You’re not afraid to go above and beyond for your customers. The problem is that, too often, you do it for free.

Here’s a scenario I see all the time. Jim, your longtime customer, calls in a panic, asking for four times their normal volume, at half the normal lead time, delivery by Sunday. You hang up and spend the next 30 minutes figuring out how you’re going to pull this off. You call Jim back and say yes.

Jim hangs up and decides where he’s having lunch.

You hang up and spend the next week in operational chaos.

You rearrange production schedules, call in favors, schedule overtime, scramble to get Sunday delivery locked down. You miss a family event. You’re exhausted. But you get it there on time, pleased with your team’s ability to serve an important customer.

Here’s what actually happened: Jim’s problem lasted two minutes. Yours lasted seven days. And you didn’t charge him a dime extra for it.

The Hidden Cost of Free

You believe you banked customer goodwill. But since it seems their problem was solved in two minutes, the credit they give you is a fraction of what you deserve. Your ability to make hard things look easy works against you here.

When the extraordinary becomes routine, customers just start to expect it. You’ve trained them that heroics are included.

If you do it for free, you tell them it’s worth nothing. And if they don’t feel the cost, they don’t feel the weight of the ask. They’ll make the same call next month, and the month after that.

A Better Way

Let’s go back to that Sunday delivery situation. What if, instead of just saying yes, you called the customer back with something like this:

“We can absolutely get that to you by Sunday, Jim. Because this is a very large order significantly inside our standard lead time, there’ll be a modest expedite fee of 20% on this order to account for the resource shifts we need to make. My team is ready to go. Should we proceed?”

They’re likely to say yes because the cost of not having the material is generally much higher than the upcharge. You get to be a hero and get paid for it. And if they don’t value it enough to pay for it, why are you doing it?

But I Can’t Charge for It!

Over the years I’ve suggested this to a lot of companies, and I sometimes get a yeah-but: yeah but our customers expect this level of service from us. (Often because you’ve trained them to expect it!) If you need time to retrain customers, call them back and say:

“We can absolutely get that to you by Sunday, Jim. Because this is a very large order significantly inside our standard lead time, this would typically carry a 20% expedite fee, but I can waive it for this order.”

This starts to shift the customer’s understanding about the value of extra service.

Then put the fee on the invoice and apply a discount that zeroes it out. And here’s the critical part: don’t just send that invoice to accounting. Share it with Jim! Let the person who makes the buying decisions understand the value of you going the extra mile.

This changes the conversation over time. The customer learns that this kind of service has real value, even when you’ve chosen not to charge for it. You’re building documented history instead of invisible goodwill.

If you eventually want to start charging, you have a natural path. You can simply say: “Jim, we’ve waived the last five expedite fees. We’ll always jump through hoops to get you the material you need, but unfortunately, I can’t waive the expedite fee any longer. Do you want me to go ahead and expedite this order?”

If you decide to keep it free, the documentation still earns its keep. Six months from now, when Jim calls to tell you a competitor offered lower pricing, you can say: “As you know, sometimes you come to us with short-lead, high-volume requests that we jump on immediately. Looking at our records, we’ve done that eleven times in the past six months, waiving a combined $46,000 in expedite fees to get you high quality material fast. Is that part of what Competitor X is promising?”

That’s a different conversation than “but we have great service.” You need the data to make the claim feel real, and you only have the data if you’ve been putting the fees on the invoice.

Not Just Expedites

The expedited delivery call is one version of this. But the same dynamic plays out any time you do something outside the normal course of business and don’t name it.

For product companies, that mean free custom specs, waived setup fees, or no-charge component upgrades.

For service businesses, scope creep is the obvious one — the client asks for a little extra, then a little more. It’s the extra review cycle you ran without a change order or the deliverable you rebuilt from scratch because the client changed direction mid-project.

In every case, the pattern is the same. You absorbed it, you didn’t name it, and they didn’t notice.

Be the Hero AND Get Paid

I’m not arguing against going the extra mile. I’m arguing against going it silently.

The extras you’re absorbing aren’t building the goodwill you think they are. Stop letting them disappear into goodwill that nobody sees.