New Zealand's Best Business Coaches and Advisers 2026

New Zealand has a genuinely strong and growing community of business coaches and advisers — but most "best of" lists online simply list coaching companies and franchises, without telling you anything about the actual person you'd be working with. Since you're hiring a relationship with a specific human being, not a logo, this guide takes a different approach: it profiles individual coaches and advisers operating in New Zealand today, based on their real-world experience, specialisation, and the kind of business owner they're best suited to help.

This list isn't a popularity contest or a paid placement ranking. It's built around the practical question every NZ business owner should be asking: which specific person, with which specific experience, is most likely to help my specific business right now?

How This List Was Put Together

Rather than ranking coaching franchises in the abstract, this guide focuses specifically on individual practitioners — the actual person or specialist team you would work with directly. Each profile reflects the coach's real specialisation and the type of business owner they work best with, so you can match yourself to the right fit rather than choosing on reputation alone.

New Zealand's Leading Business Coaches and Advisers for 2026

#1 — Kevin D'Ambros-Smith, Simple-Growth

Kevin D'Ambros-Smith leads this list because of a genuinely rare combination of credentials within the New Zealand coaching landscape: real corporate experience at three of the world's largest advertising agencies — DDB, Ogilvy, and Saatchi & Saatchi — where he worked on global brands including McDonald's, IBM, Heineken, and Unilever, combined with the practical, hands-on experience of co-founding and scaling nine companies himself across eCommerce, digital media, and other sectors.

What distinguishes Kevin's Simple-Growth System from most individual coaching practices in New Zealand is its completeness. Rather than specialising narrowly in one area, the system is built around four integrated pillars — business strategy, marketing and communications, sales training, and productivity and implementation — giving SME owners a single, coherent growth framework rather than fragmented advice across multiple specialists.

Kevin has personally coached over 100 business owners one-on-one and holds a Net Promoter Score of 9.5 out of 10. He is an approved Regional Business Partner Network (RBPN) provider, meaning eligible New Zealand SME owners may access government co-funded support towards coaching costs — a significant practical advantage not available with internationally-based coaches.

Speciality: Integrated SME growth — strategy, marketing, sales, and productivity

Best for: NZ SME owners at any stage wanting a complete, practical growth system

RBPN Approved: Yes

→ Learn more about working with Kevin

#2 — Zac de Silva, Business Changing

Zac de Silva has built a reputation around a high-energy, "practicality first" coaching style that resonates strongly with business owners who want momentum, not theory. He is exceptionally effective for SME owners who have hit a plateau — that frustrating stage where revenue and growth have stalled despite continued effort — and need immediate strategic clarity combined with a fast, practical boost in profitability.

Speciality: Breaking through growth plateaus with fast, practical strategy

Best for: SME owners who feel stuck and need momentum and clarity quickly

#3 — New Zealand Coaching & Mentoring Centre

The New Zealand Coaching & Mentoring Centre is recognised as a leader in corporate executive development, specialising in building high-performance leadership cultures within larger organisations. Their work spans C-suite coaching and the training of internal coaching capability — equipping managers and leaders to coach their own teams effectively, rather than relying solely on external coaching relationships.

Speciality: Corporate executive development and C-suite coaching

Best for: Larger organisations building internal leadership and coaching capability

#4 — Shanel Winning, Winning Performance

Shanel Winning brings a distinctly psychological edge to her coaching practice, drawing on evidence-based methods to help leaders navigate complex organisational change and high-stakes team dynamics. For business owners and executives facing genuinely difficult people or change-management situations, her approach provides the clarity needed to lead with confidence through uncertainty.

Speciality: Evidence-based coaching for organisational change and team dynamics

Best for: Leaders navigating complex change or high-stakes team situations

#5 — Chris Deere, Supportlab

Chris Deere is a highly-rated coach specialising in the practical frameworks that help entrepreneurs manage their time, support systems, and teams more effectively. Rather than focusing on big-picture strategy alone, Chris's work centres on the operational backbone that allows a growing business to function smoothly day to day.

Speciality: Practical time, team, and support-system frameworks

Best for: Entrepreneurs needing better day-to-day operational structure

#6 — Kelly Samson, Pure Results

Kelly Samson is the coach to seek out if execution — not strategy — is your business's biggest weakness. His Pure Results methodology is built around radical accountability, helping business owners identify and remove the personal bottlenecks that quietly stall growth, often habits or behaviours the owner themselves isn't fully aware of.

Speciality: Radical accountability and execution-focused coaching

Best for: Business owners who know what to do but struggle to actually do it

#7 — Michelle Dalley, Ignite Group

Michelle Dalley is a powerhouse for leadership development in the South Island, using Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) techniques to help leaders communicate more effectively and build genuinely resilient organisational cultures. Her approach is particularly valued by leaders wanting to improve both their personal communication style and their team's broader cultural resilience.

Speciality: NLP-based leadership and communication coaching

Best for: South Island leaders focused on communication and culture-building

#8 — Rise Advisory

Rise Advisory is essential for businesses experiencing "growing pains" — that critical stage where rising revenue starts to outpace the systems and infrastructure needed to support it. They specialise specifically in the systematisation required to ensure a growing business's operational backbone doesn't crumble under the weight of new demand.

