You're the Expensive Option: How to Say So Online

# You're the Expensive Option: How to Say So Online

You send the quote. Nothing comes back. A fortnight later you drive past the job and it's been done by the lot down the road who came in at half your number, and you're replaying the whole conversation, wondering whether you should have shaved a few hundred off.

Then comes the advice everyone gives, usually over a pint. Don't mention price. Compete on quality. Let the work speak for itself.

It's well meant. It's also wrong.

The problem with staying quiet

The theory goes that price is the one topic guaranteed to lose you the sale, so the safest move is to say nothing and hope the customer works it out. Keep the feed full of finished jobs, keep the numbers off it entirely.

Except silence doesn't remove price from the decision. It just removes *you* from the conversation about it.

Someone comparing three quotes has three numbers and very little else. If two of those businesses have said nothing about why their work costs what it does, the customer has no choice but to fill in the blanks themselves — and the only story that makes sense with the information available is that the dearer ones are having a go. Being expensive isn't the thing that costs you the job. Being expensive and unexplained is.

There's a second cost too. When you never talk about money, every enquiry starts from scratch, and you spend your evenings writing detailed quotes for people who were never going to pay them. That's not a price problem, it's a filtering problem.

What actually works instead

The businesses who hold their prices without constantly justifying themselves tend to do one thing consistently: they make the invisible work visible, long before anyone asks for a quote.

Think about what a customer actually sees of a job. They see the finished kitchen, the cut lawn, the accounts filed. They don't see the two hours of prep, the dust sheeting, the trip back to the merchants because the delivered part was wrong, the fact that you cleaned up properly, the insurance, the qualification you renew every three years, the free callback you did in March because something wasn't sitting right.

None of that shows up in a photo of a finished job. All of it is in your price.

So post it. Not as a complaint — nobody warms to a business that sounds put-upon — but as a matter of fact. The floor protection going down before a single tool comes out. Why you use the fixings that cost four times as much. The bit of the process that takes longest and that nobody ever notices.

Say the number

This is the part people flinch at, but a price range on your profile does more work than almost anything else you'll post. Not because it wins anyone over, but because it saves everybody's time. Someone who was expecting £200 and sees "most jobs land between £600 and £1,200" quietly moves on, and you never spend an evening writing a quote they were always going to refuse.

The ones who stay have already made peace with the number before they message you. That's a completely different conversation to have.

If a range genuinely doesn't work for what you do, give the shape of it — what the smallest job you take on tends to cost, what a typical week's work comes to. Anything that lets someone place you before they pick up the phone.

Be honest about who you're not for

Telling people you're not the cheapest is not an apology. Done properly it's the most confident thing on your feed.

"We're not the cheapest option in town, and if price is the main thing, there are people who'll beat us. What we're good at is the jobs where getting it wrong is expensive." That sentence does more for you than a month of finished-project photos, because it tells the right customer they've found the right business — and it tells the wrong one to keep looking, which is a favour to both of you.

One caution on the obvious follow-up: don't post about the botched job you were called in to fix in any way that identifies who did it. It reads as bitter, and the customer can't tell whether you're the good guy or just the one with a grudge. Tell the story without the villain — what went wrong, why it's a common mistake, what it costs to put right.

Talk in time, not adjectives

"Premium." "High quality." "Attention to detail." Every business in your sector says these, including the ones charging half your rate, so they've stopped meaning anything at all.

Time means something. "This took three days rather than one because of how the joints are cut." "We allow an extra hour on every job for cleaning up." "That report takes about six hours to put together properly." Specific numbers are hard to fake and easy to picture, and they do the justifying for you without you sounding defensive.

The same goes for materials, guarantees, and what happens if something goes wrong a year later. Concrete beats flattering, every time.

None of this happens if you never post

The catch, of course, is that this only works as a drip — a bit of process here, a straight answer about money there, over months. One heartfelt post about pricing in the middle of an otherwise silent feed just looks like you've had a bad week.

That's the bit most owners can't sustain, which is roughly why Aunty Social exists: it learns how your business talks and keeps that steady flow going for £29 a month, so the case for your prices is being made quietly in the background while you're on the tools.

But the tool is secondary. The shift is deciding that your price isn't something to be got past at the end of a conversation. It's part of what you're offering, and it deserves the same airtime as the work itself.