Sunday, October 04, 2026
What does a business coach cost in New Zealand? Published monthly and hourly ranges, cheaper options, how RBPN co-funding can help, and a checklist for judging value.
Ask any SME owner what matters most to their business and you'll hear the same answers: growth, the team, key customers, strategy. Then look at their calendar from last week. Most of it is meetings that don't move any of those things forward — status updates that could have been an email, “quick chats” that ran forty minutes, and admin that should belong to someone earning a fraction of the owner's rate. Your calendar isn't a record of what you value. It's a record of what you haven't said no to.
The enemy here isn't laziness or poor time management — most SME owners work long hours and mean every word when they say strategy matters. The enemy is the invisible drift between what you decided mattered in January and what's actually filling your Tuesday in September. Nobody schedules that drift on purpose. It happens one “just five minutes” request at a time, until the calendar belongs to everyone except the person who's supposed to be steering the business. The fix isn't a better to-do list. It's an honest look at where the hours actually went.
This is the exercise Kevin runs with every new coaching client in the first month, before strategy is touched. It's uncomfortable and it's accurate.
1. Pull the last four weeks, not the next four.
2. Colour-code every block: Growth, Operations, Admin, Reactive.
3. Total the hours per category — Growth is usually under 10%, not the expected 30-40%.
4. Set a Protected Block — two half-days a week, non-negotiable.
5. Re-run the audit in 90 days.
“Kevin had a no-nonsense approach and tackled the issues head on. Accountability was the key.”
— Ashley Berrysmith, Icehouse Coaching Programme
Owners rarely audit their own calendar because it requires admitting, in black and white, that the thing they say matters most has been getting the least time for months. That's an uncomfortable mirror to hold up alone. It's far easier to keep saying yes to the next meeting than to sit with the evidence that Growth time has quietly become Admin and Reactive time in disguise. This is precisely the accountability a coach provides — not another task on the list, but someone checking, every week, whether the Protected Block actually held.
If your calendar says the opposite of your stated priorities, that gap is exactly what Kevin closes first with you — not with a better app, but with a system that protects your time.
...and you become the owner whose diary matches what you say matters most.