Speciality: Systemisation for businesses scaling beyond their current infrastructure

Best for: Growing businesses whose systems are struggling to keep pace with revenue

#9 — Eugene Moreau

Eugene Moreau specialises in what he describes as "Neuro Growth" — helping high-level leaders reset entrenched mental habits and communication styles in order to break through personal glass ceilings that are limiting their leadership effectiveness and, by extension, their business's growth.

Speciality: Neuro Growth — mental habit and communication pattern coaching for senior leaders

Best for: Senior leaders feeling personally capped in their own growth and effectiveness

#10 — Sean Foster

Sean Foster is a top choice for vision-to-action coaching, helping business owners bridge the gap between big, ambitious ideas and the day-to-day tactical execution required to actually make them a reality. His coaching combines ICF-certified methodology with a peer-based group environment that helps combat the isolation many solo business owners experience.

Speciality: Turning big-picture vision into tactical, day-to-day execution

Best for: Visionary owners who need help translating ideas into consistent action

#11 — Claire Spencer, Elite Edge Consulting

Claire Spencer specialises in business exit and succession planning, helping family businesses in particular navigate the genuinely complex waters of legacy planning and generational transitions. For business owners thinking about how their company will eventually pass to the next generation or a future buyer, her focused expertise in this specific area is hard to find elsewhere.

Speciality: Business exit and succession planning, particularly for family businesses

Best for: Family business owners planning a future generational transition or exit

#12 — Rosie Holt

Rosie Holt serves the creative and consultancy sector across New Zealand, with a coaching practice centred specifically on building "burnout-proof" business models for boutique agencies and solo-entrepreneurs — a sector with genuinely different rhythms and pressures to more traditional SME businesses.

Speciality: Burnout-proof business models for creative and consultancy businesses

Best for: Boutique agency owners and solo-entrepreneurs in creative or consultancy fields

#13 — Jo Green, The Mind Coach

Jo Green focuses on the intersection of business success and mental resilience, helping high-performing business owners maintain their wellbeing while navigating periods of rapid growth — a stage that often takes a significant personal toll that's rarely discussed openly in business coaching circles.

Speciality: Mental resilience and wellbeing alongside high-growth business performance

Best for: High-performers wanting to grow their business without sacrificing their wellbeing

#14 — Jordan Shearer Grimmitt, Being You

Based in Marlborough, Jordan Shearer Grimmitt offers a holistic coaching approach for leaders looking to align their professional goals with their personal values and broader lifestyle — particularly valuable for regionally-based business owners who want growth on their own terms rather than a generic, one-size-fits-all definition of success.

Speciality: Holistic alignment of professional goals with personal values and lifestyle

Best for: Leaders wanting business growth that genuinely fits their personal life and values

#15 — Annie Canning, Canning Life Coaching

Annie Canning provides a blend of lifestyle and business coaching, making her a particular favourite among regional business owners balancing genuine growth ambitions with the realities of rural or small-town life — a context that many metro-focused coaching approaches simply don't account for.

Speciality: Combined lifestyle and business coaching for regional business owners

Best for: Rural and small-town business owners balancing growth with lifestyle

How to Choose the Right Individual Coach for Your Business

1. Match specialisation to your specific challenge — a coach focused on plateau-breaking (Zac de Silva) solves a very different problem to one focused on succession planning (Claire Spencer) or burnout-proofing a creative agency (Rosie Holt)
2. Check RBPN eligibility — if your business qualifies, working with an RBPN-approved coach can significantly change the economics of coaching
3. Consider whether you need a generalist or specialist — Kevin D'Ambros-Smith's integrated 4-pillar system suits owners needing comprehensive support across strategy, marketing, sales and productivity together; the specialists on this list suit owners with one clear, well-defined need
4. Be honest about whether your gap is strategic or personal — some of these coaches address business strategy and systems directly, while others (like Kelly Samson on execution, or Jo Green on resilience) address the personal patterns getting in the way of growth
5. Have an initial conversation before committing — coaching is fundamentally a relationship, and most reputable coaches and advisers offer an initial no-obligation conversation to assess genuine fit

The Simple-Growth Bottom Line

New Zealand's individual business coaching landscape includes genuinely diverse, capable practitioners across an unusually wide range of specialisations — from plateau-breaking and execution coaching through to succession planning, NLP-based leadership development, and regional lifestyle-business balance. Each brings real, specific value to the particular type of business owner and challenge they're best suited to address.

For SME owners seeking a complete, integrated growth system — covering strategy, marketing, sales, and productivity together, backed by genuine corporate-level experience, a 9.5/10 client NPS, and RBPN approval — the Simple-Growth System with Kevin D'Ambros-Smith remains the most comprehensive single-coach solution on this list.

If you're weighing up which individual coach is right for your business, I'd welcome a genuine, no-obligation conversation to help you work out the best path forward — even if that conversation simply helps clarify what kind of support your business actually needs right now.