Should you retire an offer? Here’s when it’s a smart move—and when it isn’t

It's so tempting to keep creating more offers. But sometimes, when you want to grow, you need to take a step back to move forward and create space for something new (even if you don't know what that new thing is yet). In today's episode, I'm sharing the questions you can ask yourself to help you decide if you should retire an offer (or not).

– Why giving more content does not mean you're offering more value (and how it can lead to overwhelm instead).
– How letting go of an offer you have created can be so hard, especially when you've put a lot of time and energy into creating it.
– The 6 questions you can ask yourself to help you decide whether to retire an offer or to keep it.
– The two practical ways you can retire an offer that you no longer want as part of your business.

 

Should you retire an offer? Here's when it's a smart move—and when it isn't

Let's talk about a couple of ways to know if it's time to retire an offer that your business sells. It's really easy and really tempting to just always create more, add more offers. You've put one on your website and then just add another one.
And then that one lives on your website forever. And then you add another one. You end up with so many different offers that your business is selling and sometimes to grow, you actually need to take a step back before you can move forward. You need to create that space for something new, for something different, even if you don't yet know what that is.

So that's why in today's blog I'm going run through a couple of questions to ask yourself to decide whether it's time to retire an existing offer in your business. Now I've done this before a couple of times. I did it with my very first course that I created way back in 2017. That was a course about Facebook ads and ultimately my decision to retire that course was purely because I wasn't passionate enough about Facebook ads to keep learning and staying up to date enough to then be able to pass on all of the changes that were happening in the course. So every time Facebook updated something in the ads platform, then I needed to update the course.
And I just wasn't that interested in Facebook ads and the amount of work that it took to keep updating it. I realized actually, this doesn't excite me. I don't want to keep selling this. So I retired it. I've done that with several other offers. And most recently was my Digital Product Creators Vault, which was a $27 offer that I created back during the low ticket offer craze in 2020, when everyone was creating $27 offers and there was so much value in it. Like I genuinely loved this offer and I thought that if people could see how much value I'd included, then it would make them want to join Launch Magic, which is one of my signature offers, but they couldn't get through all of the content in the Digital Product Creators Vault because I'd put so much in there.
And then it ended up essentially cannibalizing Launch Magic because when I launched Launch Magic twice a year, people would say to me, well, I'll join next round because I haven't had enough time to go through the Vault yet. I want to go through that first. And then I will join Launch Magic next time around when I'm ready to launch it.
So even though there were two very different offers, it was stopping people from buying the offer that I knew would really be the thing that they needed, so I retired it. It's obviously still available for everyone who bought it. It's still available as an upsell for one of my offers, but I no longer promote it to my list.
I no longer talk about it on social media, or this is the first time I've talked about it on this show in years, because I knew that it would stop people from signing up for Launch Magic, which was ultimately holding them back from having profitable launches. The thing that they really, really needed was Launch Magic.
The Vault was awesome and full of value, but the thing that was going to get them to that next level, they weren't buying that. And it's really, it's so hard retiring an offer, especially when you've put a lot of time and effort into creating it, like I did with the vault. But it comes down to sunk cost fallacy, which is a phenomenon whereby a person is reluctant to abandon a strategy or course of action because they have invested heavily in it, even when it is clear that abandonment would be more beneficial. We see this happening in so many areas of life. And especially when it's something in your business that you have created, especially when it's an offer and you're like, Oh, well, I've spent so much time creating it. I don't want all that time to have been a waste.
But the thing is that you have already invested that time. You can keep investing more time into something that's not serving your business. Or you can completely change tack and you can say, well, I'm going to put my time and energy into something that is going to work, that is going to serve my business long term.

So I'm going to run through some questions to ask yourself to decide whether or not to retire your offer. And at the end, I'm also going to share two ways that you can retire it because I know like when it comes to actually going about the process of retiring it, it can be a little bit daunting, especially if you've never retired an offer before.

Question #1. Does it serve your long-term vision for your business?

Is this something that you still want to be selling five years from now? And does it allow you to build the kind of business that you want to have five years down the track? So maybe you want to build an online course based business, but you're too busy delivering one on one client projects to create that first online course, then something needs to shift. And something needs to change for something to change. Your offer suite is a great place to start making these kinds of changes. Intentionally designing the things that you sell in your business can shift the direction, can shift everything, can shift the amount of time you have, the amount of money your business makes. ─
A small shift here can create a huge ripple effect throughout your business.

 

Question #2. Does it fit in with the other offers you sell?

So does it fit in with the rest of your offer suite? Does it play a nice part in the journey that you are taking your ideal client on? So often I will see a business with one offer that's something like, here's how to grow a house plant.
And then they've got another offer that's is, here's how to build a plant shop. They are completely unrelated. They are two completely different ideal clients, and it's going to make their messaging and their positioning really murky, really unclear, right? So if you're selling both of those, are you the house plant expert or are you the building a plant shop expert?
And now if you want to sell both of those, now you need to attract both house plant enthusiasts and plant shop owners and you need to work to grow your audience with both of those people and your content needs to speak to both of those people. And it just becomes really messy and a lot of extra work.
The easier way to do it is to just pick one of those and serve them with multiple different offers. So, for example, how to start your plant shop, how to grow your plant shop, how to franchise your plant shop. The different problems that they might be experiencing and different desires that they might have at different stages of that journey. So then you're only focusing on attracting that one ideal client and you're taking them on a journey over time with different offers.

