While I was running a franchise branch of Brochure Management in around 2008, I had a sales man called Willy. He was in his late fifties, the kind of man that was always happy and enthusiastic but might be described by the aphorism, ‘down on his luck’. He got the job because he was a family friend and needed work and I really did like him.

He had some of the good — if old fashioned — qualities of a sales man. He was thick skinned, first of all, who was happy to flog the same dead horse time and time again, not matter how many times he was rejected, always with a willing smile. He also had the peculiar mind that pays notice to small personal details and remembers them so that any sales conversation started with him addressing the client by name and asking after a family member or two as if he really cared, which he may well have, quickly forming rapport.

His major problem, and this may have been a product of struggling throughout his life, was that it was antithetical for him to not offer a discount. All sales were made by offering a special or promotion or a discount. He was so bad in fact that even after he signed the deal, he insisted on offering a discount, for no reason whatsoever. I think he liked to be liked. Unfortunately, this mannerism projected an image that the product or service was not really worth its asking price.

For most of my life I have suffered from a similar malady. In almost all of my businesses, I concentrated on discounted products, sales promotions and voucher services. What I learned the hard way was that not only were discounted jobs just as much work as full price jobs but for some inexplicable reason, discounted work inevitably was more problematic. Again and again the biggest problems I had with rejections and non-payment and endless changes were with people who had got the cheap deal.

This may in part be related to the fact that people who insist on discounts are not always your best customers and often don’t have much cash in the bank. They cause issues primarily to stall payments. The other factor is that people relate discounts to a lowered perception of value. As a designer they think that I don’t believe in myself and my work. People never place value in free stuff. When jobs like these went wrong (and there was no cash cushion to fix problems) I would always protest that I had done a lot of work for a very small fee and so had done pretty well. Invariably, the client would reply that they hadn’t asked for the discount, they just wanted a good job.

This outlook affects so much of your communications and the body language of your advertising and even emails. I am not good enough, I am not the best in the field, but you can save money. That wouldn’t be something that you want to hear from your house builder or your doctor or indeed the guy who manufactures the dive cages for your shark diving operations. As Marianne Williamson famously said: ‘your playing small does not serve the world’. Learning that you have value and that people respect the value you place upon yourself, your self confidence in everything you do, is a critical step into lifting yourself as a professional until success becomes a friend and discounted success becomes an enemy.