[Home](https://stoneforgegroup.com/) · [Insights](https://stoneforgegroup.com/insights/) # Thinking big and small **James Walls** · September 9, 2026 · 9 min read I live in Florida, and it’s hot – feels like 105 degrees plus by 2pm hot, for at least eight months of the year. For a guy with no hair, the sweat never gets trapped. Shirts soak easily – I’ve mastered the disheveled look effortlessly. Lately I’ve been hunting for a better undershirt – a good skin-tone one that disappears under a shirt is surprisingly hard to find, and the discomfort of looking shabby is a real thing for me. Last week we found Mr. Davis. The first thing I saw was the price: $34 – for an undershirt!? That struck me as insane, but I persevered. The second thing I saw was what happened to that price as I added to the cart. Subscribe (on the theory that everything wears out) and they’ll send you new shirts every few months at a VIP discount – which applies to your first order too, so the $34 becomes $28 before you’ve bought a thing. Add a second shirt and shipping is free. Keep adding, and the discount on the next shirt keeps deepening, until at ten shirts you’re paying just under $22 apiece, delivered. I bought ten shirts. ## An opening gambit, not a price The $34 shirt isn’t really a price – it was just an opening gambit. They never wanted to sell me just one shirt. But what the $34 did do was make a statement about supposed quality – this isn’t your $7 Jockey undershirt! But back to the discounts – this isn’t about generosity – it’s about making higher profits. We all know the actual production cost is minor – insignificant even in the scheme of things – likely $3–$6 in bulk for a good one. But here’s the math: a ten-shirt order needs picking once, labeling and shipping once, one invoice and one transaction – exactly what a one-shirt order needs. The subscription does the same job over time: they never have to go looking for their next customer, because I’m already there. Everything across their business becomes more efficient and more lucrative the more that’s ordered (up to a point). They shared a slice of that gain with me as a discount, and kept the lion’s share. Robert Cialdini named both halves of this move in his seminal book, Influence, years ago. The first is rejection-then-retreat – and Mr. Davis runs the retreat without even waiting for the rejection: the $34 exists so that every step down from it feels like a concession in your favor. The second is commitment and consistency – every yes makes the next one easier. Mr. Davis ran both on me in a single cart – I could see it happening, and bought the ten shirts anyway. And that’s worth pausing on, because persuasion mechanics are always present in a sale – whether you know you’re using them or not. The only real choice is whether you use them ethically, and that part is absolutely key. What made Mr. Davis’ version easy to live with is that none of it was false: a real product, real efficiency in the increments, and a real share of the gain handed back. Mr. Davis sells shirts. The same arithmetic is true for those of us who sell time, expertise, or the effort of others – each increment added onto an existing engagement carries more margin than the one before it. Small work isn’t small money – it’s revenue landing on capacity you’ve already paid for. ## Incrementing Up and Down The increment works in two directions. The first direction is addition – Mr. Davis’ direction. Every services business has light weeks; the big jobs never quite fill the calendar. Small pieces of work added onto what exists, like a quick-start project for a client you already serve, are easy to say yes to and fast to deliver, and they give the people you’re paying anyway something billable to do in those weeks. The margin on that work is the best margin you’ll book all year. You add when the capacity is already paid for and the year needs money – the payoff is efficiency and profit. The second direction is subtraction – though it’s the decision that gets cut down, never the deal. Somewhere in your pipeline there may be a large proposal that has been sitting for weeks – the big one, the whole solution, priced accordingly. It’s tempting to decide why it stalled, but deals go quiet for all sorts of reasons, and you’re rarely told the real one. What you do control is the structure of the ask – and when you’re working closely enough with a client to see how the decision looks from their side, structure becomes vitally important. Even when the client is asking for lots, the question is how to shape it into easier, quicker, consistent yeses. **Pipeline.** Every live opportunity the business is working on, with where each one has actually reached. [Full entry →](https://stoneforgegroup.com/glossary/#pipeline) This is where Cialdini’s commitment and consistency earns its keep: Don’t lead with one big decision. Break the work into smaller chunks, in a logical order, and lead with the piece that’s foundational, non-contentious, or both – something the client can agree to without a committee, at full price, delivered inside a month, producing a result they can see. Nothing about the deal has shrunk, and nothing is discounted; the overall book of business may end up exactly the same. What’s changed is the shape of the decision – from one big yes they can’t give you to a first small yes they can. “Don’t leave money on the table” assumes bundling into a single big transaction is best. In a relationship business, that may be the slowest path to victory for you and your client – and it can lose you the deal AND the relationship if you’re not fundamentally aligned. And for the proposal that went quiet after the price landed, the restructure doubles as a test – not a new document into the same silence, but a reason for a conversation. “Hey, I’ve had an idea – a different approach I want to run by you.” What you’re offering is the first deliverable only – the piece the client needs first, the one the rest of the work depends on – with options to move forward after it, so you’re no longer asking for a commitment to everything all at