“Expensive” is almost never about money

“I'm never coming back here,” the woman told me at the door, holding her grandson by the hand. The boy was about seven. He had spent all day begging her, she gave in, counted out some change and parked him in the main room of my gaming club, in front of the big TV.

An hour there cost ten hryvnias, the cheapest line on the price list. In the next chair over, two guys around twenty-five were playing soccer. One of them whiffed the ball and said out loud everything he thought about that ball, about his opponent and about his own life, without turning around and without lowering his voice.

She was right. And the ugly part is that the guys were right too. They came to shut their brains off for two hours, and around them swarmed schoolkids who were skipping class, scraping change out of their pockets, dropping in for seven minutes of game time and spending the whole time peering into other people's rooms and shouting advice about where to run. My club had rooms at twenty and rooms at fifty, with doors, and none of those three were sitting in them. What put them all in the same room was a line on the price list. Ten hryvnias called one crowd, fifty called another, and I set both numbers side by side and felt proud that I had something “for everyone.”

I've worked with experts for thirteen years now, and the whole time I hear the same line: “nobody buys because I'm too expensive.” Almost always that's false. “Too expensive” is what a person says when he hasn't understood what he's buying and is left with the only instrument he knows how to measure with. What follows is five questions I ask instead of defending my price, and the story of how I raised my average ticket without touching a single number on the list.

A hundred dollars and fifteen thousand, same questions

When I started consulting, people paid me a hundred dollars a session. Today people pay fifteen thousand dollars to work with me, and here's the part that still sobers me up: the level of the questions hasn't changed. A man who runs an esoteric school comes to me making over a million rubles a month, and he has no funnel, no metrics, and he doesn't track his ad spend. Instead of a beautiful ten-million scheme, I spend a week grinding him on one question: can you calculate your conversion to payment. Somebody once paid me a hundred dollars for exactly that conversation, and somebody else pays fifteen thousand.

Between those two numbers there isn't one new diploma and not one extra hour of work. What fits in there is what I call a shift in thinking: I stopped selling my time and started selling the thing people buy that time for. So price doesn't equal the volume of what I do. It isn't even calculated where we're used to calculating it.

Nobody buys the gears, they buy the time

A watchmaker lays out the contents of the case in front of the buyer: here's the balance wheel, here's the pallet fork, here's the mainspring, thirty-two jewels here, hand assembly here, four hundred hours went into this. All of it true, all of it costs money. Except the buyer came for something else. He wants to glance at his wrist and know what time it is, and he wants the people around him to see what's on that wrist. Listing gears and telling time are different things, even when they ship in the same box.

Experts sell gears almost without exception: eight ninety-minute sessions, twelve modules, a proprietary method, ten years of practice, supervision, checklists, chat support. Everything named, everything counted, and the client honestly stares at that list trying to work out whether eight ninety-minute sessions is expensive. He can't answer, because he doesn't know what one session costs, doesn't know how many he needs, and has never bought one in his life.

He has no ruler. And when there's no ruler, the only measuring instrument a person has left is the price. He measures with price because you gave him nothing else.

It's a missing ruler, not missing money

Think about the last time you bought a car. You've got thirty thousand, you show up, here's one for twenty-nine, base trim. The salesman says add two and it isn't base anymore. Fine. And for thirty-five there's this one with dual-zone climate control. So you stretched and drove off in a more expensive car than the one you came for, and you drove off happy. Nobody talked you into anything. Somebody handed you a ruler and you measured.

I demo this in rooms with a product nobody has a price for in their head. A flip chart. I ask what a flip chart costs, and the numbers I get back differ by several times, because a person buys one once in a lifetime. Then we break it down. There's an ad: flip chart, ninety-nine hryvnias (the Ukrainian currency). You call, the rep picks up, and instead of taking the order he asks: tell me, are you going to use it once or all the time? I ask because this one is made of Chinese aluminum, it works fine, but you have to transport it carefully, and if it's all the time, I'd take this German one, four hundred fifty.

Fine, let's do that. Tell me, is it going in an office or are you hauling it to offsites? Offsites, then you need the folding one, it lies flat in a trunk. And will you be carrying it yourself or your assistant? Then better the aluminum one on wheels, so it's light, fifteen hundred.

