Combine Your Services Without a Discount

Imagine a travel adviser named Oriana Avery who meets Mrs. Penhaligon about two weeks in Italy in June. Mrs. Penhaligon and her husband are taking their three grown children to mark their 30th anniversary. Oriana does three kinds of work for a trip like this. She plans the trip, she books the dinners, and she answers the phone while the family is away.

That evening, Oriana writes the proposal between two calls. “My planning fee is $4,500,” she writes. “Booking your dinners is $800, and a phone line that answers while you travel is $1,200. If you take all three, it’s $5,500, a saving of $1,000.”

Mrs. Penhaligon replies the next morning. “We can find our own restaurants,” she writes. “Could we do the planning and the phone line, with the same saving?” Oriana does not want to lose the trip, so she agrees to $4,700.

In Florence, on the night of the anniversary, the family cannot get a table anywhere they want. Mrs. Penhaligon calls the phone line and asks Oriana to find one. Oriana spends the evening on it, which is the work Mrs. Penhaligon took out of the price.

Suppose instead that Oriana offers the three as one job. “For the five of you in Italy, I plan the whole trip, book every dinner, and answer the phone while you are away,” she writes. “The fee is $6,500.”

Mrs. Penhaligon asks whether they need someone to book the dinners. “In June, the tables you would want in Florence go weeks ahead,” Oriana writes. “The anniversary dinner is the one night I would not leave to chance.” Mrs. Penhaligon books the trip that afternoon.

Oriana offered the same work both times. In the first version, Mrs. Penhaligon saw three prices and a saving. So she did what a shopper does with a list. She took out the part she thought she could do herself, and she asked to keep the saving. In the second version, she saw one job, put together for her family, at one fee. Her question was about the work, and Oriana’s answer was about the anniversary.

So when you put several services together, choose the parts the client needs and offer them as one job at one fee. Leave the saving out. Here is why a saving cheapens each part, how to build the job, and what to offer a client who wants less.

An extra called free lowers what clients will pay for each part

In 2009, Michael Kamins, Valerie Folkes, and Alexander Fedorikhin reported a series of experiments in the Journal of Consumer Research. They studied products sold together at one price. When one product in the set was described as free, people would pay less for each product sold on its own. What people would pay for the whole set did not change.

Here is the course’s view of what that means for you. Calling a part free wins you nothing on the combination, because the client would pay the same for the set either way. It costs you later, when the client wants one of the parts on its own. A saving shown beside the parts works the same way, as a price cut on each of them.

A saving is also a discount, and a discount tells a client that your first price had room in it. Mrs. Penhaligon heard that, so she asked whether the saving could stay when one part came out.

A wedding photographer built one package from what every couple must have

Katelyn James is a wedding photographer who teaches other photographers. In a post on pricing, she describes how she has put her packages together for 10 years. She weighs three questions, and the first is what her client wants. The second is how to keep it simple, because “I want to educate them on what they need but also simplify the decisions they need to make!” The third is what the best experience needs. “What are the must-haves my package needs to include for my overall client’s experience with me?” she asks.

“It’s because of those three things that I have always ONLY offered ONE package!” she writes.

James starts from what each couple must have, and her package holds those parts. So build your combination the same way. Start from what the client needs for the work to come out right, and stop there.

A wedding photographer warns that a client who drops a $400 slideshow expects $400 off

Lara White is a wedding photographer who wrote for PhotoMint about charging one price or offering packages. A package, she explains, groups the coverage with popular products such as albums and engagement sessions. She names one drawback. You “may spend quite a bit of time negotiating back and forth with a client wanting to take this out, add that,” she writes.

Her example is a slideshow that takes the photographer two hours and appears on the separate price list at $400. “The client might want to remove that item and expects to receive $400 off the package price,” she writes. Her answer is to know what each part costs you, so you know your profit while you bargain.

She also describes how she fills the package she most wants to sell. It “includes lots of extra goodies,” she writes. They are “items which don’t cost me much, such as a print credit, DVD slideshow and extra coverage.” Loading a package with extras, she writes, “makes the price feel reasonable.”

Measured against this lesson, White’s warning holds, and her page shows where the trouble starts. The client in her example asks for $400 off because the slideshow has its own price on the list. Her own extras include a slideshow, the part that client takes out. So keep a part in your combination only when the client needs it. Then do not show its own price beside the fee.

