Case Study 37.1: The Raise That Cost Nine Enquiries
📜 Tier 3 — Illustrative. Oyelaran "Oye" Bassey, his business, and every figure here are constructed. The pattern and the arithmetic transfer; the numbers are the author's.
The position, year five
Oye Bassey had run a wedding planning business for four full seasons and had never raised his prices.
Not deliberately. He had set them in year one against what the market seemed to bear, and the number had simply stayed.
💰 Run the Numbers: year five, before
Full planning × 5 @ $5,400 | **$27,000** Partial × 4 @ $3,200 | **$12,800** Coordination × 4 @ $2,000 | **$8,000** REVENUE $47,800 Fixed costs −$16,200 Event-specific costs — assistants, travel, processing −$7,900 PROFIT $23,700 Weddings 13 Saturdays consumed 13 of 17 sellable Hours worked 2,140 Effective rate on all hours $11.07 of profit He was busy, well regarded, and earning less than the assistant he hired for the day.
The three numbers that made him move
🚨 1. The Saturday number
Required revenue for a $52,000 take-home: roughly $75,300.
Seventeen sellable Saturdays. Minimum viable fee: $4,429.
Four of his thirteen weddings cleared it. The four coordinations at $2,000 were $2,429 each below it — $9,716 of Saturdays given away, in one season, from one tier.
🚨 2. The true hourly cost of one event
He closed out a single full planning at $5,400.
Fee $5,400 Assistant, travel, processing, materials −$780 Net $4,620 Hours, tracked from first enquiry 171 TRUE HOURLY $27.02 He had believed it was about $45.
🚨 3. The nine-hour consultation
He tracked a month and found that his enquiry process — two meetings, a venue visit, a proposal, and two follow-ups — took nine hours.
Twenty-nine enquiries. Thirteen bookings.
Sixteen no's × 9 hours = 144 hours. Three and a half weeks of unpaid work, in a year, on people who hired somebody else.
What he did
⚡ Four changes, announced to nobody
1. Coordination discontinued on Saturdays Offered on Fridays and Sundays at $2,400, and he expected to sell none. He sold two 2. Full planning $5,400 → $8,200 +52% 3. Partial $3,200 → $5,100 +59% 4. A $175 paid consultation, credited against the fee The change he was most afraid of He computed his loss tolerance before he did any of it.
Average rise across the mix ~54% Loss tolerance — 1 − 1 ÷ 1.54 35.1% Clients he could lose from 13 and hold revenue 4.6
What happened
💰 Run the Numbers: year six
Year 5 Year 6 Enquiries 29 20 Paid consultations taken — 13 Bookings 13 9 Weddings: full / partial / coordination 5 / 4 / 4 5 / 2 / 2 Revenue $47,800** | **$56,000 Fixed costs −16,200 −16,900 Event costs −7,900 −5,400 PROFIT $23,700** | **$33,700 Hours worked 2,140 1,610 Profit per hour $11.07** | **$20.93 Saturdays consumed 13 7 of 17 Nine enquiries lost. Four bookings lost. $10,000 more profit and 530 fewer hours.
And six Saturdays back.
🎤 From the Field
Oye, afterwards:
"The nine enquiries I lost were the nine I would have lost anyway, six months later, after a proposal and two meetings."
"The consultation fee did that. It moved the no from month two to week one."
"And the six free Saturdays are the thing I did not expect and cannot really quantify. I went to two weddings as a guest. I had not done that in five years."
The part that did not work
🚨 The Friday and Sunday coordination
He offered it at $2,400 expecting to sell none and sold two — which he reported as a success.
It was not, quite.
A Friday coordination has all the same problems: fourteen hours of client overhead, a rehearsal, a run sheet, a set of vendors, and a full day on site. It clears the Saturday test only because it does not consume a Saturday — and that is a real argument, and it is not the whole argument.
At $2,400 for roughly 67 hours including overhead, the effective rate is $35.82 — above his old blended rate and below his new one.
The honest reading: the Friday tier is defensible, it is not good, and he kept it because saying no to two people was harder than the arithmetic said it should be.
Discussion Questions
DQ1. Oye had not raised prices in four years, not deliberately. How does that happen to a competent person?
Consider
**Because a price is set once and then becomes a fact about the world rather than a decision.** **Three mechanisms.** **Nothing forces the question** — there is no annual moment at which a solo planner's fee comes up for review, unlike a salary. **Every individual enquiry argues against raising it**, because the person in front of you has a budget and you want the work. **And the feedback is silent**: nobody tells you your price is too low, and the clients who would have paid more simply pay less. **And there is a fourth that is about identity.** **Oye set his price in year one, when he was worth roughly that.** **Four years of improvement produced no signal, because the number was in a document he had stopped looking at.** **Which is §37.9a's argument: a rate is a fact about a moment**, and the practical fix is trivial — **review it annually, in the same month, whether or not you change it.**DQ2. The consultation fee "moved the no from month two to week one." What is that worth, and what does it cost?
Consider
**Worth: 144 hours a year, which at his new effective rate is roughly $2,800 of capacity** — and more importantly, **three and a half weeks of a year returned.** **And the mechanism is exactly as he describes it.** The nine lost enquiries were not lost sales; **they were people who were never going to book and who, unpriced, would have consumed nine hours each before saying so.** **What it costs is what Case Study 36.1's DQ3 said and it should be repeated: a fee is a barrier, and barriers are not neutral.** **It will deter some people who would have booked and could have afforded it**, and it will deter them unevenly — **disproportionately those with less money and those less confident about whether they are the right kind of client.** **Crediting it against the fee softens that and does not remove it.** **The honest position: it is a good change with a real cost, and a planner should be able to say what the cost is.**DQ3. Year six has four fewer bookings and $10,000 more profit. Why is this so hard to do?
Consider
**Because every part of it feels like decline while it is happening.** **Twenty enquiries instead of twenty-nine looks like a marketing problem.** **Nine bookings instead of thirteen looks like losing.** **Six empty Saturdays in a diary that used to be full is, emotionally, unemployment** — and it arrives months before the profit figure does. **And the feedback is badly timed.** **The nine lost enquiries are visible in February. The $10,000 is visible the following January.** **Which is why the loss-tolerance arithmetic matters more than it looks.** **Oye computed 35.1% before he changed anything** — so when he lost 31% of his enquiries, **he had a number that told him it was working rather than a feeling that told him it was not.** **That is the actual function of §37.8's table: not to justify the rise, but to survive the six months in the middle.**DQ4. He kept the Friday tier and the case study says it was not quite a success. Was keeping it wrong?
Consider
**Not wrong, and not for the reason he gave — which is the interesting part.** **The arithmetic is genuinely favourable: $35.82 an hour on a day that was not for sale anyway.** **A Friday that would otherwise have been empty producing $2,400 is straightforwardly good.** **What the case study flags is the reasoning rather than the outcome.** **He kept it because saying no to two people was hard**, and then found a justification. **The justification happens to be correct**, which is luck. **And the risk is what it becomes.** **Two Friday coordinations at $2,400 is a nice supplement. Six of them is a second low-margin tier that has re-created the problem he just solved** — with the same per-client overhead, on days he might have wanted for rest, at a rate below his own target. **The discipline §37.9a implies: a tier that exists because it was hard to refuse needs a cap, in writing, and a review date.** **Two a year is a decision. Six is a drift.**DQ5. "The six free Saturdays are the thing I did not expect and cannot really quantify." Should a business decision rest on something unquantifiable?