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.