🙃 The counterintuitive offer that boosted my client’s business

Not all offers need to drive profit in order for them to be profitable.

One of my client's most profitable offers is something that makes a loss. Doesn't seem to make sense, right? Let me explain.

My client Jen helps female BIPOC PhD students to complete their PhD dissertations. Jen is excellent at what she does, and retention is high. However, there is a natural break in the process mid-way through the time she works with the client that we cannot directly affect. Unfortunately, this meant that she lost a lot of clients at this mid-point break - not because they were unhappy, but because the pause in momentum meant they never picked things back up with her. Life got in the way.

What could we do about it?

She had tried retaining the clients in normal ways - emails, reminders to restart, incentives, all sorts. It didn’t work. People still “churned”. So we did something very different: Instead of trying to bring the client back, we made sure we never lost them in the first place. Sounds simple, but the way we did it was interesting.

We knew from feedback and experience that the customers would not keep paying for the standard offers - they just didn’t need the same kind of support in that natural break period and our customers were price-sensitive. We needed to build a custom offer to bridge the gap.

There was a problem though: it would cost us too much to provide the support needed to bridge the gap.

At this point, most business owners and most coaches would reject the idea. The offer would have been discarded as unprofitable. But that would have been a mistake.

While the offer wouldn’t make a profit itself, when we zoomed out we could see that the offer would help us to retain clients that otherwise leave. The lifetime value of retaining those clients would far outweigh the short-term cost of a loss leading bridge offer.

Even though the bridge offer itself makes a loss, overall it is a highly profitable offer. The bridge offer I worked with Jen to introduce has meant that customers now keep working with her throughout the whole process and they happily pay full prices for the second stage. The bridge offer has helped her business become more profitable and revenue to become more stable and predictable.

This is the kind of counterintuitive move that is difficult to see when you’re too close to the problem. Get an experienced external pair of eyes on your business, it makes a difference.

Before vs after bridge offers diagram

I shared this in my Work Smart Wednesday newsletter. Want the full set of related insights? You can read them here: https://worksmartwednesday.substack.com/p/work-smart-wednesday-may-7-2025

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