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The Leading Business Advisor to New Zealand Growth Companies. Grumley+Company assists New Zealand businesses with every phase of the business lifecycle – from launch and growth to maintaining and thriving.
Our key business advisor Toss Grumley guides over 200 New Zealand companies with the right advice, plans, strategy and structure. His insights are based on growing his own businesses and a coaching framework developed from his MBA at Warwick Business School in the UK.
Toss’s management career began early, when he became general manager of a leading wholesale supply company at the age of twenty-five.
As a Director & Shareholder Toss has helped grow multiple eight figure businesses and has successfully exited three businesses to date.
Proactive and innovative, Toss brings clarity, confidence and a structured approach. Passionate about helping business owners, he shares his experiences and insights widely as a regular contributor to national business media.
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If you’re one of New Zealand’s 550,000 small business owners, the market probably feels pretty heavy right now. Customers are more cautious, credit is harder to rely on, and business-to-business spending is taking longer to approve. And while that doesn’t mean growth has stopped, it might mean you need to change your approach.
Why Growth Stalls First When the Market Slows
Even for business owners who have weathered their fair share of storms, it only takes a couple of quiet months or large late payments before nerves start influencing decisions.
When all your focus is on the week-to-week, you lose sight of future growth, meaning sales development, marketing, systems improvement or team capability are often the first to hit the chopping block. But cost-cutting alone rarely creates a stronger business. In our experience, it often leaves a business smaller and less resilient.
Revisit Your Numbers Before You Revisit Your Strategy
Before you change direction, slow down to take a closer look at the numbers. Most business owners have a decent grasp of their finances, but a slow market leaves less room for assumptions and a smaller margin of error.
Look at what’s still performing and what's most exposed to risk, which could be anything from price sensitivity and delivery costs to supplier pressure or slow payments. The point is to find out what’s working best, so you know where you can afford to lean in.
Structured Planning Matters More in a Slow Market, Not Less
Ad hoc decisions are risky at the best of times, but in a slower market, they can quickly become expensive mistakes.
At Grumley+Company, our planning process starts with a full-day strategy session to create a blueprint for your business. From there, we touch base with quarterly reviews to keep you tracking against your goals, with an annual session to reset the strategy for the year ahead.
Where Growth Still Exists in a Slow Economy
If you come away from this article with one piece of advice, it’s that a slow economy does not remove opportunity, but it does mean you might need to start looking for it in different places. The biggest opportunities tend to lie in visibility, internal improvements, and customer retention.
Some competitors will pull back and stop investing in customer relationships, or reduce their service levels, giving you the chance to make your business more visible.
Growth can also come from inside the business, by improving how you use your existing systems and capacity to create stronger margins.
And sometimes, the best strategy is to stop chasing cold leads and focus on retention rather than acquisition. By keeping good customers and increasing repeat work, you can get more value from the relationships you’ve already invested in.
No two businesses are the same, so the growth opportunity for your business isn’t necessarily the same as it is for a competitor. Working with a business growth advisor makes it easier to identify which of these paths makes the most commercial sense for your business.
Explore case studies of how we’ve supported past clients.
The Owner's Mindset Shift
One of the problems we’re seeing across the country right now is that a slow market can pull many owners into ‘survival’ mode, and that can have the most detrimental impact on a business.
Never underestimate the benefit of an outside perspective. A business consultant can pressure-test your plans and challenge any assumptions that could be preventing you from making decisions with a longer view.
Ready to future-proof your business? Book a consultation with Grumley+Company today.
Growing Your Business When the Market Isn't Helping You
If you’re one of New Zealand’s 550,000 small business owners, the market probably feels pretty heavy right now. Customers are more cautious, credit is harder to rely on, and business-to-business spending is taking longer to approve. And while that doesn’t mean growth has stopped, it might mean you need to change your approach.
Why Growth Stalls First When the Market Slows
Even for business owners who have weathered their fair share of storms, it only takes a couple of quiet months or large late payments before nerves start influencing decisions.
When all your focus is on the week-to-week, you lose sight of future growth, meaning sales development, marketing, systems improvement or team capability are often the first to hit the chopping block. But cost-cutting alone rarely creates a stronger business. In our experience, it often leaves a business smaller and less resilient.
Revisit Your Numbers Before You Revisit Your Strategy
Before you change direction, slow down to take a closer look at the numbers. Most business owners have a decent grasp of their finances, but a slow market leaves less room for assumptions and a smaller margin of error.
Look at what’s still performing and what's most exposed to risk, which could be anything from price sensitivity and delivery costs to supplier pressure or slow payments. The point is to find out what’s working best, so you know where you can afford to lean in.
Structured Planning Matters More in a Slow Market, Not Less
Ad hoc decisions are risky at the best of times, but in a slower market, they can quickly become expensive mistakes.
At Grumley+Company, our planning process starts with a full-day strategy session to create a blueprint for your business. From there, we touch base with quarterly reviews to keep you tracking against your goals, with an annual session to reset the strategy for the year ahead.
Where Growth Still Exists in a Slow Economy
If you come away from this article with one piece of advice, it’s that a slow economy does not remove opportunity, but it does mean you might need to start looking for it in different places. The biggest opportunities tend to lie in visibility, internal improvements, and customer retention.
Some competitors will pull back and stop investing in customer relationships, or reduce their service levels, giving you the chance to make your business more visible.
Growth can also come from inside the business, by improving how you use your existing systems and capacity to create stronger margins.
And sometimes, the best strategy is to stop chasing cold leads and focus on retention rather than acquisition. By keeping good customers and increasing repeat work, you can get more value from the relationships you’ve already invested in.
No two businesses are the same, so the growth opportunity for your business isn’t necessarily the same as it is for a competitor. Working with a business growth advisor makes it easier to identify which of these paths makes the most commercial sense for your business.
Explore case studies of how we’ve supported past clients.
The Owner's Mindset Shift
One of the problems we’re seeing across the country right now is that a slow market can pull many owners into ‘survival’ mode, and that can have the most detrimental impact on a business.
Never underestimate the benefit of an outside perspective. A business consultant can pressure-test your plans and challenge any assumptions that could be preventing you from making decisions with a longer view.
Ready to future-proof your business? Book a consultation with Grumley+Company today.