Monday, November 02, 2026
One third-party guide puts an EOS Implementer at $20,000 to $45,000 a year for two years. Here is what that buys, who it suits, and six questions to ask before you sign.
You post on social media, you boost the odd ad, you ask for referrals when you remember to, and every few months you glance at the bank balance with no real idea which of it actually brought the money in. You find out how the quarter went weeks after it mattered, and by then whatever was working has quietly stopped and whatever wasn't is still eating your budget.
You are not alone in that. A 2026 Xero Money Matters release found 94 percent of New Zealand small business owners said they were not reaching their business goals. Read the release. Most of those owners are not short on effort. They are short on a single page that tells them, every week, what is actually moving the number.
Here is what keeps happening: you do more marketing to fix a slow month, without ever checking whether the marketing you already did was the problem. More noise gets added to a system nobody can see into, and the result is a bigger spend with the same blind spot, not a smaller one.
I had a client running six physio clinics across different suburbs, each one effectively its own small business. Every Monday morning, every clinic manager got one email with exactly two numbers: how close they were to an 85 percent capacity target, and how income for the week compared to forecast. Two numbers, one page, every single Monday. Within weeks, the clinics that were quietly underperforming stopped being a mystery discovered at quarter-end, and became a Tuesday conversation instead.
Allan Dib, author of The 1-Page Marketing Plan, built a nine-box grid that covers the whole customer journey in three simple phases, which I will put in my own words for an SME owner who does not have a marketing department.
Pick one measure for each of those three phases, put them on one page, and check that page every Monday the way the physio clinics checked theirs. That single habit tells you more about which of your marketing is working than another six months of posting and hoping.
"Kevin assists businesses to understand their 'Secret Sauce' and implements a strategy to grow the company's brand and in turn, business opportunities. His guidance and strategic advice is always well thought through and gets fantastic outcomes."
— Gareth Bayliss, Sales Manager, The Icehouse
The real obstacle is rarely the plan. It is that measuring marketing properly means admitting some of it isn't working, and that is an uncomfortable conversation to have with yourself when you have already spent the money. So the tracking gets put off, the same channels get funded out of habit, and the guessing continues.
This is where a second set of eyes helps, not to add more tactics, but to help you cut the ones that are not pulling their weight and build the one page that tells you the truth every Monday, without the ego getting in the way of the numbers.
This isn't for you if you would rather keep posting and hoping than look honestly at what is and isn't working. It is for you if you are ready to know, not guess.
Picture a Monday morning three months from now. One page. Two or three numbers. You know, before your coffee is finished, exactly which part of your marketing earned its place last week and which part needs to change. That certainty, not more spend, is what actually grows a business with full visibility and no surprises.
If your marketing budget runs on vibes rather than visibility, that is exactly where we would start.
Wednesday, October 14, 2026
Five lessons from McDonald's own history that a 20-person US business can copy, plus where systems stop and growth questions begin.
Wednesday, October 14, 2026
Different industries hit different growth constraints. Find the Simple-Growth page written for your type of business, plus two free resources on loyalty and exit planning.
Wednesday, October 14, 2026
Nearly a third of small business owners have never taken a full week off, and new 2026 data shows the ones working the longest hours are also the most likely to want out. Here is the three-question test for turning hours into real freedom.
Wednesday, October 14, 2026
Over half of SMEs entering a new market in one UK study hit real problems doing it. The Ansoff Matrix maps the three safer growth routes most owners skip past first.
Wednesday, October 14, 2026
45 percent of business owners in one survey feel trapped running the business they built. Here's how the Theory of Constraints, pointed at the owner instead of the process, finds the real fix.
Wednesday, October 14, 2026
UK SME owners spend six working days a month on admin and 3.6 days on growth, one survey found. Dan Sullivan's Who Not How habit flips which question you ask first.
Wednesday, October 14, 2026
Nearly half of SMEs in a 2026 survey had not raised prices since 2022. Here's the three-sentence script that makes the overdue price conversation simple instead of stressful.
Wednesday, October 14, 2026
76 of 100 B2B brands in a 2026 study fell into a credible-but-indistinguishable Sameness Zone. Here's the four-word positioning test, the Onliness Statement, that pulls a business out of it.
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.