Sunday, November 08, 2026
A Cambridge, NZ plumbing business turned culture into its brand and grows even in the quiet months. Here’s the Net Promoter System fix for feast-or-famine growth.
Every SME has at least one meeting that has happened five times this year with no different outcome — the same issue raised, the same discussion had, the same "let's revisit next month" close. That is not a communication problem. It's a decision backlog, and it is one of the most expensive, least visible drains on an SME's time. Research on meeting costs backs up what every owner already suspects: unnecessary and ineffective meetings waste an estimated $25,000 per employee, per year, according to Bloomberg-cited research — and the U.S. economy loses an estimated $259 billion annually to unproductive meetings, per London School of Economics figures. Most of that cost isn't wasted time in the room. It's the decision that still didn't get made.
You can read more on the scale of this cost in Flowtrace's meeting statistics research. The named enemy isn't meetings themselves — plenty of meetings are genuinely useful. It's the meeting that exists specifically because nobody is willing to make the call without one. Every recurring agenda item that never resolves is a decision sitting in someone's backlog, quietly costing the business momentum, clarity, and — eventually — good people who get tired of discussing the same problem without ever fixing it.
The fix isn't fewer meetings. It's a rule that forces every open item toward resolution instead of another round of discussion.
1. Decide — if the information needed to make the call already exists in the room, it gets decided before anyone leaves. No "let's think about it" when the facts are already on the table.
2. Delegate — if the decision doesn't need the owner or the leadership team, it gets handed to the person closest to the problem, with a deadline, on the spot.
3. Defer with a date — if it genuinely can't be decided yet, it gets a named owner and a specific date it returns, not a vague "next time it comes up."
Every open item in your business gets one of these three tags, every week. Nothing sits in limbo indefinitely — that's the entire point.
"Keeping me sane and focused during uncertain times."
— Rachel Williams, Icehouse Coaching Programme
Most owners aren't avoiding decisions out of indecision — they're avoiding them because every decision in a small business feels personal, and a wrong call has no one else to absorb the blame. That instinct is understandable, but it's also exactly why an outside voice in the room changes the dynamic: someone with no political stake in the outcome, whose only job is to ask "are you deciding this, delegating it, or deferring it with a date" every single time it comes up again.
If the same three issues have come up in your last three leadership meetings, that's your decision backlog — and it's the first thing Kevin helps you clear.
...and you become the owner whose meetings end in decisions.
Wednesday, October 14, 2026
Your revenue is up and your margin just fell anyway — here's the planning gap behind it. Four moves that put margin back on the same page as your growth target before next year's numbers are set.
Tuesday, October 13, 2026
A practical playbook for NZ construction and building products owners: the market, the real growth constraints, how to price and win work, and a 90-day plan.
Tuesday, October 13, 2026
53 percent of small business owners say nothing would change if AI vanished tomorrow, and that is not an adoption problem, it is an embedding problem. Here is the three-question test that shows which one your business actually is.
Tuesday, October 13, 2026
New industry research finds most senior consumer goods leaders cannot say whether their last year of promotions actually made money. Here is the Revenue Growth Management discipline that fixes it before Christmas stock ships.
Tuesday, October 13, 2026
New research shows 90 percent of small business owners are preoccupied with work outside normal hours. Michael Gerber's E-Myth explains why, and names the one shift that actually fixes it.
Tuesday, October 13, 2026
Workplace research puts the cost of refocusing after an interruption at around 23 minutes, and the average worker now fields well over 100 messages a day. Here is how to protect the hours that actually move your business.
Tuesday, October 13, 2026
Forrester research finds only 8 percent of B2B buyers name price as the biggest driver of their decision. Here is how to find out what a price objection is actually about, before you reach for a discount.
Tuesday, October 13, 2026
A new Gartner survey finds most B2B buyers would rather research and decide without ever speaking to a salesperson. If your marketing cannot carry the whole sale alone, here is the tool that fixes it.
Tuesday, October 13, 2026
New Gallup data shows only 11 percent of SME owners with staff have a detailed written plan, and most of the rest will try to write next year's in December. Here is the three-date fix to do this week instead.
Monday, October 12, 2026
EOS or Scaling Up? A fair, source-linked comparison for US owners, a five-point checklist to choose, and the growth questions neither operating system answers.
Monday, October 12, 2026
The seven concerns SME owners raise most often in coaching, why each one happens, and what actually helps.
Monday, October 12, 2026
Growth rarely needs you to do more. It needs you to stop five habits that quietly hold your business back.
Monday, October 12, 2026
Seven low-cost ways to lift sales this week, starting with the customers and quotes already in your business.
Monday, October 12, 2026
The 4 real reasons marketing fails for SME owners, and the practical, low-cost fix for each one.
Monday, October 12, 2026
New research shows 39% of small business owners blame admin, not the market, for stalling their growth. Here is how to find the real constraint before you spend another dollar fixing the wrong one.