once. It may well end up as a proposal structured exactly that way, but the intent is to get the deal moving again. It’s also rejection-then-retreat arriving the ordinary way around: the silence was the rejection, and the smaller ask is the retreat. A client who was choking on the size of the decision takes the conversation; a client who stays silent has answered you too. Both are worth more than another month of wondering. Then consistency starts working for you. The client who has said yes once, and watched the work land, finds the second yes easier than the first – and the third easier again. That’s the repeating pattern of yes: every delivered piece is both revenue and the case for the next one. Mr. Davis’ cart was the fast version of this – ten shirts, one small yes at a time, in a single sitting. Your client gets to the full engagement the same way, more slowly, with delivered work between the yeses instead of a deeper discount. You subtract when the decision has grown too big to say yes to – the payoff is acceptance, consistency, and a deal that’s finally moving. ## This year, and next Which direction, and when, is situational. Entering the fourth quarter, a whale mostly pays next year – big deals take months to sign and longer to deliver – while small, rapidly deliverable deals pay this year. Choosing the mix is deciding what the business needs more right now: this year’s money, or next year’s platform. This is playing out right now in a business I’m working with. We have a gap of $1 million against a target of $7 million. So that doesn’t look too bad. The problem is that we’ve been 34 days without closing a deal. We have $3 million of pipeline, but it’s still early stage. So here’s the million-dollar question: do we chase a whale? Or do we chase new smaller deals? The answer in this case was to first understand what mattered most. For this business it was momentum – because momentum builds confidence, and the confidence matters more than the absolute of what we did this year. Earlier in the year, when our tails were up, we did better. It’s the same consistency principle, pointed at your own team: every delivered piece is a yes your own people get to bank, and 34 days of nothing is the machine running in reverse. Then we took a look at the existing pipeline to figure out what was stalling it: whether big, difficult proposals needed decisions that were likely to delay. Did we have the ability to take each of these deals and chunk them down? Could we get an umbrella agreement in place – one master contract, so each statement of work needs a signature, not a negotiation – and get small immediate statements of work moving, each leading into the next piece, so that we’re delivering something while the next round of approvals goes on? That’s the path we’re taking, and the theory is that we might still land the big deals as bycatch while we focus on the chunking and the small ones. With the existing deals, getting them unstuck – momentum building, work delivering – is the thing that is going to make the year successful right now. That focus – the stalled deals chunked down first, the big ones still live but no longer carrying the year – also derisks it. A year built on ten small commitments from clients who already trust you fails differently than one hanging off a single big deal that hasn’t decided yet. If the big fish gets away – and big fish get away – the year doesn’t go with it. As Earl Smooter says: “You can’t ride two horses with one ass, sugarbean.” That’s the whole trick of thinking big and small: know which one the year is asking of you, and answer. If you don’t, the decision will be made for you – and probably not in the way you want. Start with the deal you’d chunk down. The Five-Stage Deal Guide walks that deal through the five stages – prospecting, qualification, discovery, scope-and-alignment, proposal – and shows you the first stage it can’t clear once you’re honest with yourself. The stage it stalls at usually points to what the first increment should be. There’s no email to hand over, nothing to sign up for, and nothing you answer is stored anywhere – it’s meant to be useful whether we ever speak or not. **Qualification.** Deciding, on evidence rather than optimism, whether an opportunity is real – whether something is genuinely pushing the buyer to act, whether the people who can decide are involved, and whether the work fits what the business does well. [Full entry →](https://stoneforgegroup.com/glossary/#qualification) You get the point... Just add one more ## Three questions to sit with - How many light weeks did your team have last quarter – and what filled them? - Which pending deal could you accelerate by chunking it down – getting agreement on the foundational or non-contentious pieces so the work gets underway? - What incremental additions could you action inside your existing deals to lift margin or efficiency? ## How this was written Idea, argument, stories and the connections between them: James Walls. Drafting, from James’s material: Claude (AI). Structure and flow: James Walls, with Claude checking the seams. Copy editing and consistency checks: Claude (AI). Corrections, final wording and judgment: James Walls. The thinking isn’t delegated; the typing and the checking are. James uses custom-developed AI skills to check style, structure, and facts against his own standards. ### Now walk your own deal through it The free Five-Stage Deal Guide takes one live deal down these same five stages and shows you the first gate it can't clear – that's where it's really stuck. No email, no sign-up. [The Five-Stage Deal Guide →](https://stoneforgegroup.com/tools/five-stage-deal-guide/) More on the proposal that goes quiet: [Why do deals stall at the proposal and quietly go nowhere? →](https://stoneforgegroup.com/questions/why-do-deals-stall-and-go-quiet/) First published in The Stoneforge Newsletter on [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/thinking-big-small-james-walls-hy4le), September 9, 2026. ### New issues land here first One email when an issue is published. Nothing else, ever.