The man came for ninety-nine hryvnias and left with a fifteen-hundred flip chart. Nobody said a word to him about quality and nobody once said “this costs more because.” He got four questions, and each one handed him a new mark on a ruler he didn't have before the call. Now picture the rep quietly selling him the ninety-nine one. The flip chart folds up in the middle of his talk at a conference, and the man is not going to write the word “flip chart” online. He'll write the company name and add that their stuff is garbage, run. He will never think “I'm an idiot, I bought the cheapest one.”

Price also quietly changes the result itself. In a 2005 study in the Journal of Marketing Research, people were given the same energy drink promising alertness and a clear head. Some bought it at full price, others at a discount. Then everyone got puzzles, and the ones who paid less solved fewer of them. The drink was identical, only the amount paid differed, and the person had no idea. Your client doesn't know that a cheap price will spoil his result. He just gets a worse result.

“That's just pushing product”

This is where people push back, and push back hard: Igor, that's manipulation, I'm a helping practitioner, not a vacuum salesman. Then look at what you just called pushing product. You called it a conversation after which a person knows more about the product than he did before, and chooses differently because of it. Actually pushing product looks like the exact opposite: quietly take the money for something that falls apart on the way home, and say nothing because it's awkward.

The second objection is more honest and I hear it more often: my audience just doesn't have money. Let me tell you how that looks from the inside. I had a place with an average ticket around a hundred hryvnias, and there was a customer who'd pull up in an expensive car, spend real money, and then ask for a discount every single time. It got to me. Twenty hryvnias, what's twenty hryvnias, he won't even notice them.

One day I finally heard what he was actually asking. He was asking: what's the biggest discount you've got? He didn't need the twenty hryvnias. He needed the card. He needed the card to be his specifically, the table to be held for him, and for it to be visible at the door that he isn't some random guy here. I was selling him coffee and he was buying status, and the only way he had to ask about status came out as a request for a discount.

Ever since, I hear “too expensive” about the way a doctor hears a complaint about fatigue: one word, several causes underneath it. Across my rooms and teardowns the split comes out consistent, though this is my field observation and not a study. The people who genuinely choose on price and will fight you over ten rubles are about a tenth, they're just the loudest, so it feels like they're the majority. About half buy on price versus quality, and those are the ones who need a ruler. Then there are the ones on fire: the granddaughter's birthday is today, the bike is needed today, and it doesn't matter whether it has gnomes or butterflies on it. And there are the ones who default to the most expensive thing because it's simpler and clearer that way. If your list has one product at one price, you're talking to a quarter of the market and sincerely believing everyone else is broke.

There's also the reverse case, and I'll flag it honestly. My partner Sasha Turubarov has an exact name for it: pants for sparrows, a thing built flawlessly that no living creature needs. If there's no pain, no ruler will save you, and price isn't even the conversation here. Pain first, price second.

The discount, meanwhile, hits you harder than you think. Do the math: you bought at seventy, you sell at a hundred, margin thirty. You knock ten off. The client barely noticed and you lost a third of your profit. The consulting firm Simon-Kucher surveyed more than two thousand executives worldwide for its Global Pricing Study 2025 and got this result: on average, companies capture less than half of the price increase they announced themselves. What blocks them is their own sales team, where nobody can clearly explain to a client what the new number is for.

Mistake, lesson, mistake, lesson

Mistake one. Pricing off your cost base and your own expenses. Your expenses set your floor, the level you can't work below, and they have nothing to do with the client's decision. The client compares your price with what another year of the way things are now will cost him, and your costs don't enter that comparison at all.

Lesson one. Before you argue about price, count the cost of doing nothing out loud, and use his numbers, not yours. For a man who's been unable to hire an assistant for three years, that number is always bigger than your fee, and he has never once thought about it.

Mistake two. Hiding the price until the last minute, so they fall in love first and hear the number after. Gong went through eleven thousand three hundred thirty-one deals and published the data: where price came up on the first call, deals closed forty-two percent of the time, and where price never came up at all, five. I'll say honestly that part of that gap runs the other direction, because deals that were dying anyway never got to the money conversation. But one simple point stands, and I see it in teardowns constantly.

Lesson two. The client reads your silence about price as your own lack of confidence in it. He feels it before you work up the nerve to say the number.

Mistake three. Answering “too expensive” with a justification: I put ten years into this, I have a supervisor, there are a hundred hours of work in here. Every one of those lines puts another gear on the table. The client didn't know how to measure, and you handed him more parts of the mechanism.

Lesson three. You answer “too expensive” with a question. An argument takes away the person's right to decide and puts him on the defensive, and a question hands the ruler back and leaves the decision with him.

