After a few decades of ensuring I regularly nudged up my fees, I’ve just chopped them in half. And no this isn’t a lead generation tactic. It’s more complicated than that.

Ironically, a couple of months ago, I wrote a piece here that was all about hiking prices and now here I am seemingly suggesting the opposite. Except I’m not.

‘Hiking prices’ explored the oft-overlooked strategy of looking closely at your fees when in the pursuit of business viability. My recent shock-horror-prices-slashed action has been levelled against a little business that happily achieved viability a long time ago.

When I say viability, my definition is that my activities reliably put sufficient food on the table, keep a smile on my face and my demeanour generally seems to please my family and friends. It’s all I’ve ever wanted from my work.

Maybe if I’d wanted more, my car would be longer, my house larger and my choice of footwear more varied. I’ll never know. Anyway I digress.

Let me try to explain my actions

Some weeks ago, I took myself off to see a psychotherapist as I wanted to better understand and improve an aspect of my thinking. After a handful of very enlightening sessions and a couple of boxes of tissues, I feel much better equipped to handle some life stuff that was bugging me. Thanks for asking.

Given the focus of my work, I couldn’t help paying attention to how my specialist operated and was surprised to discover that she:

• Has no website and doesn’t show up prominently on Google
• Offers no free trials, no ebooks and no newsletters
• Has no intake process, no online diary and no virtual assistant
• Doesn’t make gormless looking LinkedIn videos, isn’t crushing it on Instagram and wouldn’t recognise a side hustle if it ran over her

Hmmm. And l found her by word-of-mouth. Oh, yes, and she charges a third the price of a coaching session with yours truly.

All this (or all not this?) and yet she’s nicely occupied doing work she loves with people she knows she can really help. That’s Satisfaction 101 surely?

The simple way to build a lovable business

And realising that is what lit up my bulb. The kind of people I want to help and with whom I can truly add value, would never pay my silly fees. And those who can are generally not my tribe.

So be advised. If you want to create and build a lovable business, I’ll help you achieve it. But if you want to rapidly scale, flip or crush anything, best get your cheque book out and head to Google.

I’d love to hear what you make of this, let me have it in the comments.