The Duct Tape Tax

I was on a website the other day. A small, independent business, nothing fancy, but honestly not bad. Clean enough. Professional enough. The kind of site you'd click around on and think, okay, these people have their act together.

Then I tried to actually do something on it.

Wanted to book a spot at an event they were hosting? That kicked me out to a separate ticketing platform: different look, different login, and a cut taken off the top before the owner ever sees a dollar of it. Wanted to book one of the cottages they rent out? Off to Airbnb, where a chunk of that booking gets skimmed away before it lands in their pocket.

Nothing about the experience was bad, exactly. It wasn't theirs. It was five companies' software taped together behind a homepage that made it look like one business. And every seam in that tape is a place where money and trust can leak out.

This is the part nobody budgets for

Piecemeal software doesn't announce itself as expensive. Nobody sits down and thinks, "I am now going to lose a percentage of my event revenue to a ticketing platform and another chunk of my rental income to Airbnb, on top of paying separately for my website, scheduler, and payment processor." It happens one convenient sign-up at a time. Need a booking calendar? There's an app for that. Need to sell tickets? There's a platform for that too, and it takes its cut automatically, so it barely feels like a bill. Need payments? Another account, another fee.

None of those decisions feel expensive in the moment. Add them up over a year and they can become one of the biggest line items in the business. Unlike rent or supplies, this line item can also confuse clients, because every step of working with you looks like it belongs to someone else.

The fee isn't even the worst part

Here's what nobody thinks about until it's too late: when someone books through a marketplace, that guest may be the platform's customer first and yours a distant second. The platform has the email, phone number, and booking history. Depending on its rules, you may not get a list you can use next season with a "we'd love to have you back," or a heads-up when a date opens last-minute.

That's you paying twice. Once in the fee, and again in the relationship you may not own. You did the work of getting that person to notice you, and then handed the record of them to a company that isn't you.

It isn't only event hosts and cottage owners

If you're a therapist who went out on your own, this probably sounds familiar even if your business looks nothing like the one I was clicking through. Session booking through one app. Intake forms through another. A different tool for payments. Maybe an event page if you run a workshop or group. A website that was built once, years ago, and now sort of sits there, disconnected from all of it.

Every tool may have a monthly fee, a processing fee, or a separate login that you and your clients have to figure out. And every time a potential client bounces between three different-looking pages to book a first session, you lose a little of the credibility you worked hard to build. Duct tape holds things together. It doesn't make them look like they belong together.

The same data question applies to you too. If someone signs up through a third-party scheduling widget or an outside page for your workshop, where does their information live? Can you export it? Can you keep it if you leave? Can you see the relationship in one client record? Those answers matter before you add the next tool.

The fix isn't "add one more tool"

The fix is deciding which parts of the business need to share the same information and experience. Your website should know your services. Your services should feed your booking flow. Bookings, payments, and client details should stay connected. The public experience should feel like your business from the first search to the final confirmation.

That's the idea behind Club Solo: one guided platform for the brand, website, services, content, booking, payments, and client management of an independent service business. You answer the questions, review the work, choose when to publish, and manage the business through the same connected portal. Your domain, website, content, images, and client list remain yours.

You went solo so you'd be building something that's yours. Make sure the systems running it support that goal too.

See what the connected platform includes.