You know that diner with the menu the size of a phone book? Breakfast all day. Burgers. Pasta. Gyros. Sushi, somehow. A "Mexican section." And some kind of chicken parm pizza nobody has ever ordered on purpose.

You also know the food is mediocre. Every single item.

Nobody's ever surprised by that. When a kitchen tries to make 140 things, it can't make any of them great. The freezer's packed, the cooks are confused, and the owner works 80 hours a week wondering why the margins stink.

Now go look at your services page.

I'm guessing it's a diner menu.

The marketing agency that does SEO, ads, websites, social, email, branding, video, "consulting," and once built an app for a client's cousin. The HVAC company that also does plumbing, electrical, generators, water treatment, duct cleaning and "light handyman." The accountant who does taxes, bookkeeping, payroll, fractional CFO work, business coaching, and somehow a little estate planning.

Every one of those got added for a good reason. A client asked. A competitor offered it. A slow month made you say yes to something you normally would've passed on. And one day you looked up and realized you were running a diner.

Here's the hill I'll die on this Sunday. For most service businesses, the fastest way to grow isn't adding something new. It's cutting.

Every service you sell has costs that never show up on the invoice.

Training. Every service needs someone who knows how to do it. More services means more training, more mistakes, and more "only Mike knows how to do that one."

Tools. Every service drags in its own software, equipment, supplies and maybe a license. You're paying for all of it, all year long, even for the thing you sell twice a quarter.

Marketing. You can't market twelve things well. So you market all twelve badly. Your website tries to talk to everybody and ends up sounding like nobody.

Pricing. When you sell a little bit of everything, you never get good enough at any one thing to know what it really costs you. So you guess. And guessing almost always means undercharging.

Your brain. This is the big one. Every service is another thing to think about, quote, schedule, manage and fix. Owners with a diner menu are always tired. Not because they work harder than everybody else, but because they're switching gears forty times a day.

And with costs as stubborn as they've been this year, you can't afford to carry dead weight anymore. Everything on the menu has to earn its spot.

Block two hours this week and pull your numbers for the last twelve months. Your bookkeeper or QuickBooks can get you most of what you need.

Make a simple spreadsheet. One row for every service you sell. Then fill in these columns.

If you don't really know where your hours go, run Rize for a couple of weeks. It tracks where your time actually goes on your computer, and it's usually a rude awakening.

Then sort the whole sheet by profit per hour.

You'll end up with four groups. Almost everybody does.

The stars. High profit per hour, low headache. This is your actual business. This is what you should be known for. Most owners find one to three of these, and they're usually not the services they talk about the most.

The workhorses. Lower margin, but they lead to other work. The cheap tune-up that turns into replacements. The tax return that turns into a bookkeeping client. Keep these, price them right, and treat them as a front door, not a profit center.

The headaches. Decent money, but everybody hates them. Either raise the price until they're worth the pain, or hand them to someone else.

The anchors. Low profit, high headache, nothing coming out the other side. These are dragging you to the bottom of the lake. Cut them.

What usually happens next: the owner stares at the sheet and realizes that most of the profit comes from two or three services, and the rest are eating time, energy and sleep. More often than not, there's at least one service that's actually losing money once you count the owner's time. It's been losing money for years. Nobody noticed because it kept the calendar full.

A full calendar and a profitable business are not the same thing. Ask anybody who's ever owned a diner.

Let me walk you through a made-up but very typical example, because the spreadsheet makes a lot more sense once you see it filled in.

Picture a home services company doing about $1.4 million a year across six services.

System replacements: $700,000 in revenue, 40 percent margin, and a solid $150 or so of profit for every hour spent. Low headache. That's a star.

Maintenance plans: $180,000 in revenue, thin margin, but almost every replacement customer started as a maintenance customer. That's a workhorse. Keep it, protect it, price it right.

Repair calls: $320,000 in revenue, decent margin, but the scheduling is chaos and every tech dreads the callbacks. That's a headache. Raise the price and tighten the rules.

Duct cleaning: $90,000 in revenue. Sounds fine until you see it needs its own equipment, its own crew and its own ads, and nets about $20 an hour after all that. Anchor.

