21 April 2026
When discounting quietly erases a year
Nobody schedules a meeting called ‘let us give away June’. They schedule a meeting called ‘we need this job’. The five percent lives in the corridor between those two sentences.
A discount is a decision about mix. It changes which hours of the week are funded. If the sales desk can grant it without a named approver, you do not have a pricing policy. You have a weather system.
The arithmetic nobody recites
On a job sitting at 28 percent contribution, a five-point cut is not a gesture. It is a large share of the room you had to pay rent. Volume rarely arrives on cue to replace it. Volume that does arrive often needs more labour, which was the scarce thing.
The Pricing Integrity Clinic spends an indecent amount of time on a single paragraph: list price, floor, and who may cross the floor. The paragraph is boring. The year after it exists is less surprising.
Loyalty discounts are still discounts
Long relationships deserve memory, not automatic erosion. If a customer has earned a different price, write the reason and a review date. Eternal ‘mates rates’ are how a book of work becomes a museum of unpriced favours.
We are not anti-discount. We are anti-amnesia. If you can show the exception on a one-page log, you are still running a company. If the exception is tribal knowledge, the year is already negotiating without you.