There is something in your business you would rather not sell any more. A format you have outgrown, a package that always overruns, a piece of work you took on once and now attracts more of.
It is probably still on your website. Somebody will inquire about it this month, and you or someone on your team will probably say yes, because saying no requires a decision nobody has made.
Here is the decision, as a short list.
Decide what happens to the people currently in it
Before anything is announced or removed.
Honor what is running. People who bought under the old arrangement should finish under it. Changing terms mid-engagement to suit your restructuring is the kind of thing people remember and mention.
Decide about renewals separately. This is the awkward one, particularly for anything recurring. You can grandfather people indefinitely, which is generous and means you are still delivering the thing you retired in three years. You can give a long notice period, six months or a year, which is usually the right answer. Or you can move them onto the nearest current offering, which requires a conversation rather than an email.
Choose deliberately, write it down, and apply it to everybody. Handling this case by case in the moment produces inconsistent treatment, and people compare notes. If you have staff, that written policy is also what stops three people giving three different answers.
Tell them before anybody else finds out. A current client learning from your website that the thing they are in has been discontinued is a bad way to find out.
Decide what the inquiries get
They will keep coming, for a year at least. Old links, old referrers, people who saw you speak in 2024. If you have not decided in advance, you will improvise, and improvising under a direct request is how you end up delivering a retired offer for another eighteen months.
Write the two sentences now. What you do instead, and who to go to if what they actually need is the old thing. Having a specific person to send them to converts an unhelpful no into a genuinely useful redirection, which is better for them and better for you.
Do the unglamorous cleanup
The page. Do not delete it if it has been there a while and has links pointing at it, or people arrive at a dead end. Replace the content with a short note saying it is no longer offered and a link to what is current, or redirect it. A page that quietly disappears also takes its accumulated search visibility with it.
Everything that still mentions it. Your services page, your bio, the paragraph in your email signature, the description you use on the site where people book you to speak. This is where retirement usually fails: the offer comes off one page and stays on four others.
Anything automated. Sequences, onboarding, scheduled messages. Something written eighteen months ago will cheerfully continue promoting a thing you no longer do, to someone who then asks about it.
The people who send you work. Tell them directly, tell them what to send instead, and tell them who to send the old thing to. Referrers work from a mental picture of you that is often two years out of date and it only updates if you update it.
The part that is not logistics
Retiring an offer is usually resisted for a reason that has nothing to do with any of the above: it produced income, and stopping feels like choosing to earn less.
Sometimes it is. More often the arithmetic is friendlier than it feels, because the retired thing was consuming disproportionate attention, overrunning, or attracting clients who took more from you than the fee suggested. That last one has its own post, on the real cost of a wrong-fit client. Do that sum honestly before deciding you cannot afford to stop. In Revenue Engine terms this is a Deliver question: whether the business can take on more of the right work, which it cannot while capacity is tied up in the wrong kind.
And there is an identity element worth naming. If you were known for it, letting it go feels like giving something up rather than moving on. I have been through my own version of that, more than once, in how I got my offer and its pricing wrong three times. That feeling is real, and it is not a business reason. Businesses that never retire anything end up as an accumulation of everything they have ever offered, which is confusing to describe and exhausting to run.
Questions owners ask
How much notice should I give clients on a recurring service?
Long enough that nobody has to make a rushed decision, which for most service work means somewhere between three and twelve months depending on how deeply the arrangement is woven into their operations. Whatever you choose, give everybody the same notice and put it in writing.
Should I announce it publicly?
Usually not as an announcement. A quiet removal plus direct conversations with current clients and referrers is sufficient and avoids making a routine business decision into a piece of news. The exception is if a lot of people are mid-conversation about it, in which case one clear note prevents a month of confusion.
What if I want to bring it back later?
Then say it is paused rather than retired, and say so consistently. What causes problems is retiring something publicly and then quietly delivering it for whoever asks, because that teaches people that your stated boundaries are negotiable.
Can I just raise the price until nobody buys it?
It works, slowly, and it has a cost. In the meantime you are still delivering the thing, now to the specific clients who were least price-sensitive about work you did not want to do. A clean end is usually kinder to everyone, including you.