Sunday, November 01, 2026
Management Capability Development funding can cover up to half of one-to-one business training for eligible NZ businesses. Here is who qualifies, what it covers, what it does not, and the order to do things in.
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.
Sunday, October 04, 2026
AI is saving small business owners 10 to 13 hours a week, and most have no idea what they gained. Here is the four-question method for pointing AI at the hours that matter.
Sunday, October 04, 2026
You nailed the pitch and the buyer loved it, then the deal went quiet. The reason is usually a meeting room you were never invited to. Here is how to sell to a buying committee you cannot see.
Sunday, October 04, 2026
Customers don't buy products, they hire them to do a job. Here is the framework that explains why an inferior competitor keeps outselling you, and what to fix in your marketing today.
Sunday, October 04, 2026
Most SME owners have one growth plan: get more customers. There are actually four distinct ways to grow, and the cheapest one is usually sitting in your existing customer file.
Sunday, October 04, 2026
Small business confidence just rose, but growth expectations are falling for almost everyone. New 2026 data reveals the one decision separating owners still growing from owners just waiting it out.
Sunday, October 04, 2026
A 1 percent price increase lifts operating profit by an average of 11 percent, McKinsey's Global 1200 research found, far more than an equivalent rise in volume. Here's how to raise prices without losing your best customers.
Sunday, October 04, 2026
Some coaches build a business out of being needed forever. Here's the Graduation Test: three questions that reveal whether your coach is transferring real capability, or just keeping you on retainer.
Sunday, October 04, 2026
Most owners respond to a bottleneck by fixing something else entirely. Eli Goldratt's Theory of Constraints explains why that backfires, and documented case studies show a mean 69 percent lead-time reduction once the real constraint is found.
Sunday, October 04, 2026
Roughly four in ten B2B purchase attempts end in no decision at all. It's rarely about price. Here's Alex Hormozi's Value Equation, in plain English, and why it explains almost every stalled deal in your pipeline.
Sunday, October 04, 2026
41 percent of consumers now always read reviews before choosing a business, and 31 percent won't use one rated under 4.5 stars. Here's the Review Velocity System that turns happy customers into a steady stream of five-star proof.
Sunday, October 04, 2026
64 percent of executives say they're juggling too many conflicting priorities, and most SME strategies die from addition, not ambition. Here's the three-step Strategic Short List that turns six priorities into the one that actually moves the needle.
Sunday, October 04, 2026
A third of small business owners are absorbing this year's cost increases out of their own pocket instead of raising prices. Here's the three-step Margin Audit that turns that guess into a safe, thirty-day pricing test.
Sunday, October 04, 2026
Before you approve the next hire, run the revenue-per-employee test. Some of the growth you are trying to buy with headcount is sitting in tasks AI can already take off the list.
Sunday, October 04, 2026
Owner-dependent businesses sell for roughly half the multiple of businesses that run without them. Dan Sullivan's Who Not How question is the simplest fix most owners never try.
Sunday, October 04, 2026
The tasks only one person in your business can do are a hidden cost waiting to land. Here is how to clear the backlog in an afternoon using a recorder instead of a blank page.