Every election year, the same pattern shows up. Business owners decide that nothing much is going to happen until the new Government is sorted, so marketing gets paused, hiring gets parked, and the whole business goes into a kind of holding pattern. New Zealand’s heading into another one at the end of this year, and if the last one is anything to go by, that holding pattern could last a while.
The six weeks that felt like six months
After the 2023 election, it took until 27 November for National, ACT and New Zealand First to form a government, roughly six weeks after election day. That made it the second-longest government formation since MMP began in 1996. It felt even longer than that at the time, at least it did to me, probably because everyone’s tolerance for sitting in uncertainty was already worn pretty thin after a few years of Covid.
Six weeks doesn’t sound like much written down. But if you’re a business owner trying to plan a new financial year, or deciding whether now’s the time to invest in growth, six weeks of not knowing which policies, which tax settings, which coalition partners you’re dealing with, is a properly long stretch to sit still in. Especially since Christmas is so close, and we have to start thinking about covering wages while everyone is on holiday.
My own version of this
I’ll admit I’ve been guilty of exactly this pattern myself. I’d more or less written off this election period in my head already, bracing for a quiet patch in the business.
My business coach didn’t let me get away with it. He asked me a simple question first: how many businesses are there in Auckland? I didn’t know. Turns out it’s over 220,000.
Then he asked how many new clients I wanted between now and the end of the year. Easy one, we’ve got capacity for two a month.
Then came the question that reframed the whole thing… out of 200,000 business owners, could I find that many who didn’t believe in pausing their own marketing just because an election was happening? Put like that, it wasn’t even a hard question. Of course I could.
The market is bigger than the news cycle
When you’re deep in your own business, they’re the important stats that gets forgotten. You start to assume the entire market is thinking the same way you are, pausing the same way you are, waiting on the same news you’re waiting on. It isn’t. Most of the 220,000 businesses in Auckland aren’t sitting around refreshing coalition talk updates. They’re getting on with things, and some of them are exactly the kind of client who’d rather keep moving than freeze.
There’s a reason the freeze happens anyway; economists who study this call it policy uncertainty, and there’s a measurable effect where businesses delay investment and hiring during periods where the range of possible outcomes is wide. Not because they expect a bad result specifically, but because reversing an expensive decision later is costly. On top of that, most people weigh the risk of a wasted investment more heavily than the upside of moving early, so waiting feels like the cautious choice even when it isn’t. And if everyone around you in your industry is also waiting, that just reinforces the sense that waiting is the normal, sensible thing to do.
To be fair, sometimes waiting makes sense
For some businesses, waiting is the smarter call. If you’re heavily dependent on government contracts, or your entire model sits on a policy setting that could change with a new government, holding off on a big commitment until you know who you’re dealing with is reasonable risk management.
But that describes just a small slice of businesses. For most small and medium businesses, the actual exposure to whichever coalition forms is a lot smaller than the anxiety about it. The plumber, the physio clinic, the accounting firm, the marketing agency, none of these live or die by which political parties end up in cabinet. What they do live or die by is whether they kept showing up in front of customers while their competitors went quiet.
What I’d ask instead
If you’re heading into this election already bracing for a quiet few months, the questions my coach asked me are worth asking yourself. How big is your actual market? How many clients or customers do you need to have a good quarter? And out of everyone in that market, surely there are enough people like you, getting on with it rather than waiting for the news to settle?
Most of the time, the answer isn’t ‘there’s no one out there’. It’s ‘I’ve talked myself into believing there’s no one out there.’ Those are very different problems, and only one is real.
We’re not saying ignore what’s happening, I’m just asking you not to let six weeks of coalition discussions talk you out of a market that’s still 200,000 businesses deep. Do I have your vote?