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A woman who reupholsters furniture in Sedgefield quoted R4,800 for a job last week. Heart in her throat, because it’s July and the phone barely rings.

The client said yes before she’d finished the sentence. No haggle, no “let me think about it,” nothing.

A week later she found out he’d budgeted R9,000 for it. He’d have paid every cent.

She didn’t lose that R4,200 to a tough negotiator. She handed it over before he’d said a word, because she quoted the job scared.

That price wasn’t the job. It was July talking.

Winter does something to your pricing. The bays go quiet, the N2 empties out by four, and every quote starts to feel like your last shot at a paying month. So you shave a bit off. Then a bit more. Just to be safe.

But that number has nothing to do with the work. It tracks one thing only: how scared you are of a quiet month. You’re not pricing the fabric and the site visit and the fifteen years it took to get good at this. You’re pricing your own fear of an empty diary.

The client can’t see any of that. They just see a number that came in suspiciously low, say yes, and off you go, doing R9,000 of work for R4,800 because you flinched first.

A cheap quote lands you the worst clients

And dropping your price doesn’t even buy you the safety you dropped it for.

Bohlale Buzani, writing in the Daily Dispatch in May, put it plainly: people read price as a signal of quality, and of whether you rate your own work. Come in far under everyone else and you’re not shouting “great value.” You’re quietly asking whether you’re sure of yourself. Some customers hear that and walk, cheap or not.

The ones who stay can be worse. The hagglers, the people who query an invoice they already got at a discount, the ones who treat a done deal as an opening offer. You dropped your price to feel safe and reeled in the exact clients who bleed you slowest.

None of this is a licence to gouge. It’s the same nerve behind the cheap winter yes you should be turning down: charging what the work is actually worth, especially when it’s quiet and you feel least entitled to.

So the next quote you send this week, before you hit send, add fifteen percent. Don’t explain it, don’t apologise for it, don’t soften it with “but I can come down.” Just send it, and watch. Nine times out of ten the sky stays exactly where it is.

Reply with the last job that got an instant yes, and what you’d charge for that same job today. I’ll gather the answers back here, no names, so we can all stop quoting like it’s the middle of winter in our heads.