Price Wars: Opting In vs. Opting Out

My good friends and fellow standard holders, Menotti’s Coffee Stop, have been open everyday since the day they opened more than three years ago. Not a single day of closure including Thanksgiving, Christmas, birthdays, death days, and even construction days seems like an arduous streak to maintain. Surely, it’s more difficult than not being open everyday (at least by volume), but considering that they already decided before day one the nature of their business to be this way, it’s not much of a burden at all. It’s business as usual. Closing would mean opting out of a decided plan. Conceptually, the idea of closing would be extra mental work.

While the last thing I intend to do is remove any shine from Menotti’s excellent practices, I think we can learn something from our award winning coffee making friends. In fact, we can apply these lessons to any desirable outcome. In this example, the desired result is 365 days per year of being open for business. Deciding that the business, as a rule, will be open every day sets in motion the slight challenge of staffing and committing to maintain such an agreement. To falter would take a specific action to opt out of the regularly scheduled program, per se. Opting out takes energy and can be a helpful barrier to getting off track.

Opting in works the same way. It takes energy. What if the business didn’t commit to being perpetually open for business, as a rule, through all holidays and odd scheduling shake-ups. You could argue that the business would have to continually opt in to being open on days that business is understandably closed, like Christmas for example. I can just imagine the owners and managers sitting around a monthly meeting toiling over, “Should we try to staff up and be open Christmas, Louis?”

“Ah, hell.. let’s give it a go..”

After all, that’s how this blog works. People ask, “how do you guys write a blog every single day?” Well, it’s easy. We have no other option. We’d have to opt out of our regularly scheduled practice in order to break the streak. I can tell you with confidence that if our norms suggested that blogs were post when good ideas worth sharing came about, there would be zero chance there would be a blog everyday.

The cost of opting in and the cost of opting out is significant. Use this cost to your advantage. We try to aid in this notion by selling only contextualized memberships based on a certain number of specific training days and times per week. It pays, then, to view these classes as appointments that you must opt out of and to do nothing extra would mean showing up as you always do. Not coming to class would be changing your schedule, not the other way around.

The idea of waking up and opting in to coming in to train is a horrible strategy that is fueled by the least reliable energy source known to man; motivation. This will, at best, offer modest results in compliance.

 

Logan Gelbrich

@functionalcoach