Leaving money on the table

It’s a perfect place for luxury condos — but that doesn’t mean that they have to be built. (Image by Peter H)

I recently had the misfortune of making a purchase from Ticketmaster.

I really enjoyed the show that I went to, which was an incredibly well done Beatles tribute, organized by a friend of mine, that has become a Portland tradition over the past twenty years.

But before I went to the show, I had to fight through the maze of attempts from Ticketmaster to get me to spend more money.

I was invited to insure my purchase in case anything happened in the 24 hours before the show.

I was invited to subscribe to streaming services and, in a twentieth century throwback, print magazines.

I must have clicked “no” at least five times before they finally ran out of things to peddle.

It was a frustrating experience. It made me feel disrespected and degraded in a way that I have gotten far too used to at the hands of major corporations.

These marketers understand human psychology. They know how to get someone to click. And they use that knowledge to manipulate or even deceive someone into making purchases they hadn’t been intending to make when they woke up that morning. It’s sad and dispiriting — the opposite of hearing a beloved song or seeing a breathtaking mountain range.

In my life, I don’t want to make people feel that way. And even though I run a business, I don’t have to. There are a lot of things I won’t do to bring in dollars. I’m okay with leaving money on the table so that I can uphold my own values.

I have had to work to calibrate that slider. I started out being hesitant to charge a rate that would actually yield a profit for my hard work. It’s been a slow process to correct that.

Therefore, I don’t trust my own cringe factor when it comes to sales and marketing. Some of the tactics that make me uncomfortable are perfectly innocuous practices that I just have to get used to.

And now, I have found myself in the role of supporting other business owners as they navigate this landscape themselves. I’m not just looking out for my own values — I’m helping them to embody theirs. And with that comes that challenge of contextualizing the dozens or even hundreds of voices they’ve heard in the marketing space, explaining to them and often modeling for them exactly how they should exploit the emotions of their fellow human beings for profit.

They don’t like it. They want to know that they can do it another way. And they can. The icky ways work, but you don’t have to do them. You don’t have to get on a sales call and “handle objections.” You don’t have to pretend the thing you’re selling is worth five times what you’re actually selling it for.

If you don’t do these things, there may theoretically be financial repercussions. But there are financial repercussions to all kinds of things we don’t do, from starting an OnlyFans page to charging a nightly fee for houseguests. We make these kinds of choices all the time.

The challenge, when it comes to business, is that we do want to make a profit. Profit isn’t bad in itself. But we get to decide exactly how we will make this profit, and that part is tricky. We might choose to say no to something lucrative because it feels dirty. It might work really well for us — and yet, we still say no.

It’s not my place to tell you what is right for you. I’ll tell you that there’s nothing wrong with getting paid for what you do and create, and there’s also nothing wrong with choosing to keep it simple and skip certain steps even if they could generate revenue for you.

Contrary to popular belief, it’s okay to leave money on the table. I believe there will still be enough.