Peaceful Profits Podcast Ep. 51 - Why I Don't Do Black Friday Sales
Synopsis:
In this episode, Mike Shreeve tackles a common question: Why doesn’t Peaceful Profits run Black Friday sales?
His answer reveals much more than a seasonal decision—it’s a deep dive into how opportunity cost, brand perception, and long-term thinking shape strategic business growth.
Mike compares flash sale profits to the enduring value of evergreen acquisition funnels, explains how discount-driven marketing can damage team morale and customer perception, and urges listeners to rethink short-term revenue wins in favor of long-lasting assets.
This is a masterclass in intentional entrepreneurship for anyone tired of chasing fleeting wins and ready to build a business that compounds over time.
Transcript:
Why I Don't Do Black Friday Sales
[00:00:00] Hello, my dear friends. Hope you're doing well. Mike Shreeve here. Thank you very much for listening to today's episode. It's gonna be an interesting one. We're going to be addressing a question that we get quite often around this time of year, which is, why don't you do Black Friday sales? Now, I'm gonna address that specific question, but I want you to know and understand that I'll be doing so in order to teach and share a broader lesson.
So the fundamental component of this lesson is this. [00:00:30] Everything has a cost. Everything has a cost. Whether that cost is an investment of time. Whether that cost is an investment of team resources or team availability, whether that investment is a cost of actual, like a financial cost, whether it's a cost in lifestyle, whether it's a cost in your ability to do the things that you want to do, et cetera.
Everything has a cost [00:01:00] and unfortunately in marketing, people very rarely. Either talk about it or even actively seek out trying to understand what that cost is. And so what you get is. And you're going to see this through Black Friday is you're gonna see a significant number of companies hammering your inbox with Black Friday sales.
And there will be some of you who think, oh, I wish I had done that. Or they [00:01:30] must be doing it because they know what they're doing, or they must be doing it because it's so profitable, et cetera, et cetera. But no one ever stops to ask. What is it actually costing these companies and these business owners to run this specific sale?
The other day I saw someone post a, a sort of a brag post about how they had made something like $150,000 in a Black Friday weekend, and I thought to myself, oh my goodness. It [00:02:00] costs much more than that in the help industry to run a Black Friday sale. And again, cost is not. Regulated only to financial costs, and I'm gonna walk you through what the costs of a Black Friday sale are and.
In us understanding what those costs are. That's why we don't do Black Friday sales. But again, what I want to teach you is the way of thinking rather than necessarily the specifics. Okay? So let's go ahead and go through that. Now, the first reason [00:02:30] that we don't do Black Friday sales is because what it costs us in relative prioritization.
Now, what the heck does that mean? There is a long list of things. That this company Peaceful Profits can do to generate revenue. The thing we like doing the most is called creating an acquisition funnel. So it's a book or a low ticket funnel, using that to offset ad spend, building up a [00:03:00] big old email list of people from the email list.
We then are able to book calls for our backend services, which are very expensive, and that's how we run our business. Now what we like most about acquisition funnels is that they are what's called evergreen, which means you build it once and then you turn it on, and then you can just manage it for years to come, and it will continue to bring in new customers every [00:03:30] single day.
Those customers then turning into backend sales. Now, that's one of the ways that we make money. It's a way that we really like it. The reason I tell you that is because when we talk about prioritization in our company, we have to take into account that we have limited resources in terms of team, in terms of time, and in terms of ability to focus.
So when we're looking at something like an evergreen. Campaign like [00:04:00] acquisitions and comparing it to a Black Friday sale. It turns out that what it takes to run a successful Black Friday sale is nearly exactly what it takes to launch a brand new evergreen campaign. So what does that mean if you are going to run.
A Black Friday sale. What do you need? You need a sales page of some kind. You need to put the offer together, even if it's just a recycle of a past offer. [00:04:30] You need to make it a really big, compelling thing that people will very quickly click the buy button on, because that's the whole purpose of Black Friday sales, their impulse purchases, and then you need some emails that you need then send out to the email list and et cetera, et cetera.
So basically you need a really strong offer that needs to be built and compiled. Then you need a bunch of. Copy to sell that thing. Guess what? That's what it takes to create an evergreen acquisitions funnel. So for [00:05:00] us, if I'm looking at what do I want to spend financial team focused time resources on Black Friday sales don't make any sense.
When we have the ability to take that same exact time, energy, effort, and resources, the same things that we would be doing to put a Black Friday sale up, we can just go build an acquisition funnel. And like that guy who was bragging about making $150,000 in that post [00:05:30] from a Black Friday sale last year, and how excited he was to do it.
Again, I'm thinking to myself if an acquisition funnel of mine. Only made $150,000. I'd consider that a massive failure. Most of our acquisition funnels bring in more than a hundred thousand dollars a month in revenue, and it's evergreen. So when I'm running an analysis between what is the return on a Black Friday sale versus the return of an acquisition funnel, you're talking about a one time $150,000 event [00:06:00] verse a hundred thousand dollars a month asset that will last for years.
