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 close the deal. You should feel like you won. Instead you do the numbers afterwards and realise that, once the discount and the "just this once" extra came out, you made almost nothing on it, and you are the one who goes without pay again this month so the wages and the suppliers get covered first.
A 2026 Bluevine survey of 781 US small business owners found 62 percent had reduced or skipped their own pay at least once in the past year, and 21 percent had done it four or more times. Read the study. You are not bad at sales. You are winning the wrong kind of sale, over and over.
Here is the trap: every discount feels like it saves the deal, so in the moment it feels like good salesmanship. Across a year, it is a thousand small decisions to take less, each one justified on its own, that quietly add up to a business that is busy and broke at the same time. The sale was never the problem. The price you let it go for was.
I had a solvent client whose price sat at $40 for years, out of habit more than strategy. We moved it to $50. Margin went from $5 to $15 on exactly the same work, triple the margin for the same effort it used to take. That one change produced the same profit as tripling turnover would have, for a third of the workload, and not one client complained. Nobody loses a sale over a fair price delivered with confidence. They lose it when the price is apologised for.
One of the simplest fixes in pricing is also one of the most ignored by SME owners: offering three tiers instead of one price. In my own words, built for a business your size:
Most customers choose Better when it is offered well. The owners who only ever quote one price are the ones training their customers to ask for a discount, because there is nothing else on the table to choose instead.
"Kevin is an absolute powerhouse! He doubled our business's profits in the first month alone with lots more of his recommendations still to be rolled out."
— Darilyn Kane, Coaching and Advisory Lead, The Icehouse
The real obstacle isn't pricing theory. It is the fear that asking for the full price loses the deal, and that fear gets stronger the closer you are to not making payroll. That is exactly the moment discounting feels safest and is actually most expensive, because it is the moment you can least afford to work for less than you are worth.
This is where having someone outside the business, who isn't scared of this month's number the way you are, pays for itself: holding the new price with you until it becomes normal, and building the Better tier so customers have a real reason to spend more without ever feeling sold to.
This isn't for you if your whole pitch is being the cheapest option in the market. It is for you if you are ready to be paid properly for the value you already deliver.
Imagine sending your next quote at the price that actually pays you, confidently, with two better options sitting beside it, and the customer choosing the middle one without you saying a word about discounts. That is not a guarantee of any particular result. It is a genuinely available possibility, and it starts with one pricing conversation you have been putting off.
If you're closing sales that don't pay you properly, that's the first thing we'd fix together.
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.