Never Negotiate Your Price

By OSJJ

Open Source Jiu-Jitsu

Never Negotiate Your Price

Every deal I ever cut, I regretted. The person who talks you down is telling you exactly who they are before they have paid you a dollar. Here is why holding your price is the most profitable thing you will do.

Justin Hall / Co-Founder, Open Source Jiu-Jitsu

Every deal I cut, I regretted

I will start with the confession, because I have made this mistake myself, more than once. Someone would come in interested, we would get to the price, and they would push. Just a little off. A better rate than the one on the board. And out of some quiet fear that I would lose them if I said no, I would bend. Sometimes it was a family trying to get below the family discount I already offered. Sometimes it was a member on their way out, dangling their stay in exchange for a lower rate.

Every single time, I regretted it. Not sometimes. Every time. I have never once cut a deal out of fear and looked back on it as the right call. And after enough of those, I noticed the pattern was not random. The people I gave deals to behaved differently than the people who paid the posted price, and they behaved differently in ways that cost me.

The person who negotiates is telling you who they are

Here is what took me years to see. When someone tries to talk down your price before they have even started, they are not just asking for a discount. They are showing you how they will treat your business for as long as they are part of it.

They do not respect the business the way the members who paid full rate do. They have told you, on day one, that your price is a suggestion and their comfort is the real number. And that mindset does not switch off once they sign. The person who negotiated their way in is the person who later negotiates the late fee, the missed-class credit, the hold they did not request in time, the promotion they think they are owed. They are, in my direct experience, the least loyal members you will have and the most likely to leave, because they were never buying what you built. They were buying a bargain, and the moment a bigger bargain appears down the road, they are gone.

So the fear has it exactly backwards. You think you are about to lose a good customer by holding your price. You are actually screening out a bad one, for free, before they have cost you anything. The negotiation is not a problem to solve. It is information, handed to you at no charge, about who this person is going to be.

The discount does not just cost you that deal

If the only damage were the dollars off that one membership, this would be a small issue. It is not, because the discount reaches past that single deal and does something to the business itself.

It reprices you, in your own mind and in theirs. The moment you agree that your price is negotiable, your price is no longer your price. It is an opening bid. You have told this person, and told yourself, that the number on the board is soft, and a number that is soft cannot command respect or premium positioning. You spent years and real money building something worth a real price, and a single concession at the counter quietly reclassifies it as a flea-market table where the sticker is just where the haggling starts.

It is also unfair to everyone who paid full rate, which is most of your academy and your best members. The loyal family who paid what you asked without a word is now, unknowingly, paying more than the person who complained the loudest. And here is the part owners underestimate: it does not stay secret. An academy is a tight community. People talk in the lobby, in the parking lot, in the group chat you are not in. Prices come up. The member who negotiated is often the one who brags about it, because to them the deal was a win worth mentioning. So assume that every discount you hand out privately will eventually be public, and picture that moment honestly. Your most loyal member finds out the person next to them, who trains less, complains more, and committed later, is paying twenty or thirty dollars a month less for the exact same thing. What does that do. It does not make them ask for the same deal, though some will. It does something worse and quieter. It tells them that loyalty and paying in good faith were the sucker's move here, that the people who get rewarded at this academy are the ones who push, and it chips a small crack in the trust that kept them paying full rate without resentment in the first place. You have taught your best people that the way to be valued here is to complain, and you built that lesson yourself, one quiet exception at a time.

This is the downward spiral. Each deal makes the next one easier to justify and harder to refuse, your posted price means less every time you undercut it, and the members you attract are increasingly the ones shopping for the lowest number rather than the best academy. Hold the line once and it holds itself. Break it once and it keeps breaking.

The line, and the two things it is not

Never negotiating does not mean never discounting, and it does not mean turning to stone at the counter. There is a clean line here, and it rests entirely on one question: who set the terms.

The first two are principled and they are strong. A policy discount is fair because it is public and it applies to anyone who meets it. A scholarship is powerful precisely because you chose it, on your terms, for a reason that matters to you, and I do not even call it a discount, because it is not one. It is a gift the academy decides to give from a position of strength. Both of those come from you. The negotiated deal is the only one that comes from them, conceded out of fear, and that is the one, and the only one, you never do.

What to actually say

Once you decide this, the hard part is not believing it. It is holding it calmly in the moment when a real person is standing in front of you asking. So have your words ready before you need them, and keep them warm and simple.

When someone asks for a better price, the answer is short and it is kind. Sorry, we do not offer discounts beyond the ones in our policy, and then you name them: law enforcement, first responders, multiple family members. You are not defensive and you are not apologetic about the business. You are simply stating that the price is the price, the same way every serious business states it.

If they push past that, I have one question that ends it almost every time, and it ends it by making the ask sound out loud the way it actually is. I ask them, calmly: when you went grocery shopping last, did you ask to speak to the manager to see if you could get a discount? That is the whole thing. Because they did not, and they would never think to, and the question quietly puts your academy in the category it belongs to, a real business with a real price, rather than a yard sale. Most people get it right then, and a good number of them respect you more for it, because people trust a business that believes in its own price.

One honest word about that question, and about the sharper versions of it. Once you have done this long enough that losing the sale genuinely does not scare you anymore, you can start to have a little fun with it. I have looked someone dead in the eye and asked whether we were in a bazaar in southeast Asia, because if not, I was not sure why they were haggling with me. It lands, and people usually laugh and sign. But I could only say that once I had gotten used to shutting the bargaining down calmly, hundreds of times, and the fear was completely gone. Do not reach for the joke until you are there. In the mouth of an owner who is still nervous about losing the customer, the same line comes out defensive instead of easy, and it blows up the interaction rather than ending it. Start with the calm grocery question. Earn your way to the bazaar.

The bottom line

The fear driving every discount is that you will lose the customer if you do not bend. Turn that fear around and look at it honestly. The customer you keep by bending is the least loyal, least respectful, most likely to leave member you will sign, and the price of keeping them is the respect of everyone who paid you what you asked.

Set your policy discounts and publish them. Grant a scholarship when you choose to, on your terms, because you want to. And beyond that, never negotiate, not out of anger, but out of the settled understanding that your price is the price. Hold it once and it holds itself, and the members you attract will be the ones who came for the academy instead of the bargain. Those are the ones who stay.

Open Source Jiu-Jitsu

Open Minds. Open Mats. Open Source.

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