth side of the business rather than the operational fires, changes the outcome — someone whose job is to make sure the runway gets built while you're busy running the business.
The business owners who wait until November to think about Christmas trading will be competing for scraps — the ones building their runway this week won't.
...and you become the owner who is already trading while others are still planning.
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.