In this solo YouTube monologue, Michael (a business‑concept creator) warns entrepreneurs about a recurring error: extracting extra money from customers at the moment they are leaving a transaction or ending a relationship. He illustrates the point with two personal stories. The first, set during COVID, describes a 3.5 % surcharge added to receipts to offset soaring freight costs. While it rescued short‑term margins, the unexpected charge appeared on the final receipt, leaving customers feeling cheated and prompting negative social‑media chatter. The second story involves a membership organization where, after a 90‑day termination notice, the speaker was billed for a fourth month despite the contract. As the organization’s top referrer, this surprise fee turned a loyal promoter into a vocal detractor, risking hundreds of thousands of future referrals. Michael argues that such “last‑interaction” revenue grabs may boost immediate cash flow but damage reputation, erode trust, and destroy long‑term growth. He urges managers to avoid surprise fees at the exit point, to protect the customer’s final impression and preserve word‑of‑mouth referrals.
Chapters
So I want to talk about a huge mistake that I see businesses make over and over again, and I'm going to explain it to you through two stories of two companies, and one of which is a company I've been deeply involved in for over a decade, and the other one is a company I was involved in for over 20 years. Let me tell you these two stories. Hopefully it'll teach you not to do what these companies did. If you're new here, my name is Michael. I make YouTube videos, videos for social media about business concepts, and they're designed for people that are entrepreneurs, people like myself who are trying to build good businesses and do that in a way to feed their families and kind of live their dreams. If you like like that kind of stuff, stick around. So story number 1 dates back to the COVID times. And if you remember back in COVID, folks who were running businesses started to see crazy things happen with their expenses. You would see things like freight, for example. If you were trying to bring over stuff from overseas and import it, like, your freight prices were going through the roof. Other expenses would just go crazy. You had all kinds of labor shortages. People couldn't come to work, all that kind of stuff. Many companies started to add surcharges to their bills where it was basically like just a surcharge to the bottom of your ticket when you got your bill at the restaurant or at a store, there'd be 2%, 3%, 5%, 10% surcharge to try to make, well, make it so the companies weren't losing money with all these new higher expenses. And this company I was involved in, we decided to do the same thing. We went and added a 3.5% surcharge to our bills to go cover just an increase in all the expenses with freight that we were seeing trying to get stuff in from overseas. Well, it worked great. Suddenly we weren't losing money anymore. It had a slight problem when all was said and done. And that problem was that showed up as an extra expense and it would surprise the customers and they would see it precisely at the worst moment when a customer is interacting with your business, which is on their way out the door. They open up their receipt, they look at it and they're like, what's this extra 3.5% thing? And there's no better way for a company at that particular moment to try to make their customer feel alienated. And it's like the last interaction you're going to have to them. You walk out the door, you look at your receipt and you say, ugh, they just dropped this extra fee on me. And you saw this stuff at the time, by the way, all over social media. People would be going into restaurants and be like, what's this on my bill? If you want to have your customers leave with a bad taste in their mouth, like drop something like that on them right at the moment they're settling up with you. It's not good. And the second story to tell you about this kind of phenomenon is around the idea of a membership organization that I've been part of for over 10 years. And this membership organization has a policy that you can cancel. They pay— it's month for month, but you cancel and you have a 90-day termination notice. So you have to pay for 3 months on your way out the door. That's fine. That's in the contract that I signed. I knew that was part of the deal. But after I canceled, I discovered they had charged me for a 4th month on the way out the door. Sent it into their billing. They said, well, actually, It's 90 days, but you have to tell us by a certain date each month. Otherwise, we charge you for a fourth month. This is a fascinating organization. I've been a member there for over 10 years, paid them 6 figures in fees for the privilege of doing that. In my city, I'm the number 1 person who's referred them the most business. It's a fascinating thing. In order to kind of maximize their revenue, this particular organization has taken somebody in that precise moment who is a huge promoter of their organization, somebody who's referred more business than anybody else, and made me an instant detractor. So I feel like I got screwed on the way out the door. And you can see where this is not good business for them. It looks like good business in the short term, but in the long term, if I was to keep referring them more business, potentially that's hundreds of thousands of revenue they could get from other folks that I would send their way. But here, in order to get kind of one more month of revenue, which looks good in the short term, don't get me wrong, they're screwing up hundreds of thousands of dollars and losing that opportunity in the future. And look, I can see where businesses think this kind of move is good sense, right? Somebody like me is not going to be paying any more, any more fees in the future. So who cares if I'm a little unhappy on the way out the door? But the reality is, like, people people talk. And in the world of business, when somebody like me goes around and suddenly starts saying like, don't do business with these guys, like it's just a money grab, they're going to screw you over, or in the case of the business I was involved in where, you know, we kick somebody in the shins on the way out the door when they leave our business, like people talk. And eventually that kind of behavior catches up to you, and then you have to, well, maybe figure out how to earn their trust back in the future. But just this mistake, you want to avoid it, because if you're going to kick somebody in the shins or take advantage of them or do a deal where they feel kind of a little slighted, it's one thing to do it when you first start, you know, bring them into your shop, or you're doing it while you're working with But at the precise moment where that's going to be your last interaction with them, the last thing you want to do on the way out the door is kick somebody in the shins and make them have a bad taste in their mouth about working with you. And it's just a huge mistake I see happen over and over in business, and one that's just so easily avoidable if management just kind of makes some better decisions. That's what I think. Let me know what you think in the comments below. See you next time.
