36 The Financial Times Guide to Business Development
covering all furniture and carpets service;
preparation of all surfaces;
removal of all old wallpaper;
painting and wallpapering as agreed;
end of job cleaning service;
once a year ‘decorator touch-up’ service.
Decorators out there may throw up their arms in horror at all this, but actually
look carefully. Many of these items are the ‘norm’ for decorating and some of
the more creative elements are easy to provide as they are either free, or low-
cost extras that you can throw in. For example, it shouldn’t cost you anything
to create a booklet of ‘happy quotes’ from past customers; your trade suppliers
will give you interior design guides; and even the online design service is based
on using a free web application, which even I managed to use after a minute!
How many bullet points can you come up with relating to your business?
The more you can create, the more you can charge and the more desirable
you become.
Be inventive. Start out by thinking what would be powerful and helpful to
customers and clients.
5. Unbundle and charge things separately
Having just told you to bundle as many elements as possible into your
product and service, an alternative strategy to play with is the notion of
unbundling. Depending on your business and sector, you may nd this will
work better for you.
With unbundling, you simply work from a base price, still stacked with
‘weight blocks’, and sell additional items as optional paid-for extras. This
way you get the benet of potentially looking cheaper than competitors,
but making additional prots by selling highly protable ‘add ons’ later
when they are most likely to say ‘yes’. This strategy is worth considering in
high-volume, very price-sensitive areas.
A good example of this concept applies to the so-called ‘cheap ight air-
lines’. A ight that appears cheaper to begin with can be more costly by
the time you have paid for priority boarding, meals, luggage, seat choice,
drinks, headsets, fees etc.
Is this a strategy you can use ethically to leverage additional business?
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