Should your small business do Black Friday? A straight answer for Australian service-based businesses
Black Friday 2026 falls on Friday 27 November, with Cyber Monday on 30 November. That's still months away, which is exactly why I'm writing this now instead of in the third week of November when everyone's feed turns black and red and the decision gets made in a panic on a Wednesday night.
Because the answer to "should we do Black Friday?" is that it depends entirely on a handful of things many small businesses never sit down and work out. So let's work them out now.
The event has outgrown retail and that's a problem
Black Friday used to be a shopping weekend for shops. It isn't any more. The scale of it in Australia is genuinely enormous now. The Australian Retailers Association and Roy Morgan put the 2025 Black Friday to Cyber Monday weekend at around $6.8 billion, up about 4% on the year before. CommBank iQ, looking at a wider two-week window and de-identified transactions from roughly seven million Australians, found spending of $23.8 billion, which made that fortnight almost 20% bigger than a normal one. Australia Post recorded its biggest parcel week on record.
Those numbers are why everyone feels the pull. They're also why the event has spilled well past the businesses it was designed for. I now see accountants running Black Friday offers. Physios. Bookkeepers. Marketing consultants. Anyone with an invoicing system and a black graphic.
Here's the reason I come back to this with my clients around this time every year - the maths that makes Black Friday work for a retailer clearing stock is not the same maths that applies to you if you sell your time.
Small businesses are already backing away
You are not being precious if you've been feeling uneasy about it. Research from Xero, surveying 500 Australian small businesses, found that only 39% were definitely taking part in 2025, which was down 22 percentage points on the year before. Nearly two thirds said they felt pressure to compete with big brands over the period, and that pressure had gone up, not down.
Around 30% said plainly that they couldn't afford to discount. Another 40% were worried about what it would do to their margins. And a quarter said something I think is the most interesting line in the whole survey: they believed their customers would keep buying from them without a one-off discount.
That last group is onto something.
Meanwhile Deloitte found that about 44% of Australian retailers were participating. So even in retail, where the event actually makes sense, more than half sit it out. The idea that everyone is doing this is not true. It just feels true because the ones doing it are shouting.
The four questions to answer before you decide to participate in Black Friday
1. What is the sale actually for?
Not what do you want it to do? What is it for? There are excellent answers like:
You've got stock sitting there that's costing you money.
You want to fill a period that's traditionally dead.
You want to introduce people to a service they don't know you offer, and you've worked out how you'll keep them afterwards.
You've built a package you're proud of and you want a reason to put it in front of people.
Any of those, go for it. There's a real job for the offer to do.
"Everyone else is doing it" is not a reason. It's a feeling, and it's an expensive one.
2. What does the discount actually do to your profit?
Let’s take a little maths break: Say you're selling a product at $100 that costs you $50. Your gross margin is $50. Take 20% off and you're selling at $80, still costing you $50, so your margin is now $30. To make the same gross profit as before, you need to sell about 67% more units. Take 30% off and your margin drops to $20, which means you need to sell two and a half times as much just to stand still.
Now do it for a service business, where it gets worse. Say you charge $150 an hour and you bill 25 hours in a good week, so that's $3,750. Offer 25% off and you're at $112.50 an hour. To earn the same $3,750 you need to bill 33 hours. That's an extra eight hours of work in the same week, in November, for the same money, while your costs haven't moved an inch.
Retailers discount to clear something that's taking up space and losing value. Your Tuesday afternoon isn't sitting in a warehouse. You can't have a clearance sale on your own capacity.
3. Is this new revenue, or revenue you were getting anyway?
This is the one I'd underline if I could only pick one.
A lot of Black Friday income isn't new. It's December revenue pulled forward into November and handed over at 30% off. The month looks fantastic. The quarter doesn't. If your November spikes and your December falls off a cliff, you didn't run a promotion. You ran a discount for people who were going to buy from you regardless.
Worse, if you do it every year, you train your regulars to wait. And customers who are trained to wait are very hard to untrain.
4. What do you want these customers to do next?
If the answer is nothing, you've just bought a one-off transaction at a discount, from someone who came for the price and will leave for a better one.
