"Friend & Family" Discounts Are a Terrible Idea

In this episode of The Energy Xchange, we're breaking down why friend and family discounts are a really terrible idea.

We're diving into:

• The critical difference between gifting your work and discounting your work 
• The dynamic of increased expectations despite a lower price
• The subtle identity shift that happens when you become the "favor" friend 
• The groups of people this pattern hits the hardest
• How I lost friendships when I stopped doing marketing favors 
• Three practical alternatives that let you still show up for people without undermining your business or your boundaries

If you've ever adjusted your pricing to avoid an uncomfortable conversation, offered a deal no one requested, or quietly resented a project you volunteered to undercharge for, this episode will help you see where the pattern starts and give you real ways to handle it differently.

The Energy Xchange is a podcast for highly sensitive people (HSPs), empaths, INFJS, and deep feelers navigating relationships, business, and personal growth.

Links & Resources For This Episode:

• Subscribe to my Weekly Newsletter
• Visit My Website
• Get the Book: The Empath Detox
• The Empath Detox Oracle Deck

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:03

Welcome to the Energy Exchange, a podcast for deep feelers and quiet leaders. Here, we explore what happens when we start working with our natural energy in both our business and personal lives. I'm Colleen Wallach. I'm a highly sensitive professional who spent years untangling patterns of overthinking, people pleasing, and playing small just to feel safe. Now, I help others like me step more fully into their power without losing the superpower of their softness. We don't have to be allowed to be seen, and we don't have to push to be powerful. Everything is energy. Let's start this exchange. Welcome into this week's episode of the Energy Exchange. Today's episode is a little bit of a spicy take, depending on who you ask, but it's something I've experienced personally and something I see come up all the time with my clients. I want to talk about friend and family discounts and why they are a really terrible idea. And not from a place of being stingy or not wanting to help people, it's actually the opposite. It's because of how quickly these situations can get really complicated, especially if you're someone who already leans towards overgiving, people pleasing, not demanding reciprocity, or just genuinely caring a lot about the people in your world. So we're gonna unpack why this happens, where it tends to go sideways, and what you can do instead that feels a lot cleaner for both you and your relationships. Before we break this down, I do want to ground this in where I'm coming from. As with all of my episode topics, I'm speaking from the lens of a highly sensitive person and someone who felt really stifled by that in my earlier years, and certainly in the first decade, probably longer, of my professional career. I don't want to just bring awareness to these topics. I think you know that these are happening for you. I want to create understanding not only of what the thing is, but how we got here, and then share some ways to address it that I have found helpful that make sense for me as a highly sensitive person. I'm personally always looking for solutions where everyone wins, where I can honor myself and still maintain great connections and relationships with the people in my world. That's the lens I'm speaking from always. So take what resonates and leave the rest. Okay, let's dive in. This isn't a conversation about being generous or not generous. It's important to remember that there's a big difference between gifting your work and discounting your work. If you want to do something for someone complimentary, go for it. If you have time in your schedule, it's not going to impede progress on other clients or projects. Maybe this person has supported you in other ways, and that would mean there's some reciprocity, right? That's not what we're talking about here. We need to understand the difference between gifting and discounting. If there's any piece of you that's going to feel put out or resentful for doing the thing, or you know their personality and you know they're going to be calling you at night about something you're doing for free, then we need to trust ourselves to know whether this is a good idea or not. Gifting something should feel very clean. It's intentional, it's something you're choosing to do with no expectations in return, right? There's no strings. There should not be any layers of resentment here. Discounting, on the other hand, often comes with unspoken expectations or maybe a little bit of internal conflict. You're gonna feel that, and it will in some way impact either the quality of your work or the dynamic of the relationship. That's almost a certainty. Gifting is expansive, it feels good. Discounting will drain you in some way. I don't like the idea of friend and family discounts for anyone, but I do think this hits certain types of people harder. First up, if you have any history of people pleasing, just even a hint of it, this dynamic will feel almost automatic. Saying yes feels easier than navigating the discomfort of saying no. People pleasing really is just conflict avoidance in disguise, right? And I've justified this so many times in my life, telling myself, oh, I have extra time, or this won't take very long because I do this all day, it's so easy for me. But those small yeses will add up quickly. Another group that gets hit hard by this is anyone dealing with imposter syndrome. You might feel on some subconscious level, even, like you shouldn't be charging your full price. Like it's too much, anyways. So if there's any piece of that in your head, you might be discounting your services before anyone ever asks you to do so. And then the third group is anyone that's dealing with some scarcity. Maybe you're trying to pay your bills, you lost a big client, something's going on, and you just need work. If you're feeling that kind of tension right now, you might take on things that you would have no problem saying no to under normal circumstances. And if you have all of these things going on at the same time, holy shit, right? That's a really hard place to make clear decisions from. All of these patterns reinforce that same outcome of overriding our own needs to maintain a sense of safety, approval, or control. And here's why it gets so complicated. Number one, expectations won't necessarily shrink just because the price does. In fact, they often expand because the relationship is more casual. You have more skin in the game, right? And because it is personal, it becomes harder to say no without feeling like you're letting down someone you care about. I know myself, even if they're not asking for more, I'll find myself really open to discussing their project outside of my traditional work time. It's not uncommon for me to give marketing advice when we're out casually meeting for drinks. This conversation is bigger than what people in your world might be asking for. You know yourself, you know how you're gonna show up. And I know that I'm probably gonna way over give for this group of people. So the idea of discounting my services or time gets really complicated. All of this to say that it's very easy for boundaries to get blurred, and you might not even realize it or have a problem with it until all of