Monday, October 26, 2026
Only about a third of seasonal businesses hold enough cash to cover their leanest months before the slow season hits. Here's the ten-minute reserve check before this year's peak trade.
Every November, a familiar ritual starts in boardrooms and kitchen-table offices across New Zealand and the US: next year's number gets set. Usually it's last year's revenue plus a percentage that felt ambitious in the moment. A widely cited UK survey of business leaders found 44% had missed their own earnings target at some point, and almost half missed it in the very first quarter of the year. If that's been your pattern too, the problem almost certainly isn't effort — it's how the target got built in the first place.
After founding or co-founding nine companies and coaching more than 200 businesses one-on-one, Kevin has never once seen a team miss a target because they didn't try hard enough. He has seen plenty miss because the target was fiction from the day it was written down.
Here's the enemy: percentage-on-last-year planning. Take this year's revenue, add 15% or 20% because that number sounds motivating in a meeting, and call it the plan. It isn't a plan — it's an extrapolation, and extrapolations don't account for a market that's shifted, a team that's already at capacity, or an owner who's quietly run out of hours in the week.
A 2023 survey conducted by the revenue-intelligence firm Gong, reported in Startups Magazine (UK), found that more than half of business leaders said accurate forecasting mattered more because of economic uncertainty — yet most were still building those forecasts in a spreadsheet, dragging last year's line forward. The target wasn't wrong because people didn't work hard enough to hit it. It was wrong on the day it was set.
Before you write down a number for 2027, run it past three checks instead of one gut feel:
"I have grown my business 5x since working with Kevin. Everything Kevin told me to do was the complete opposite of what I had been doing. Working with Kevin has truly been a complete game changer."
— Richard, Chem Suppliers
Most owners already sense their target is soft. They build it the old way anyway, because the three checks above take an honest look at the business, and an honest look takes someone outside the business to run it properly. Inside your own head, the capacity ceiling always looks a little higher and the market always looks a little kinder than it really is. That's not a character flaw — it's just what happens when the person setting the target is the same person who has to live with the consequences of getting it wrong.
This is the exact gap a coach closes: someone in the room who has no incentive to flatter your forecast, and thirty years of watching which numbers hold up and which ones quietly unravel by March.
If your 2027 target is just last year's number with a percentage bolted on, Kevin will help you fix that first.
Be the owner who starts 2027 with a target built on real numbers, not a hopeful percentage.
Wednesday, October 07, 2026
Wrong hires are now costing Australian SMEs an estimated 7.3 billion dollars a year. The mistake almost never happens in the interview room. Here is where it actually happens.
Wednesday, October 07, 2026
Somewhere in your pipeline right now is a buyer whose budget has to be spent before their financial year ends. Here is how to find them before a competitor does.
Wednesday, October 07, 2026
Most SME marketing budget goes to whichever channel the owner already knows, never the one that would actually work best. Here is the simple test that finds it.
Wednesday, October 07, 2026
Most strategic plans fail quietly, from an optimism nobody questioned out loud. Here is the 20-minute pre-mortem that finds the weak spot before you commit a dollar to it.
Tuesday, October 06, 2026
What a business coach for an NZ food, beverage or FMCG brand should do: price waterfall, real constraint, velocity story and a 90-day plan.
Tuesday, October 06, 2026
73% of small business owners feel more confident than ever, yet 57% have flat or falling revenue. Here is the real constraint behind the gap, and the 15-minute test that exposes it.
Tuesday, October 06, 2026
Most SME owners know their cost per click. Almost none know their true cost to win a customer, because the real costs live in four different spreadsheets nobody has ever combined.
Tuesday, October 06, 2026
A pleasant weekly chat and a structured coaching session can look identical from the outside. Here's exactly what should be happening in the room if the second one is real.
Tuesday, October 06, 2026
Most SME task lists have no visible connection to the goal on the whiteboard. OKRs fix that gap in three simple steps, without turning your week into a spreadsheet exercise.
Tuesday, October 06, 2026
Giving away a free sample, audit or pilot feels like it removes risk for the prospect. Mostly it just removes their reason to commit. Here's the structure that converts instead.
Monday, October 05, 2026
There is no single best business coach in the USA. Here are five criteria for choosing one, a fair look at the main formats, and why an outside perspective can change what you see in your own business.
Monday, October 05, 2026
Eighty-four percent of small business owners sacrifice health or relationships to their business, new 2026 data shows. Here is the Transferability Number test that shows why, and what to fix first.
Monday, October 05, 2026
You're about to have your busiest quarter of the year. If nobody's planned for it, your bank balance is about to go the wrong way at exactly the moment the business looks like it's winning.
Monday, October 05, 2026
Ask most owners what they do and they'll answer instantly. Ask them why their business exists, beyond making money, and watch the pause. That pause is costing you customers, hires and referrals.
Monday, October 05, 2026
Ask your team to name the business's single most important goal this quarter. Five different answers from five people means you have one problem, not twelve: nobody knows what the goal actually is.