When to Raise Your Prices

Almost nobody raises prices too early. The usual pattern is a number picked nervously at the start, kept for two years out of habit, and quietly resented every time an order comes in.

The signals that actually mean something

You are booked out and turning work away. You feel a small sink in your stomach when an order arrives rather than a lift. Your costs have moved and your price has not. Any one of those is enough. Waiting for all three is how people stay underpriced for years.

What is not a signal

A quiet fortnight is not a signal, and neither is one buyer telling you that somebody else charges less. Somebody always charges less. Pricing against the cheapest person in a market you did not choose to be measured against is how you end up working more for the same money.

Move it on new buyers first

The simplest version, and the one that causes the least friction: the new price applies to new enquiries from today. Anyone mid order pays what they agreed. You are not obliged to write to your existing buyers about it at all, and most of the awkwardness people imagine comes from announcing a change nobody asked to be consulted on.

Do not explain it

A price is a number, not an argument. The moment you justify it you have invited a negotiation, and the justification tends to sound like an apology whatever words you use. Update it where it is written, answer enquiries at the new number, and let it be ordinary.

Expect to lose a few, and count what replaces them

Some buyers leave at any increase. What matters is what the rest are worth. Fewer orders at a better price, with the same hours, is not a smaller business. It is the same business with the resentment taken out of it, and that is usually the thing that was actually running out.