If price is one of those "ooh, err" subjects for you, my advice is simple: toughen up. It's the basis of your entire business.

If you're a franchise, this goes for franchisors setting the model and franchisees running the area.

If you're a one man band, running a simple gardening business, the same goes.

It's a fundamental truth in the vast majority of businesses, that if you insist on competing based on nothing but price, you will struggle at best.

At worst, you'll go under.

Without margin or scale, the economics simply don't work. And of the two, margin is by far the easier to get.

Margin buys you freedom

Healthy margin gives you room to market properly, position yourself properly, and most importantly, put real effort into customer service and retention.

It's the difference between running a real business, and surviving on fumes.

In the UK, there is, for all intents and purposes, no end to the B2C, professional and home services market. Research indicates it's approaching £700 Billion.

That's 25% of the entire UK GDP.

Recent research showed that up to 20% of UK home owners now employed a cleaner, so the amount of business out there is endless.

Unfortunately, so is the competition.

You won't beat them by trying to be the cheapest. There will always be someone cheaper.

Low margin doesn't make you competitive, it makes you fragile. One bad month, one slow quarter, one rise in costs, and there's no cushion.

Margin is how you actually beat your competitors. Margin is what lets you outperform rather than just undercut.

If you can afford to spend more to acquire a customer than your competitor can, then you will win, full stop. All else being equal, it's nigh on impossible for a price-cutting competitor to out-market or out-service a well-funded one.

If you can afford to spend more servicing a customer once you've got them, they're not going anywhere.

Better marketing equals better positioning. Better positioning equals customers willing to pay more for premium product or service, and if you can deliver on that, you really won't have anything to worry about from cheaper, price oriented competitors.

Franchisors & Franchisees - this applies to you too!

I see a lot of franchisors & franchisees who for some reason think that concepts of marketing, positioning or price strategy don't apply to them.

That franchises are different. They're wrong.

Franchises are in the same market for the same customers as independent businesses.

Franchisors: if your fee structure or recommended pricing squeezes franchisee margin too tight, you're not protecting them from competition, you're disarming them.

A franchisee with no margin can't invest in service, can't invest in marketing, and eventually can't invest in staying open.

Franchisees: if you're discounting because a competitor down the road is cheaper, you're playing their game on their terms.

Compete on what margin actually buys: experience, reliability, follow-up, the stuff that makes a customer stay for three years instead of one.

The bottom line.

Price has to be the foundational building block of your business, and it's not one you get to shy away from.

Grow a pair, get the economics right, protect the margin, and everything else, marketing, service, customer retention, gets easier.

Get it wrong, and you're stuck competing on the one thing that has nowhere left to go but down.