Tuesday, October 27, 2026
There's one role almost every SME owner has avoided filling for a year or more — while quietly doing it themselves instead. Here's the Who Not How framework, and the three-step test that makes the hire obvious.
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 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.
Tuesday, October 13, 2026
A new Gartner survey finds most B2B buyers would rather research and decide without ever speaking to a salesperson. If your marketing cannot carry the whole sale alone, here is the tool that fixes it.
Tuesday, October 13, 2026
New Gallup data shows only 11 percent of SME owners with staff have a detailed written plan, and most of the rest will try to write next year's in December. Here is the three-date fix to do this week instead.
Monday, October 12, 2026
EOS or Scaling Up? A fair, source-linked comparison for US owners, a five-point checklist to choose, and the growth questions neither operating system answers.
Monday, October 12, 2026
The seven concerns SME owners raise most often in coaching, why each one happens, and what actually helps.