The road to ruin often looks quite safe. No one will fault you for taking it. As they say, “The road to Hell is paved with good intentions.”
I know this from personal experience. As I mentioned a few newsletters ago, on 18 November, 2025, I was within 24 hours of ending the self-employment that has sustained me for over 20 years.
One of the concepts that brought me to that disastrous point was the idea that if you lower your prices, you’ll raise your conversion rate.
One is not crazy to believe this idea. There is a ton of evidence surrounding us all day long to back up this idea. It is even a key part of mainstream economic theory.
Even laundry detergent at the grocery store tends to follow this rule. If the grocery store wants to move more laundry detergent, it discounts the price of the laundry detergent. And when it discounts the price of the laundry detergent, it sells more units of laundry detergent.
It’s a tried and true method. It’s one of the conventional wisdom cornerstones of economics.
You would never take this route and have people call you crazy, irrational. No one is going to say “you’re wrong.”
But sometimes, that’s exactly what it is: Wrong.
Take me, for example. In the years leading up to 18 November, 2025, I found the hard way that lowering my prices does not raise my conversion rate at all. And so when I, for example, cut my prices in half, I saw no increase in the conversion rate, which means that I needed to get twice as many clients as I did before.
A few years before, when I began heading down this road, no one would have faulted me. I was just executing a conventional piece of economic wisdom we all see in play every day. And yet it nearly ruined me.
You might ask, and rightly so, what any of this has to do with your presentations. And it’s this:
There will often be some aspect of your presentation, whether it’s one of the graphics you use, or even the words you say in the speech, that you are tempted to remove. In some way it seems “un-presentation-like,” out of the norm. And so your safety instinct tells you to get rid of it, to round the edges.
But before you get rid of it, consider keeping it in. It is often those outliers that need expression the most, and it is highly likely that your audience will respect you more for the saying of it.
(and yes, those of you who are wondering if the subject line of this email is a reference to The Ramones album of 1978, you are correct)
