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Photo by Angela Divine Knox
If you’ve been in business for longer than 0.2 seconds, it’s likely that you’ll know this moment well: Inquiries are slow to come in. Clients aren’t converting. The service may even come across as a little...murky.
Naturally, your brain offers up a question that feels like the next right step, “What if we just added more to the offering?”
More services. More deliverables. More options. More something.
Because more? It always equals more value.
Why is our immediate reaction to add, rather than subtract?
First, let’s get on the same page about what I mean by “adding more.” I’m not talking about legitimate business growth or evolving your offers in response to what your clients actually need (hello, see Service Delivery Model Series from the last few months). I’m talking about the reactive kind of addition. The kind that happens when something isn’t performing and the immediate response is to pile more onto it or into it before understanding why it isn’t working in the first place.
Because examples are helpful: I was on a call recently with a business owner who received some hard feedback about her main offering. The data was clear in that there was a perception problem, a clarity problem, and real questions about who the offering was actually for. Her immediate response was to add more to it and charge more for it. She hadn’t sat with the feedback yet. She hadn’t looked at what the data was actually telling her. But she was ready with a remedy before she’d finished understanding the problem.
I can already see where this is headed because we’re already in the middle of it. A few months from now, maybe a year, and we’re going to be right back in this position. Not even sure what she’s offering because ‘just add more’ has happened so many times that the original purpose, heart, and soul is completely lost.
Yes and, I understand the rationale. Stopping to diagnose feels slow. If your business needs revenue (like yesterday), the idea of pausing to revisit your positioning or examine your ideal client feels like the opposite of what the moment requires. So you add a service tier. You create a new offer. You bundle things and call it a refresh.