a sudden you do. There are ways this is going to cost you beyond just money. Especially for my fellow highly, deeply feeling people, you're no longer just doing your job. You're managing emotions, expectations, relationship dynamics. There's a lot more folded into this than just the work itself. So when you're giving that discount to someone you love, you are telling yourself that your work is worth less when it's for people who matter the most. Like the math is not mathing here. And over time, that can create resentment, which is the exact opposite of what you were trying to create with your super helpful, generous, discounted service. Not to mention that in undercharging the people closest to you, you're modeling that your expertise is negotiable based on emotional proximity. And it's going to be harder to enforce boundaries around your timelines, revision, scope, all the things. And the worst part of it is that if something does go sideways, it doesn't stay contained to the project. They're not in this neat little client bucket anymore. It spills into the relationship, and now you're carrying both of those things. And I want to key in on a subtle identity shift that can happen here because I dealt with this a lot, especially in my 20s, my early 30s. I've been in marketing since before all of these AI tools existed. It was something everyone needed help with. You start a business, you have a fundraiser, you need a logo, website, all the things. And I became that friend who could help. I was that default favor person. And I was a big-time people pleaser back then. I also had a full-time job. I wasn't working for myself yet. So it was easy to take side gig money versus what I would actually charge a client now while I'm building a business. And what happened for me in that space is that I unintentionally trained people that my work was flexible and negotiable. And that's a very hard thing to undo, which I discovered when I did start my own business. I actually lost a few friends when I stopped doing favors. And I don't know if that was the full reason or if I just wasn't communicating well enough or having clear conversations, but that was my perception. I stopped doing those things and suddenly I wasn't on their friendship radar anymore. So let's talk about ways around this. How can we still be helpful while honoring ourselves, our time, and our energy? I'm gonna give some specific examples based on my business in marketing and branding to make this more practical, but hopefully we can find some threads that apply to your own work. Okay, I'm gonna give the hard line options first. First up, we don't have discounts. This is my rate. This is what I do. I would be so honored to help you. Period. Easier said than done, but you can have that hard line. And to be very fair, a lot of times we get in our own heads and we assume that people need a discount or that we should give them a deal because they're close to us. And we discount ourselves before they even have a chance to just say yes. So let's be conscious of that. We could also draw a hard line that we don't mix personal and business. I don't know that this fully works for this audience here. I struggle with it too. My friends' businesses, those are the ones I automatically feel invested in and I want to help. For me, I have marketing collaborators that I can refer people to. And that allows me to still be involved without being the primary point person or responsible for pricing and all of that. I do work with the digital marketing agency on the East Coast. So I can bring someone into the fold, stay somewhat involved and be that liaison without having to manage the full client relationship. If you're a hairstylist, your cousin wants a full color transformation on a Saturday, your busiest day, maybe you connect them with someone in your salon that you trust instead of squeezing them in and having any sort of resentment for that. If you want to maintain that line, having someone you can refer people to is very helpful. So we're not just leaving them hanging with no solution. Now, if we do want to accommodate a special budget need, we can, but it's a two-way street. If I'm flexing on price, something else has to flex too. Maybe that's timeline. Maybe it's the number of revisions, but we're not doing full service work at a fraction of the price and pretending that that is sustainable. If you're a photographer, maybe the shoot still happens, but the turnaround of edited photos is six weeks instead of two because your higher paying clients take priority. If you're a baker, I don't know, the cake gets made, but you're choosing from my existing designs, we're not doing five rounds of custom mock-ups. If you're a contractor, I'm fitting you in between my scheduled jobs. So we're on my timeline, not yours. There's gonna be some give and take there. And if that doesn't feel right, there are ways we can still be helpful without giving away the whole house. So, an example in my world in marketing, maybe instead of full website copywriting and full personal branding, I might offer a marketing audit, which I actually do have as a service, which is priced in a very accessible way, and give someone a great starting point. So they're gonna get top priorities, actionable recommendations, many of which they can implement themselves. So again, I'm not leaving them hanging. I'm giving them valuable information, the same insight I would give any client, and a roadmap to move forward. That for me would feel like a really great energy exchange. Some other examples for other industries. If you are a fitness trainer, maybe instead of discounting a full 12-week program, you offer a single session where you build them a plan that they can follow on their own. If you're a web developer, maybe you set them up on a template and walk them through how to customize it rather than building a fully custom site at half your rate. The thread running through all of these is the same. We're not saying no, we're not being unhelpful, we're just finding the version of our help that doesn't quietly cost us our energy, our boundaries, or the relationship. As I wrap this up, I do want to be very clear. I don't want to put us in a victim mindset here. I don't think everyone in our world is asking for these things. A lot of times when we're in people-pleasing or imposter syndrome mode, we're the ones offering it up front. And we need to be aware that we're doing that. I don't think everyone is trying to take advantage of you. This can go both ways. But your business is not the place to manage other people's financial comfort. Charging full price is not selfish. It's what allows us to be able to continue doing this work at all. It's one of the most respectful things you can do for yourself. It says, I trust this relationship to survive me honoring my own value. Your friends and family should want to support your business, not negotiate it. And if someone gets upset with you for setting that kind of a boundary, do they really fit into that friend category? They should want to see you succeed just like you want that for them. And if they're not open to a way where both of you can win, that is something worth paying attention to. All right, I'm gonna leave it there. If this episode spoke to you, a quick review would mean the world to me. It helps more like minded souls find this space. You can also connect with me on Instagram at the.energy.exchange. Thanks for being here, guys. I will chat with you next week.