The hardest email I ever had to send

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I stared at that email for about 45 minutes before I sent it.

I knew what I needed to say.

I had known for a few weeks honestly.

But there is something about typing the words out and hitting send that makes it feel irreversible in a way that just thinking about it never does.

I had decided to raise my prices.

Not by a little either.

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The $300 a month I had been charging was quietly draining me and I had finally accepted that the number had to change significantly if I was going to keep doing this work at the level I wanted to do it.

That decision felt clear once I made it.

What did not feel clear was what to do about the clients I already had who had signed on at the old price.

I had a conversation with one of them first.

Laid it out honestly.

Told him what the new pricing looked like, explained that I could not keep operating at the old rate, and gave him time to think about it.

He came back a few days later and told me he could not make the new number work.

He was genuine about it, no hard feelings, just a real constraint on his end.

And then I had to write that email.

The one that said I understand, I appreciate everything, and this is where we part ways.

I rewrote it probably six times.

I kept softening it, adding more explanation, looking for a way to make it feel less like what it was.

But it was always going to be what it was.

I was ending a professional relationship with someone I had worked with for months, someone I had genuinely invested in, because the arrangement no longer worked for where I was trying to go.

I sent it eventually.

He responded graciously. It was fine.

But it sat with me for days afterward and I kept turning over this feeling that I could not quite name.

It was not guilt exactly.

More like a quiet discomfort with the fact that I had chosen my own trajectory over the comfort of keeping things the same.

And somewhere in that discomfort was this voice that kept asking whether that made me selfish.

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I do not think it does.

And I want to explain why because I think a lot of people in service businesses carry this weight unnecessarily.

Ending a client relationship to protect your own direction is not selfishness.

Selfishness is taking without regard for anyone else.

What this was, was clarity.

Clarity about what your time is worth, what your work deserves, and what kind of business you are actually trying to build.

Those are not selfish things to know.

They are necessary things.

When you stay in arrangements that undervalue you out of loyalty or discomfort or fear of the conversation, you are not being generous.

You are slowly depleting the thing that makes you good at what you do.

The energy, the care, the genuine investment in the outcome.

You cannot sustain that when the foundation of the arrangement feels wrong.

And there is something else.

The clients who come in after you raise your prices, the ones who can meet you where you actually are, those relationships are different.

There is a mutual respect built into them from the start.

They know what they are paying for and you know what you are there to deliver.

That clarity makes everything easier.

The client I let go did not get a worse version of me for the months we worked together.

He got everything I had.

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But continuing past the point where the arrangement made sense for me would have eventually changed that, whether I wanted it to or not.

Client relationships are some of the hardest to end precisely because they are built on trust and consistency and real work done together.

Ending them feels like it means something about your character.

But sometimes ending them is the most honest thing you can do, for both sides.

Knowing what you are worth and standing by it is not something to apologize for.

It is just the job.

Talk soon,