And so this is, again, this is the reason I'm sharing this stuff with you is because I want you to think this way in your business to sit down and say, okay, so then what would it actually cost to run a Black Friday sale in my business? So in Peaceful profits, it would cost me about a million dollars.
Just measuring the first year of ROI, [00:06:30] so is $150,000. In a good weekend, black Friday sale worth saying no to or deprioritizing a potential $1.2 million acquisition funnel. And the answer is for us, no. Why would we do that when we could build something that brings in another million dollars over the next 12 months?
It doesn't make any sense. And look, I'm not a hater of Black Friday sales, don't [00:07:00] get me wrong. Just for us in our company, it doesn't actually make any sense whatsoever when we look at it accurately. And that's what I'm trying to impress upon you today is the ability to accurately look at the opportunity cost, if you're familiar with that term of doing things in your business.
Another reason I don't particularly care for Black Friday sales is this idea of loss leader marketing [00:07:30] to a group of customers you already have. So again, in my business. How, because we use acquisition funnels, our email list is made up of customers. So we've already done the work of taking an offer at low price out into the market and running it to acquire customers at breakeven or better, right?
So we've already have, discounted books and discounted low ticket. Funnels and all that kind of stuff. [00:08:00] So we're already done, we've already done that work. It doesn't then make sense to do what's called loss leader marketing, which is what fire sales and Black Friday sales are all about, where they massively discount and offer with the hopes.
With the hopes that if you buy this offer, you'll upgrade to something else later on. That doesn't make any sense when we've already done that work and in a much more controlled way where we [00:08:30] actually can measure. What the through rate is from customer to backend sale by using acquisition funnels it doesn't make any sense for us to then do that again.
We've already done that with those evergreen funnels. So one of the, what you might call tactical advantages of a Black Friday sale or a fire sale no longer makes any sense. We don't need to have another loss leader event in our company. Because we already [00:09:00] have those working every single day, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 running and well managed by our team.
And again, like I said, each one averages about a hundred thousand dollars a month minimum in total revenue, backend included. So again, it's one of those things where sometimes in business we do things because we think we should do them without realizing that we might have already done that. And if we're just doing the same thing, again, we're unnecessarily stacking work [00:09:30] effort, et cetera, and we're not gonna actually get the results that we're looking for because the result we're looking for has more to do with now doing the next step.
So if you already have a loss leader event in your company. So again, like I said, we have our acquisition funnels. If you already have a loss leader event in your company, you don't stack another loss leader event. You stack a conversion event, you stack a nurturing event, you stack a loyalty creation event, et cetera.
Another reason that we don't really engage with Black Friday sales [00:10:00] in this particular company is because we are in the help industry. You might be in the help industry as well if you're a freelancer, consultant, coach, agency owner, someone who sells time, ideas, services, et cetera. One of the worst things you can do in the help industry is to discount your time or discount the time of your team.
And the reason for that is it there's a couple reasons. One is oftentimes the [00:10:30] discount breaks into margins, and we could have a whole discussion, how about how price is power and you need margins to be able to afford the help and et cetera. Watch any of the podcasts that we've ever done, and you'll see that this is a really core component to the way that I run business.
There's no point in putting financial duress. On team members or systems. It just doesn't make any sense. Not in the help, not in the help business where service and how you deliver to people is so [00:11:00] important. But the other element here is that it begins to. Negatively affect the thinking of both, either yourself, your team, or your customers in a way that becomes addicting.
Let me see if I can explain this really quick. I can't tell you how many teams I've been a part of, right? In my, I've been doing this now since 2007, was a part of a lot of different teams. I would see a company run a discount. And they would love [00:11:30] it because when you discount something like most Black Friday sales, it becomes very easy to sell.
Of course, it's easier to sell something for very little than it is to sell it for it's appropriate price. Of course, it doesn't take a rocket scientist and you're not very good if all you ever do is. Discount things and pat yourself on the back. That's not an indication of your ability to sell or your ability to perform.
But it is quite [00:12:00] addicting because it's a rush. Oftentimes the process of putting these together is it's a lot of fun. Hey, let's hurry put it together, and then you get a bunch of money and everyone's high fiving each other and it's really fun. And then again, I've been a part of many teams where this happens, then they say, Hey, let's do it again.
We need another 20, 30, 40, 50, a hundred thousand dollars. Let's do it again. And they do it again. And then they make a bunch of money, maybe not as much as the last time, and they wait around for a couple weeks and then they do it again. And they wait around for a couple and they do it [00:12:30] again. And. What ends up happening is that each event earns less money than before, so you get a decline in performance as you run discount after discount.
You find that the team involved. In this launch to launch lifestyle begins to burn out quite quickly, and if you're the only person doing it, then you are gonna burn out even more quickly because [00:13:00] trying to do, a big well run discount launch, black Friday, flash sale, whatever it takes some work, it takes some effort, but then you begin to train your audience to expect that.
Discount. And so what often happens is you have these companies and these teams with really great products that have actually created a micro environment that is driving their own price downwards as they have to [00:13:30] compete against their own promotions oceans. So in the environment they've created, which is this audience of people.
