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.
A price war rarely starts because a rival got cheaper. It starts because buyers cannot tell you apart, so price is the only thing left to compare. New Zealand telecoms showed how fast that goes: once a sharper offer arrived and switching was easy, customers moved. The way out is not a lower quote. It is a clear, visible reason to choose you.
Kevin D'Ambros-Smith is an Auckland-based business coach and advisor who has coached 200+ businesses one-on-one across 30+ industries.
Most owners blame the competitor who undercut them. Look closer and the order is different. First, your buyer stops seeing a difference between you and the alternative. Then the only comparison left is the number at the bottom of the quote. Then someone cuts it. The price war is the symptom. Sameness is the cause.
That matters because discounting treats the symptom and feeds the cause. Every cut teaches your customers that price is the lever to pull, and it shrinks the margin you would need to build something that sets you apart.
Telecom is a useful case because the whole country watched it happen. New Zealand telephony was a state monopoly until Telecom New Zealand was formed in 1987, and Telecom was privatised in 1990. Competition arrived in the early 1990s, starting with Clear Communications, and prices fell greatly as it grew.
Mobile gives sharper evidence. In a report published in November 2009, the Commerce Commission found that before 2degrees launched in August that year, New Zealand's best prepaid ranking was 26 out of 30 OECD countries, at more than one and a half times the OECD average price. After the launch, consumers could for the first time get a prepaid plan at prices lower than the OECD average. In August and September, more than triple the usual number of mobile subscribers switched network and kept their number. The Commission pointed to compatible networks, which made switching easy, as one of the drivers.
Read that as an owner. When offers look alike and switching is easy, customers move on price, and they move quickly. In 2014 Telecom renamed itself Spark, saying it wanted a name that better reflected the company's new direction and aspirations. A new name is a signal. It only becomes a reason to choose you when the offer behind it is different and the buyer can see it. That last point is our view, not a finding from the sources.
One honest caveat: telecom companies are large, regulated and sell a service that is easy to compare, so treat this as an illustration of the mechanism, not a benchmark for your sector. Telecom was one of the accounts from Kevin's agency years, but every market fact above comes from the public sources linked, not from inside knowledge.
Three habits show up again and again in owner-led businesses:
None of these is a character flaw. They are what happens when you are busy delivering and nobody has stopped to ask what a stranger would see if they compared you with the next three options.
Run this checklist honestly. Tick each line that sounds like your business:
Two or three ticks and positioning, not price, is probably your constraint. This is a self-check, not a diagnosis. A coach tests it against your own numbers before you spend another dollar on marketing.
You make yourself easy to recognise and easy to choose for a specific buyer. In practice:
Kevin spent his early career in advertising at DDB, Ogilvy and Saatchi and Saatchi, working on 60+ global brands, and has since founded or co-founded 9 companies. The craft that carries over to a business your size is simple: big-brand thinking, small-business clarity. You do not need a big budget to be distinctive. You need to decide what you want to be known for and repeat it everywhere a buyer meets you.
Give each step an owner, a date and a measure. If win rate and margin do not move, you have learned something cheaply and you adjust.
"Kevin worked with us at PhysioACTION to develop a positioning that sets us apart, 'PhysioACTION - A better experience', then helped us build the experience to match. In every part of the business we ask how to make it better for our customers and our team, and that's now the standard we hold ourselves to."
Simon Keepa, PhysioACTION
Coaching clients surveyed through The Icehouse return a Net Promoter Score of +72.
Sometimes. If your cost base is genuinely lower than your rivals and you can protect your margin, or you are running a short clearance or introductory offer with a plan to keep customers at full price, price can work. Otherwise it is a race that a bigger player usually wins.
Better is a claim your buyer cannot easily check. Different is something they can see, remember and repeat to a colleague. Price wars happen when buyers cannot see the difference, however good you are.
Some, probably the ones who only ever bought on price. Look at your numbers before deciding: rank customers by profit, not sales, and you may find the discount buyers earn you the least. Test any change with one segment first.
Clarity on your position can come in a few weeks. The market response depends on how consistently you apply it, which is why the plan runs over 90 days with a measure for each step.
If you keep pitching against rivals who sound just like you, and the quote keeps coming down, a 30-minute conversation is a low-risk way to find the real constraint. There is no obligation, and you will leave with at least one thing to test. Be the owner whose business is chosen for what it does differently, not for the lowest quote.
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Kevin and The Simple-Growth Team