Two things we just changed.

“I’ve never worked harder than I am in 2025” one CEO told me recently. 

And I gotta say… I agree.

I feel like I’ve been vacuumed back into every tiny detail lately to try to solve some major financial pressures.

• Increasing costs on literally every single thing we buy.
• Increasing cost of doing business thanks to the government
• Not to mention the increased cost of living which means employees need higher salaries.

But the problem is, it also feels like the worst time to pass on increases to customers. 

Some are super sensitive to it and instantly drop you (or drop a nice 1-star review on you…)

When it goes badly you feel like a big A-hole for adding more pressure to their world.

So recently we started looking at other ways to add revenue instead of direct price increases. 

Here are two things that worked that you might want to do too:

1. Credit Card Fees

Since COVID, cash is pretty much non-existent. 

Everyone seems to be paying on cards, even for business expenses. 

The thing is, every bank charges their own fees which are somewhere between 0.5% and 4%.

And we’ve been absorbing it for years!

Partly because I hated the idea of adding ‘fees and charges’ onto a transaction. It felt cheap.

But these days, we have to look under every rock to find the tiny gold. 

So we decided to start passing on the credit card processing fee to the customer at the point of sale.

The result?

We added over $50,000 to our net profit. 

But the best bit?

Not a single person said anything!

Mostly because the rest of the world is already doing it so it’s now common practice. 

Then after the excitement wore off I thought - ‘damn I wish I did this sooner…’

The next one is about looking at your business through a different lens.

2. Shake It Up.

When you have regular customers visiting your shop, or your website, they can move on autopilot.

They miss subtle value adds if it doesn’t gently slap them in the face.

We learned this when sales were flat-lining at one of our shops.

We decided to flip the layout of our main service counter to reposition some of our best items directly in front of people as they entered.

The next day we saw an instant increase in revenue after changing nothing else!

We simply put pastry products front and centre and pushed the POS units to the side which created a wall of delicious food you can’t miss as you approach the door.

It was like putting a golden halo floating over our products and topping it off with a rainbow leading them to the place they could swipe their card.

A truly awesome result.

How you might apply it:

Website: Put your best offers in a carousel at the top of your landing page or make people land directly inside the shop to minimise steps for them to spend money.

Office Reception: Make people wait in an environment where they can buy things or learn about more of your products and services.

Retail: Bundle things that go well together to help customers not think as much. 

Hospitality: Put rotating impulse buy food products right at the point of sale (not 1 metre away in a cabinet)

You literally have to slap them in the face with it so DON'T BE SUBTLE OR CUTE.

Here are some stats to back up why it’s important:

• 8 out of 10 impulse buys are made at brick-and-mortar stores.
• Single shoppers make more impulse buys than customers in groups.
• The average shopper will make 3 unplanned purchases 40% of the time they visit a store.

Pro Tip:

1. A great exercise we've done is to get the team out and about visiting other stores.
2. Individually critique the experience and then return to evaluate your own.
3. Get the group to think about every detail from the customer's perspective.

That’s it.

I hope it helps.