The offer is the easy part. The plan for what happens after the offer is the part that decides whether this was worth doing. Do they get a follow-up? An invitation to book again? A reason to come back at full price in February? If there's nothing on the other side, you're renting attention, not building anything.
If you want to participate without gutting your margin
You don't have to choose between a 30% discount and doing nothing at all. There's a lot of room in the middle, and for service businesses it's usually where the good ideas live.
Add rather than subtract. Include a bonus session, an upgrade, a piece of work you'd normally charge extra for. The client pays full price and gets more, which protects your margin and still feels generous.
Build something limited that you'd genuinely like to sell more of. A defined package, available for a set window, with a clear outcome attached to it. That's a far better offer than a percentage off everything, and it doesn't reset your pricing in anyone's head.
Reward the people you already have. Early access, a thank-you upgrade, something exclusive for your existing customers rather than your future ones. Most Black Friday activity is aimed at strangers, which is a strange choice when your regulars are the ones who actually pay your bills.
Sell forward. Prepaid blocks, gift vouchers, packages that get used in the new year. It brings cash in now and fills January and February, which for a lot of service businesses is the genuinely quiet part of the calendar.
Or run your own thing at your own time. There is no rule that says your annual offer has to happen on the same day as everyone else's, competing with Amazon's advertising budget. A March offer to your own list will probably sell better than a loud promo in November to strangers.
The businesses that opted out and won anyway
If you want proof that not participating is a legitimate position, there's a decade of it.
REI, the American outdoor co-op, has closed its stores on Black Friday since 2015 with its #OptOutside campaign, paying staff to take the day off. The campaign won a Grand Prix at Cannes and has now run for over ten years.
Patagonia has spent years directing its Black Friday energy toward repair and reuse through Worn Wear, and toward donations, rather than discounting.
Deciem, the company behind The Ordinary, replaced the whole thing with Slowvember, spreading a modest discount across the month and closing on Black Friday itself.
Closer to home, Sydney fashion label Philosophy Australia has been publicly and specifically saying no. The argument its founder makes is one I'd repeat word for word to any small operator: the model was built for big players with offshore production and deep margins, and for small local makers it encourages overproduction, undervalues the people doing the work, and teaches customers to expect permanent markdowns.
Someone much smaller and much closer to home - Mornington Peninsula-based non-alcoholic drink brand ETCH Sparkling does a “Give Back Friday” on the day - donating $1 from each product sale to Sober in the Country.
None of these businesses disappeared. Several of them got more attention for opting out than they'd have got for a sale.
What I'd actually do if I were you
You’ve found your way to this blog, so it’s safe to say you’re weighing up your options. If I were you, I’d decide now, in August or September, not on 20 November.
Work out whether there's a real job for an offer to do in your business this year. If there is, build the offer around that job, run the numbers on what it costs you, plan how you'll market it over several weeks rather than several days, and decide in advance what those customers get invited to next.
If there isn't a real job for it, don't do it. Spend that fortnight on the thing that reliably works better for small businesses anyway, which is looking after the customers you already have. Call them. Follow up. Ask how the thing they bought is going. That doesn't cost you a cent of margin and it's the reason people say your name out loud when someone asks for a recommendation.
Because a sale gets you noticed. The experience is what gets you remembered, and only one of those keeps working in February.
And if the numbers don't stack up? Cool. You don't have to have a Black Friday sale. Sometimes keeping your margin is the better deal.
If you'd like help working out whether an end-of-year offer makes sense for your business, and what to do with it if it does, that's the kind of thing we sort out together in a marketing plan. Get in touch or book a free chat with me.
Hi, I’m Erika McInerney - a marketing and customer experience strategist working with regional, suburban and small-town businesses.
I help you see where customers and revenue are leaking, build practical marketing strategies around your real capacity, and create systems that actually support your business (and your life).
Alongside one-on-one work, I partner with councils, business groups and organisations to deliver practical workshops that build marketing capability across entire communities.
If you’re ready for clearer strategy and more confident visibility, you can book a free discovery call, send an email or connect on social media.