A Waterloo florist set a minimum for whole weddings and made small orders a separate service

Haley Zaharia runs Charmed Flowers, a florist in Waterloo, Ontario. In 2022, she wrote on her blog about why wedding florists set a minimum spend. When she started, she had no minimum for brides. At that time, she writes, she had “lots of time to spend chatting, emailing, making changes,” even on a single $200 order. That “was not a sustainable way to do business.”

After a few years, she set a minimum of $1,000 for weddings. By the time her shop stopped doing full-service weddings, the minimum was $3,000. One of her reasons is that a small wedding takes the same work beforehand as a large one. Apart from “actually putting the designs together,” she writes, “the lead up work is exactly the same.”

Her shop no longer takes full-service weddings, and it now offers an à la carte service with no minimum. It uses mostly flowers the shop keeps in its cooler every week, and it “does not include a consult and only has a very small amount of customization.” Couples leave the choices to her shop. That, she writes, is how “we can offer you just a bouquet and boutonniere.”

The à la carte service is not the full service with the consult taken out and money off. It is a different service, built so that a small order pays. So when a client wants less than your combination, offer a smaller job designed on its own terms, with its own fee.

Why throwing in an extra for free goes wrong

Imagine a caterer named Cosima Wilde who quotes Mrs. Thistlewood $9,000 for a dinner for 40 in October. Cosima wants the quote to feel generous, and she is writing it between two tastings. So she adds a sentence at the bottom. “Late-night sandwiches at eleven, on the house.”

Mrs. Thistlewood books the dinner, and the guests finish every sandwich. In March, she asks Cosima to cater a party for 60, with the sandwiches again, and Cosima quotes them at $700. “They were free in October,” Mrs. Thistlewood writes back. She asks Cosima to leave them out, and she asks whether the rest of the quote has room in it too. Cosima takes $500 off the party to keep her.

Cosima’s sandwiches were worth $700. Her mistake was calling them free. In October, “on the house” told Mrs. Thistlewood what the sandwiches were worth, which was nothing. So in March, $700 sounded like a charge for something that used to come with the dinner.

The version that works decides first whether the sandwiches belong in the evening. Mrs. Thistlewood’s dinner runs past midnight, so they do. Cosima writes, “Dinner for 40, with sandwiches at eleven for the guests who stay late. The fee is $9,700.” In March, she quotes the party the same way, with the sandwiches inside the fee. Mrs. Thistlewood books it.

Leaving out the saving is not charging too much

Many professionals feel that a client who buys more should pay a little less. Hotels and phone companies take money off for buying more, so a combination with no saving can feel greedy.

In the Kamins experiments, though, calling a part free did not change what people would pay for the set. The free label bought nothing. In the second version, Mrs. Penhaligon did not ask for a saving, only what the dinners were for. A client buying a job planned as a whole weighs the job, not the parts one by one.

Your fee for the combination can still be lower than the parts would cost one at a time. Doing them together may save you a meeting or a trip. Then set the fee lower for that reason, and say it as one fee. The client does not need to see a saving to pay a fair price.

How to put your services together as one job

1. Write down what a client in one common situation needs for the work to come out right. Start from what they must have, as James does, not from what you could add. For example, a specialist realtor might write the pricing advice, the staging, the photos, and every showing.
2. Leave out any part that is there only to make the fee feel generous. The calls and emails along the way are a different matter. They belong inside your fee already, with no price of their own.
3. Set one fee for the whole job. Add up what each part takes from you, then round the total to a figure you meant. If doing the parts together saves you work, set the fee lower for that reason. Do not show the difference as a saving.
4. Say the job in one sentence, with what the client gets and the fee. Leave out “save,” “free,” “worth,” and any price for a single part. Call it by the work, not by shop words such as “package” or “bundle.” For example, a dog walker can say, “For Fennel and Clover, I walk them every weekday, feed them at noon, and take them to the vet when they need to go. It’s $1,400 a month.”
5. When a client asks to take a part out, say once what that part does for them. If they still want less, offer the smaller job you keep ready, with its own fee. For example, a music teacher can say, “The recital coaching is what gets her ready to play in front of people. Without it, weekly lessons are $320 a month.”
6. For a client who wants one small piece, build a simpler service with its own fee, as Zaharia did. Say what it leaves out. For example, an interior designer can write, “Two hours in one room, with a written list of what to change, is $650. There are no drawings, and I do not shop for you.”

Next: You will start a new module. It begins with why reliable service is only the minimum. The real test is whether a client tells someone about you.