Water treatment: $60,000 in revenue, a separate supplier, separate training, and half the jobs end in a return visit. Anchor.

"Light handyman": $50,000 in revenue, a headache score of five, and nothing comes out the other side. Super anchor.

Cut the last three and the company loses about $200,000 in revenue. That sounds terrifying. But the profit on that $200,000 was close to zero once you count the time, the equipment, the extra truck and the owner's sanity. Those hours get poured back into replacements and maintenance, which are the two things that actually make money.

Twelve months later, revenue is about the same. Profit is way up. And the owner stops getting calls at 7pm about a squeaky cabinet door.

That's the trade. A little less on top, a lot more at the bottom.

This is the part people skip. You cut three services and suddenly you have hours you didn't have before. If you don't decide where they go, they'll get eaten by email and random fires.

So decide now. Put every freed-up hour into one of three places.

Getting better at the stars. Tighter process, faster delivery, better follow up. When you only do a few things, you can finally build a system for each one.

Selling more of the stars. Same customers, more of the good stuff. Your existing clients are the easiest people on earth to sell your best service to.

Raising the price on the stars. When you're known for one thing and you're great at it, you can charge for it. Specialists always out-earn generalists. Your cardiologist doesn't take walk-ins for sore throats.

This is where people freeze up. "But what if my clients leave?"

Some might. Mostly the ones who only bought the thing you're cutting, which is fine. And you can make it smooth for everybody else.

Option one: raise the price first. Before you kill anything, try charging what it's really worth. Sometimes pricing it 30 or 40 percent higher turns an anchor into a decent service. And if nobody buys it at the new price, it cuts itself. No awkward announcement needed.

Option two: refer it out. Find a great partner who does the thing you're cutting as their main thing. Send your clients there. Where it's allowed in your industry, ask about a referral fee, or ask them to send their overflow your way. Your client gets a specialist, you get your sanity back, and the partner owes you one.

Option three: fold it in. Sometimes a small service makes more sense as part of a bigger one than sold on its own. Instead of selling the filter change separately, it's part of the maintenance plan. Fewer things to sell. Bigger tickets.

Option four: sunset it with a date. For anything you're fully cutting, give current clients real notice. Sixty to ninety days is fair. Something like this:

"Hey Tom, quick heads up. Starting January 1, we're no longer offering [service] so we can focus on doing [core service] better than anybody in town. I didn't want you caught off guard. I've lined up [partner], who specializes in this, and they'll take great care of you. Happy to make the introduction. And we're still here for [core service] like always."

Short, honest, and it gives them somewhere to go. Most clients will respect it more than you'd expect.

And look at the calendar. It's late October. January 1 is the cleanest cutoff date you're going to get all year. Start these conversations now and you walk into 2027 with a menu that actually fits your business.

Once you've cut, update everything that tells people what you do.

Your website. Lead with the stars. Pull the anchors off completely. If someone has to scroll past nine things to find the one you're best at, you've lost them.

Your Google Business Profile. Update the services list and the description. That's what shows up when people search for you, and more and more, it's what the AI tools pull from when somebody asks them for a recommendation.

Your proposals and price sheets. Fewer options. Clearer choices. A confused buyer doesn't buy.

Your team. Tell them why. "We're cutting these so we can get really, really good at these" is something people can get behind, especially the ones who've been stuck doing the anchors.

Then, for the next 90 days, put every marketing dollar and every piece of content behind your top one or two services. Not twelve. One or two. You'll be amazed what happens when your ads, your content and your referrals all point at the same thing.

Cutting feels like losing. It isn't. Every great business you can name is known for one thing. Nobody goes to the steakhouse for the salad.

Pick your steak. Get really good at cooking it. Charge what it's worth. Let somebody else make the chicken parm pizza.

Talk Soon,

Dan

Dan Kaufman

Founder, Dead Simple Growth and Pinnacle Masters

P.S. Reply with MENU and send me your current list of services. I'll tell you which one I'd cut first if it were my business, and which one I'd charge more for.