Whether it's on social or email or whatever, there is a buying environment that you create as a marketer, business owner, et cetera. That buying environment dictates how people perceive you and the brand. If you begin to become addicted to [00:14:00] discounts, one of the byproducts will be a drop in perception of your brand quality.
So for us as a team here at Peaceful Profits, if we go all the way back to the beginning and I say, look, the reason I don't do Black Friday sales is because the time, energy, and effort it would take to make a decent Black Friday sale, I can just go make something that brings us in a hundred thousand dollars a month anyways, called an acquisition funnel.
So we know [00:14:30] that already. But then to add on top of that, the context of if we start to go down the path of Black Friday discount, flash sale, discount type of marketing, we're going to start ruining the perception of our brand. This is what I was trying to mention at the beginning of this audio, which is you have to understand the total cost.
Of the promotion, the [00:15:00] campaign, the decision, the offer, the things you do in business, you have to fully understand the total cost. So for us to do a Black Friday sale is not just the cost of not building another acquisition funnel. It's not just that million dollar cost. It's not just the cost of the actual team that would then be, putting the offer together and et cetera, et cetera.
But then you have the additional cost of a decrease in brand perception, [00:15:30] which could also be worth, if not millions, hundreds of thousands of dollars. When you begin to start adding all these things up, for us it's incredibly clear that a Black Friday sale doesn't make any sense whatsoever. It makes no sense in 10 different ways of looking at it.
Whether you're gonna do a Black Friday [00:16:00] sale or not, it might be right for you right now. Maybe you don't know how to do an acquisition funnel, so you don't have that alternative. Maybe the brand you have right now is the cheap brand, so it makes sense that running Black Friday sales would actually reinforce the brand that you have.
It's not about you copying exactly what I do. What the conclusions I have drawn for my business might not be correct for you. What I do hope you do though is [00:16:30] think things through to the extent that we've demonstrated here, whether it's Black Friday sales, whether it's something else, because the reality as a business owner is that you will net the quality of the decisions you have made.
You will net the quality of the decisions that you have made If you constantly are chasing after easy money, which is what essentially a black Friday sale is quick, easy [00:17:00] jolt of cash. If that is the continual decision that you make, there is a net result that you will live because of that. Or if you do what we do and you have acquisition funnels and you stack acquisition funnels, so one feeds off the other, feeds off the other, you're constantly building evergreen promotions that will last you a very long time. Instead of just the constant hustle from one campaign to another campaign, from one promotion to another, from one [00:17:30] shiny object to another.
If you start making those types of decisions. There is a set of consequences that you will live because of those decisions. Does that make sense? So the point of this podcast has nothing to do with Black Friday sales. Instead, it has everything to do with your ability to make the decisions that actually lead you to the life you want as a business owner.
The financial [00:18:00] reality, the lifestyle reality, the impact reality, the day to day that you live is a net result. Of the choices and decisions that you make in your business. It's the great thing about being a business owner, and it's the terrible thing about being a business owner. It's great because it means quite sincerely and literally there is nothing that we have to do except perhaps pay taxes.
But there are things that we get to design. This is entirely your design. The [00:18:30] business you're living right now is the business that you created. You did that by the decisions that you are making, that you have made. Continue to make today. So if you want a different reality, you just have to start making different decisions.
I recommend personally that you start making more long-term decisions that all the time, effort, energy that you put into creating campaigns and promotions to bring people into your business that you start asking yourself, yeah, but is this gonna [00:19:00] last longer than a weekend? One of the things we didn't even talk about is that oftentimes people do a Black Friday sale, they make a bunch of cash in a weekend and then it's spent by the end of the next month, rather than, again, having spent that time building something that lasts, building something that's gonna bring them in income and money for months on end and et cetera.
And here's my shameless plug. This is what we do. There's a reason I'm so passionate about taking the long-term [00:19:30] view on things about doing trade-offs between short-term campaigns like Black Fridays and investing into long-term assets, acquisition funnels that will run for years. Not even weeks, not months, years.
Bringing in people month after month after month into your business. And if that is something that you would like help with, we absolutely can help you. We can do it for you, we can do it with you, we can teach you how to do it, et cetera. All you have to do [00:20:00] is go to peaceful profits.com/call against PeacefulProfits.com/call.
We'd love to be able to help you with that. But even if you don't work with us to do something like that, I hope that you take away from this podcast episode how important. Carefully thinking things through R before you just rush off to copycat something that you're seeing everybody else doing. [00:20:30] Just because everybody else is doing it doesn't mean it's a good idea.
The only thing it means when everybody else is doing it is that everybody else is doing it. That's all it means. Which, in other words, it doesn't mean anything. It doesn't mean anything meaningful. So take the time. It's always a good idea. Take a beat before you rush off into something. Ask yourself, what is the opportunity cost of pursuing this tactic or strategy or et cetera, and how does it measure up against all the other things I could [00:21:00] be doing?
Knowing that the decisions you make. Is the net outcome of what you will live tomorrow. Alright, my friends, that's it. I hope this has been helpful and we'll talk to you later. Bye.