One of my recent acquisitions is running about fifteen grand south of break-even. I'm okay with that for now. We're in cleanup mode, and it's okay to run at a loss when you can do something about it. A recent leadership meeting was us doing something about it, line by line. Costs we could cut without touching revenue, invoice timing, which leads were stalling and why. We had just spent ten minutes on the company card, where food and coffee were quietly running about $8,000 a year. Somewhere in the middle of all that, I asked a question I hadn't planned to ask.
Have we ever considered giving every customer a three-year warranty for free, and a ten-year warranty if they pay $99?
I did the math out loud. I think that's the easiest hundred-dollar add-on we would ever sell. A couple hundred takers a year is twenty grand, and that's straight to the bottom line.
The idea behind the question comes from Jack Butcher at Visualize Value. He calls it sell your sawdust, and he draws it as simply as it sounds. A sawmill sells lumber. That's the product, that's the business, that's what everyone in the building wakes up thinking about. And every day the floor fills up with sawdust, and every night somebody sweeps it out the back. The sawdust has buyers too. Somewhere in your process, the work you already do is producing something else a customer would pay for. In our meeting it came out as wood shavings. Same pile.
Once you see it, you see it everywhere. Take your car in for service and look around while you wait. There are hats and shirts and water bottles by the register, and a display of floor mats near the door, because that dealership decided a person standing in their building with a wallet is a chance to get paid twice. The grocery store has an entire building of food behind you, and there's still a cooler of cold drinks at the checkout, because the line is one more chance to collect. Nobody drove there for a floor mat. The floor mats sell anyway.
Jeremy Clarkson is running a version of this right now that sounds different but is just as applicable. The old Top Gear host owns a farm, and he actually works it. Then he convinced Prime to turn the working of it into a show. The farm is the root product. The show is the same farm, monetized a second way. The crops pay him once. The cameras watching him grow the crops pay him again.
Most small companies run the opposite way, and I include mine whenever I've gone too long without asking this question. One product, one price, one moment to get paid. We spend real money to get the lead, real effort to earn the trust, and then we take exactly one swing. I like to make money off of every single lead. I mean that literally. If they don't want the full project, could we sell them maintenance? Could we at least put them on a list to talk about maintenance later? Every lead except the spam ones should have something it can buy from you.
There's one worry worth taking seriously, and I said it in the same meeting. I don't want to lose a $10,000 project over a $99 idea. That's the real tension in this. Put the add-on in front of the main sale and you tax the yes you spent all that money earning. Ignore it entirely and you sweep real money off the floor every night.
So we didn't build a program. I asked for one test. Pick a customer, make the offer, see what happens. The first reply came back: 'Woah, that's a no brainer. Yes, let's do it!' So far, so good, and we're on our way to another twenty grand a year in revenue that was sitting on the floor the whole time.
Working Theory: Sell Your Wood Shavings
The goal, stated plainly: produce the most revenue per lead and per customer you already have.
Inventory the shavings. List what your process already produces that a customer might pay for. Protection like a warranty, maintenance after the project, priority scheduling, the literal leftover material. If it exists because you did the main job, it qualifies.
Price one at an impulse number. $99 works because nobody reopens a $10,000 decision over it. Then do the annual math out loud. Two hundred takers at $99 is twenty grand a year on work you were already doing.
Attach it after the yes. Never lose a $10,000 project over a $99 idea. The add-on shows up once the main sale is safe, at signing or on the invoice, never as a hurdle in front of it.
Give every lead something to buy. Make money off every single lead except the spam ones. If they won't buy the project, offer maintenance. If they won't buy maintenance, put them on the list for it. A no to the main product should never mean zero.
Validate before you build. Skip the program design. Pick one customer you're confident will say yes, make the offer this week, and watch what happens. One live reply will teach you more than a quarter of planning the tiers.
