Wednesday, November 04, 2026
Rocket Lab began in New Zealand and is now headquartered in Long Beach, California. Three source-linked lessons in outside thinking for US business owners, plus a five-question blind-spot test.
Ask most SME owners how to improve sales and they'll say the same thing: more leads. It's the default answer, and it's usually wrong. More leads poured into a slow, leaky pipeline just means more deals sitting there going stale. The metric that actually predicts revenue growth isn't lead volume — it's sales velocity, and almost no SME owner has ever calculated theirs.
Sales velocity is a single number: how much revenue your pipeline generates per day. It's calculated as (number of open opportunities × win rate × average deal size) ÷ length of your sales cycle in days. The formula is used across enterprise sales teams and is explained in detail by HubSpot's sales research team — but it's rarely taught to SME owners, who default to counting leads instead. The problem with counting leads alone is that it ignores the two levers that usually matter more: how long deals take to close, and what percentage actually convert. A business that halves its sales cycle length doubles its velocity with the exact same number of leads it already had.
Once you know your velocity number, you can see exactly which lever is worth pulling — instead of guessing that "more marketing" will fix a sales problem.
1. Calculate your baseline — Multiply your open opportunities by your historical win rate and average deal size, then divide by your average sales cycle length in days. That's your daily pipeline value.
2. Find your weakest lever — Of the four inputs, which has moved the least in the last twelve months? For most SME sales teams, it's cycle length — deals drift because nobody owns pushing them forward.
3. Attack cycle length first — Set a hard maximum number of days a deal can sit in each pipeline stage before it triggers a follow-up action. This single change typically moves velocity faster than any lead-generation campaign.
“Kevin is an absolute powerhouse! He doubled our business's profits in the first month alone with lots more of his recommendations still to be rolled out.”
— Curtis Hacon, Give A Sh!T
Buying more leads is an action you can take this afternoon — book the ad spend, brief the agency, watch the numbers roll in. Fixing cycle length and win rate means confronting your own sales process, your own follow-up discipline, and often your own team's habits, which is a much harder conversation to have with yourself. It's genuinely more comfortable to blame lead quality than to audit why deals sit untouched for three weeks at "proposal sent." This is where an experienced outside operator changes the outcome — someone who can look at your pipeline for thirty minutes and tell you, without ego attached to your process, exactly which stage is bleeding velocity.
If nobody in your business can tell you your sales velocity number right now, that's the first gap Kevin closes with you.
...and you become the owner who knows exactly how fast your pipeline turns into revenue.
Wednesday, October 21, 2026
49% of business owners question monthly whether running the business is worth it, a US survey found. Here's what changes when someone else is asking that question with you.
Wednesday, October 21, 2026
Nearly half of NZ SME owners are planning Christmas trading changes, MYOB research found, and most of it is a discount. Here's how to build memory before you build the offer.
Wednesday, October 21, 2026
46% of New Zealand business owners aren't paying themselves, Xero research found. Here's the Profit First fix that changes the order money moves through your business, not the hours you work.
Wednesday, October 21, 2026
The share of businesses reporting serious dead stock has doubled since 2024, new research found. Here's why rising revenue can still mean tightening cash, and the three numbers that catch it early.
Wednesday, October 21, 2026
42% of business owners named efficiency their top 2026 priority, a US survey found. Here's Michalowicz's Clockwork system for building a business that doesn't need you in every decision.
Wednesday, October 21, 2026
B2B win rates fell to 19-21% in 2025. Here's why a quiet Q4 pipeline is usually a budget deadline in disguise, and the three moves that use it instead of waiting for January.
Tuesday, October 20, 2026
Chemical and industrial distributors rarely have a product problem. Here is how to find the real constraint, escape the price war and build a 90-day plan.
Tuesday, October 20, 2026
97% of small business owners believe branding matters to their success — only 18% have an actual strategy for it. Here is the 3-question Brand Key test that closes the gap without a rebrand.
Tuesday, October 20, 2026
Roughly 90 percent of companies never achieve sustained profitable growth. Here's Jim Collins' Hedgehog Concept for telling which growth opportunities are actually worth chasing.
Tuesday, October 20, 2026
68 percent of US Google searches now end with no click at all. Here's what that means for small business marketing, and the fix that doesn't depend on getting the click back.
Tuesday, October 20, 2026
Most strategic plans are tactics with better formatting. Here's the one-sentence test, borrowed from Sinek's Golden Circle, that tells you if yours has a real why behind it.
Tuesday, October 20, 2026
A private, unwritten goal succeeds about 35 percent of the time. One with a weekly accountability check-in succeeds more than 70 percent of the time. Here's why that gap exists.
Tuesday, October 20, 2026
Roughly 65 percent of small businesses are tied so closely to their owner they'd struggle to run without them. Here's Gerber's E-Myth framework for finally getting out of the technician's chair.
Tuesday, October 20, 2026
42 percent of B2B businesses do nothing proactive during the pre-Christmas slowdown. Here's what the ones who keep selling do differently, and why January rewards them for it.
Monday, October 19, 2026
Is Vistage worth it? A fair, source-linked look at what peer advisory groups offer US business owners, a checklist for deciding, and how one-on-one coaching differs.