What should you give your clients for free?

Great photo by George Dolgikh

You’re in business to make money. These days, that sounds like a dirty little secret, but all businesses exist to make money. To reward the owners. The shareholders. To turn a profit. 
 
Therefore, you charge your clients for everything you do. 
 
Or do you? 
 
Or should you? 
 
In this article, we’ll dive into the reasons you should, or shouldn’t, provide some hard, payable work for free. It’s based on lots of experience, with lots of clients—and often, their clients. 
 
The cold-reality ROI argument
 
You’ve surely heard of a “loss leader.” Something that gets a prospect in the door for a super-attractive price. “Super-attractive,” as in “untenable.” Hence the “loss” you take on it. 
 
Ever played a scratch-off Monopoly game at McDonald’s and won a free order of French fries? C’mon. You think McDonald’s will lose money on that one? Remember: You can’t claim that prize on that visit. You have to come back.
 
So would you ever, honestly, make a trip to McDonald’s, and only order French fries? Even if they’re free? Of course you wouldn’t. Neither would anyone else. 
 
Hence the “cold, hard ROI” argument for freebies. Which goes something like this: 
 
Sure, you can give away something for free—just so long as you’re virtually assured that you’ll end up making way more than the value of what you gave away, from that same client or customer.
 
Ooof. How cold. How… Darwinian. 
 
It’s the little things
 
First off, know that we here at Copel Communications toss out freebies to our clients from time to time. Typically, they’re what we’d consider “too small to charge for.” We recently did a little quick-turn project for a client that, while admittedly urgent, simply wasn’t a huge amount of work for us. 
 
So what were we going to do at the end of the month? Line-item it for, say, 50 bucks? 
 
Naah. We refuse to nickel-and-dime like that. 
 
Still, we did list it on that month’s invoice. But the price? “N/C.” 
 
Surprise and delight
 
Sometimes, tossing out the freebie is just the right thing to do—especially if you’ve got a longstanding relationship with a client and the right project comes along and you can afford to do it. 
 
Ever give your dog a treat not because he chased a squirrel away from your bird feeder, but rather "just because”? This is like that. 
 
True story: We have a client that competes in an incredibly high-tech field. In fact, among our tech-savvy clients, this is one of the savviest, to the point where it’s always challenging to write for them—to assume that mantle of brilliance. It’s difficult and daunting. 
 
Yet we must be doing something right, because this client keeps turning to us with projects for years and years. 
 
One day, however, the owner of this business hit us with an unusual request. Turns out he was running for town council in the area where he lived, and wanted our help with some of his campaign materials. 
 
Man oh man. We knew this would be a freebie the instant we saw it. 
 
He sent us some fliers. And posters. And emails. And what-not. Asking us to clean them up, and bill him for whatever it required. 
 
Now we know this guy and you don’t. Trust us: He’s a great person. Any town council would be blessed to have him aboard. 
 
We were flattered, and honored, to work on this stuff. Sure, we had other paying gigs on the calendar, but were happy to carve out time for him. And when we turned to it, we hit it out of the park. 
 
Our client was delighted! He was so grateful—perhaps especially because this assignment fell outside of his usual high-tech comfort zone. “Send us your invoice,” he said. 
 
And so we sent it. With every single item line-itemed. We showed the “rack rate” for each thing—what it would cost in the real world—and even added up the total cost. 
 
And then, below that, we subtracted the entire total cost, with the note: “Courtesy discount." 
 
Amount due? Zero. 
 
If you think this client was delighted by the work we did, you can only imagine how surprised and happy he was to find out he was getting it for free. 
 
And we felt great. It still feels good, simply re-telling this story. 
 
Happy ending?
 
So, this client immediately came back and rewarded us with zillions of dollars’ worth of fresh, new work. Right? 
 
Wrong. In fact, it was months before he needed our services again. 
 
Are we bitter? Not at all! This is the antithesis of the “cold-reality ROI” argument. We’d call it the “spark of humanity” argument. A little Christmas, when it isn’t Christmas. 
 
Businesses exist to turn a profit. But they’re also run by people who live lives. Sometimes you simply need to connect at that very basic level. 
 
Have thoughts on this issue or a story to share? Contact us. We’d love to hear it. 

---