Raising your prices without losing your customers

Ask an owner when they last raised their prices and watch the pause. It is usually longer ago than they think, and they usually know it.

The reluctance is understandable. Every other lever — more jobs, more vans, more hours — is visible work with a visible result. A price rise is a conversation you might lose, in exchange for money that feels like it arrived by not working. It gets deferred, and deferred again, and meanwhile materials went up twice.

Why it outperforms everything else you could do

Take a job you price at £400 with £250 of costs. You make £150.

Raise the price by 10%, to £440, and your costs do not move. You now make £190 — a 27% increase in what you keep, from a change most customers will not question.

To make that £40 any other way you would have to find, quote, schedule, drive to and complete additional work — with the fuel, the hours and the wear that implies. The price rise is the same money with none of the work attached.

That arithmetic is why it is the first thing any decent accountant asks about, and why it is the last thing most owners do.

How to tell whether you are due one

When did you last change them? If you cannot remember the month, you are overdue. Materials, insurance, fuel and wages have all moved in the meantime. A price that has not changed in two years is a price that has quietly fallen.

Are you winning nearly everything you quote? This feels like success and usually is not. A shop winning almost every job it quotes is priced below the market — the quotes it should be losing are the ones subsidising the rest. A healthy loss rate is normal and necessary.

Are you busy and still not making money? The clearest signal there is. Busy and unprofitable means the price is wrong, not that you need more work. Taking on more of it makes things worse, faster.

Are you avoiding certain jobs? Most shops have a type of work they quietly dread. Usually it is underpriced rather than genuinely awful.

Price the work, not the hour

Hourly pricing punishes you for being good. Twenty years of experience means you do in forty minutes what takes someone else two hours — and hourly billing means you are paid a third as much for the same outcome.

It also invites an argument you cannot win, because it makes the conversation about your time rather than about their problem. Nobody wants an hour of your time. They want a working boiler.

Pricing by the job takes the length of the visit off the table, rewards competence instead of penalising it, and lets a customer say yes to a number before you start rather than worry while you work.

Doing it without the dreaded conversation

Do it on new quotes first. Most price rises need no announcement at all. New customers have no previous number to compare against.

Existing customers get notice, not an apology. One clear line, in advance: prices are changing from the first of next month, here is the new rate. No essay, no justification paragraph. A long explanation signals that you think it is not justified.

Never apologise for it. "I'm really sorry but unfortunately I have to…" invites negotiation. "From September my call-out is £X" does not.

Expect to lose someone, and let them go. Some customers will leave. In almost every case they are the ones who took the longest to pay and complained the most, and losing them is the point rather than the cost.

Raise once, properly. A 3% rise you apologise for costs you the same awkwardness as a 12% rise you state plainly, and buys a fraction of the benefit. If you are going to have the conversation, make it worth having.

The honest limits of this advice

Fixed-term agreements are fixed. A maintenance contract with a stated price runs to its end, and raising it mid-term is a different and worse conversation.

Commercial and domestic behave differently. A commercial client with a procurement process may need notice periods you have agreed to in writing.

Local ceilings are real. Every area has a level beyond which the work goes elsewhere. This is an argument for finding your ceiling rather than assuming you are already at it — most shops are well below.

None of this is financial advice. It is a description of how the arithmetic works. What your business can bear depends on facts about it that this article does not know.

The one thing to take away

Look up when you last raised your prices. If the answer is more than a year ago, that is the finding — and the fix costs you one uncomfortable line in an email rather than a single extra job.