July 12, 2026 · by David Gilbert · 3 min read · Business & Marketing
There is always, always someone cheaper. No matter how lean I run things, no matter how efficient I get, someone somewhere will quote a lower number for a website, a repair, or a marketing job. I spent a few frustrating years early on trying to win on price anyway, and it nearly wrecked the business before I figured out it was the wrong fight entirely.
The Race to the Bottom Has No Bottom
Every time I dropped my price to match a competitor, two things happened: my margins got thinner, and I attracted exactly the kind of client who'd happily leave the moment someone else undercut me again. I wasn't building loyalty. I was training my own customer base to shop purely on price, which meant I'd built a business with no actual stability in it at all — just a constant, exhausting race against whoever was willing to charge the least that month.
What I Compete on Now
Reliability, mostly. If I say a job will be done Thursday, it's done Thursday, and that sounds like a low bar until you've been burned by enough tradespeople and contractors who treat deadlines as loose suggestions. Honesty about what something actually needs, even when the honest answer costs me a sale — telling someone their old laptop genuinely isn't worth repairing, or that the flashy website feature they want won't actually help their business, costs me money in the short term and earns trust that pays off for years.
And breadth, which is a slightly unusual one to compete on, but it genuinely matters here in a smaller community. Being the person who can sort the website, advise on the cyber security side, and fix the laptop the website's being built on, means clients don't need three different relationships with three different providers who don't talk to each other.
The Conversation I Have Instead
When someone tells me they've got a cheaper quote elsewhere, I don't try to match it. I ask what's included in that price, genuinely and without snark, because often it's a narrower scope, no support afterwards, or corners being cut somewhere that won't show up until later. Sometimes the cheaper option really is the better fit for that specific person's situation, and I'll say so honestly. Often, once we actually compare what's included, it isn't.
Why This Took Me Embarrassingly Long to Learn
I think I assumed, for longer than I'd like to admit, that price was the main thing customers cared about, because it's the easiest thing to compare and the easiest thing to talk about. But the clients who've stayed with me for years — and a fair few have — didn't stay because I was the cheapest option available to them. They stayed because they trusted the work, trusted the honesty, and didn't want the hassle of finding and vetting someone new.
The Risk of Saying This Out Loud
I'm aware that publishing "I don't try to be the cheapest" is an unusual thing for a small business to say in public. But I'd rather attract the clients who value reliability and honesty over rock-bottom pricing, and lose the ones who don't, than keep chasing a race that has no actual finish line. It's a slower way to grow a business. It's also, twenty-five-odd years in, the only way I've found that actually holds up long-term.