Raising your price isn't editing a number on the list

On the second of May, 2014, in Odessa, what happened happened. One of my places stood on Derybasivska Street, dead center, and at the end of May I got a report where for the first time in three years we didn't even break even. People stopped coming downtown. Smashed windows, chairs thrown around, fear, and against that backdrop revenue that didn't cover rent and payroll.

I hadn't set foot in that business for four months, and I called a meeting for Tuesday. I didn't sit through why it turned out this way, it was all clear without explanations. I asked for numbers: how many visits, what conversion to payment, average ticket, how long a person stays, what he buys besides game time. It took them a week to pull together. I come in, I look, and I see a number I still remember: average visit length, one hour and nine minutes. And I bill by the hour.

The price list never got touched. What I needed was to turn those nine minutes into twenty. I ran an offer that was almost embarrassingly simple: buy an hour, get thirty minutes free, buy two hours, get an hour. I set the minimum at an hour and a half and handed the job to the manager.

A week later I come back and nothing has changed. I ask how many people used the offer, and they tell me: Igor, everybody loves the offer, people are thrilled. I say, print it out. They print it: five people used it all week. So I told the manager that next week I'd send in five secret guests, and if even one of them didn't hear about the offer, he'd be fired. The offer started working the next day.

For a week the right decision lay there dead, because the person who opens his mouth in front of the client said nothing about it. Your price lives in your employee's mouth and in your own mouth, and the price list and the landing page only record what's already been said there. Until it lives there, you can rewrite the numbers all you want and the client will still get the old one.

Hence the rule I give everyone. Raise the price as long as total profit for the period keeps growing. Not the average ticket, not unit margin, total profit. The moment it turns down, traffic dropped harder than the number rose, so you step back one notch, and that's your optimum. I recommend a noticeable step, around thirty percent. At places people walk into on their way somewhere out of habit, traffic usually doesn't move at all at that step.

Put this to work: five questions instead of a defense

When a person says “too expensive,” you have about a minute not to start defending yourself. Here's what I do instead.

1. “Expensive compared to what?” Four words I've heard on almost none of my teardowns. Nine times out of ten it turns out they're comparing it to something built differently: a one-off consultation, a recorded course, a nine-hundred-ruble subscription. You find out what ruler the person is measuring with, and then you talk about the ruler.

2. “Do you need this once, or are you going to use it going forward?” The flip chart question. A one-time job and an ongoing job get solved by different products, and that should be audible in your price list.

3. “What happens if you don't solve this for another six months?” This is where the cost of inaction shows up. Don't push, let the person do the math himself. He'll do it more accurately than you, because he knows his own numbers.

4. “Who else is part of this decision?” Sometimes “too expensive” means “I need to talk to my husband,” sometimes it means “I need my partner not to write this off as a whim.” That conversation isn't about your price, and you won't be the one having it, so give the person something to walk in with.

5. “What would have to be in this work for price to stop being a question?” The person will dictate your own offer back to you in their own words. Write it down verbatim, then build a sales page out of those phrasings, and it'll work better than the one you have now.

A word about the price list itself. My club had the best room in the whole place: the biggest TV, the best air conditioning, and it sat empty. It was called the kids room. Grown men refused to walk into it. I renamed it the soft room without changing a single thing inside, and it became the best seller. Check three things on your own list: does the product name make it clear who it's for, is there an offer for the people on fire who'll pay for speed, and do you have something noticeably more expensive than your main product, because a quarter of the market picks the top line without reading it.

From here it runs into a question that sits deeper than any price list: why you don't charge for what comes easy to you. And into the one next to it, about growth: a million doesn't come from ten times a hundred thousand, because a new number demands a different action and not double the old one.

What I did with the cheap hour

I raised the price and took the cheap line off the list. I didn't hang a “please keep it down” sign, I didn't put someone on floor patrol, I just removed the number that brought me people who were going to have a bad time in my place anyway. It felt like a betrayal: there'd be fewer clients, the room would empty out. Since then I've watched it play out many times, in my own places and on teardowns. When you choose who you're for, you get all of those people, and there are a lot of them.

The schoolkids didn't stop existing. They went where they were welcome, and they were right to. And the woman with her grandson never came back, and that's the one line in this article I can't close nicely. I don't know where she took him. All I know is what got paid for those ten hryvnias, and it wasn't her who paid, it was me.

Your client who says “too expensive” is actually saying: I don't understand what I'm buying, and I'm afraid of getting it wrong. When you drop the price, you confirm that being afraid was the right call.