 

Question #3. Is it easy to sell or does selling it feel like a struggle?

Now, if you are struggling to sell it, it doesn't necessarily mean that it's the wrong offer. It could be the messaging isn't quite landing. Maybe you're not communicating it in a way that resonates with your ideal client. This can happen if you're not very specific with your messaging. If you're trying to talk to too many different ideal clients, then it could be that. It could be that your sales process for it isn't working.
So the journey that you are taking that potential buyer on before they buy. That's not quite aligned. It's not quite effective to sell them into that offer. Or it could be that the offer itself isn't really something that they want. It's not solving a problem that they have or a problem that they experiencing badly enough, they want to spend money to solve it, or maybe it doesn't do a task that's on their to do list, or it doesn't deliver a win that they want. It's something they're not really seeing why they should invest in it. And if you've tested different messaging, different positioning, you've tested different sales processes, and you're still struggling with it, it could be that it's time to retire it and replace it with something that does solve a problem that they will pay money to Solve, right?

 

Question #4. How much of an income hit would your business take by retiring this offer?

And this one is hard because sometimes or often you do have to take a bit of an income hit to create that space and time to create a new offer. For example, when I started shifting from pretty much all client work to building a business that was online course based, I started letting go of clients one at a time, so I didn't fire them all in one hit. I know you hear this quite a lot, “I fired all my clients.” It was one at a time. So I still had a little bit of client income coming in and I'd let go of one and then try and replace as much of that income as I could with online course sales before I then let go of the next client.
But it was still a risk that I had to take. I still had to let go of those clients before the income came in and it's scary. I know, it's really scary. But you also kind of have to back yourself and trust that you can figure it out. Trust that you will be able to get that income in if you let go of that client.
And if one offer is 100 percent of your income, I probably wouldn't recommend that you retire that offer until you have other income streams, because that would be very risky. But is there a way that maybe you could scale it back a little bit and free up your time then to go and create other offers so that your income's not reliant on one income stream?
And then on the other hand, if an offer takes a lot of time for you to deliver, but it's not a huge percentage of your income, that's probably a great place to start with an offer to retire. So then you can free up more of your time to focus on creating an offer. That's not going to be as dependent on your time to deliver.

 

Question #5. Is delivering this offer limiting you from having a bigger impact in other ways?

If you are working one on one with clients and you know that you can serve more people in an online course program format, like a bigger group, for example, but you don't have time to create it because you're too busy with clients, then that might be a sign that it's time to retire it and look at how you can start to show up differently, how you can start to serve your audience in more scalable ways.
Or even starting to dial back the amount of one on one or other time-intensive offers that you sell. So for example, putting up your prices for one on one and working with fewer clients and then using that time to create those offers that are scalable and that allow you to help more people in one go.

 

Question #6. Do you enjoy delivering this offer?

There is only so long that you can keep doing something you hate in your business. If you don't enjoy showing up and delivering this offer, ultimately you're going to end up hating your business. You potentially might burn out.
It's not great. When we look at this though, I want to differentiate between two things. Is it temporary boredom or temporary pain? Like you're just at the moment, you're going through a bit of a rough patch with this offer. You don't enjoy it because maybe you've got one painful client or you've been delivering it for six months now.
And you're like, Oh, this is a little bit repetitive. I'm a bit bored. I wouldn't retire an offer because of a temporary pain. But if it's something that you really just, it doesn't feel aligned, you can't see yourself doing it in your business a year from now, five years from now, then it's probably worth retiring or at least considering retiring it.

One of the things that I really want to reiterate is intentionally designing your offer suite is the one thing that's going to determine who your business attracts, how much you make in sales, how consistent those sales are and how much freedom you have in your business. If you don't have the right office suite, you're going to be limiting your freedom from the get go. Let's say you've decided now to retire your offer. This one offer that you're looking at, you're like, Oh, no, I'm going to stop selling this. You have two options.

 

Option 1 for retiring an offer

So the first option is to tell your audience about it and use that retirement of the offer as a way to almost run a limited start, limited time launch campaign for a couple of days, maybe three days, maybe seven days, whatever it is, where it's their last chance to buy this offer. I would do this if you just want that one last cash injection and you still enjoy delivering the offer, you just don't want to do it long-term.

 

Option 2 for retiring an offer

On the other hand, if you do not ever want to deliver this offer ever again, then option two might be the better way and that is don't tell anybody about it. So unless, obviously, if it's a client offer and you've got clients that are doing that work with you, let them know, obviously. But you don't need to tell the rest of your audience that you are retiring that offer.
If you don't want to ever offer it again, great. You can remove it from your website, remove the checkout page, remove whatever needs to be removed, remove all references to it, do a Google search for it and just make sure it's not still showing up in the search results, all of that. And that's it. You don't have to, it doesn't have to be this big fancy, like, Oop, I'm retiring my offer and you don't have to explain yourself or anything like that.

 

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