A digital agency owner I’ll call David lost a pitch last year to a competitor who charged nearly double his price.
Same scope. Same deliverables. Same timeline. The client picked the more expensive firm and David couldn’t understand why. He thought he’d done everything right. Came in sharp on price, showed flexibility, even threw in a free audit to sweeten the deal.
Two months later he won a different project. Bigger client. Celebrated with his team. Then reality set in.
He’d priced it so aggressively to guarantee the win that the margins left no room for error. One scope change from the client and he was underwater. His senior designer worked weekends for three straight weeks. David personally picked up the overflow because hiring a freelancer would have killed what little profit was left.
They delivered on time. The client was happy. David’s team was burned out and his accountant told him they’d barely broken even after factoring in the hours.
Meanwhile the competitor who won the first pitch at double the price used the margin to hire a dedicated project manager, delivered without drama, and had the client signing a retainer before the project was even finished.
Same industry. Same type of work. One builds a business that funds itself. The other builds a hamster wheel that spins faster every quarter.
Pricing isn’t about what you think the market will bear. It’s about what your business needs to operate without slowly eating itself alive.
Today Module 2 of Fall in Love with Your Business Again goes live.
It covers the four growth levers that actually move the needle for your business.
Pricing and margins is one of them.
Owning a niche, differentiation, and recurring revenue are the others.
This isn’t “charge more” advice.
It’s understanding why your pricing is either funding your freedom or financing your burnout and what to do about it with the business you already have.
Pioneer pricing with a one time $97 payment for lifetime access to the program and all monthly meetings is closing soon on 30 April.
After that it’s $997 for the program and $197 monthly for the monthly group cohort access.
Click here to claim your Pioneer Lifetime Spot.
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P.S. Feeling trapped in your business? Turn it into an Asset you love to run – and that investors want to own.
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George Sotiropoulos uses the story of two competing digital agencies to illustrate how underpricing destroys margins, burns out teams, and traps owners in a cycle of overwork. This coincides with the launch of Module 2 of his programme End Burnout — Fall in Love with Your Business Again, which covers smart growth including pricing strategy, niche focus, differentiation, and recurring revenue for 7-figure SME owners.