Quotes

Raising your prices without losing clients

Most venues raise too late and then too much at once. How to approach it, and what to say to existing clients.

Team MiceBird20 June 20266 min read

Four bars rising gently year on year, the last marked plus 4 percent

Your prices haven't moved in three years. Purchasing has gone up, staff cost more, and your margin has quietly halved. You know something has to change and you've put it off for two quarters, because you don't want to lose the regulars.

That delay is exactly what makes the increase painful. Wait three years and you have to go up twelve percent at once — and that is an amount someone starts a conversation about.

Small and regular beats large and rare

An increase of three to four percent a year is rarely noticed and almost never challenged. It's what people expect from every supplier.

The same total increase in one step, after three years, is an announcement. Your client has to explain it internally, so they'll ask questions they would never have asked at four percent.

Pick one moment a year — the new year, or the start of your season — and stick to it.

Not everything has to rise equally

An increase doesn't have to be one percentage across the whole list. You have more room than you think, provided you look at what happens where:

Scarce slots — Friday and Saturday evenings, December. Demand-based pricing is normal and expected there.
Small groups — a meeting for eight is nearly as much work as one for thirty. A minimum spend is often more sensible than a higher per-person price.
Individual extras — technical services, extra hours, late breakdown. Often untouched for years and rarely compared against competitors.
The base package — this is precisely what clients remember and compare. Be most careful here.

What to tell existing clients

Announce it before their next enquiry, not in the quote itself. An increase someone discovers in a proposal feels like something being done to them; the same increase in an email four weeks earlier is information.

Two or three sentences will do. Give the date, give the percentage, and offer to complete enquiries already in progress at the old rate. That last part costs you one quarter and buys the goodwill you were delaying for.

Once a year, empty your price list and rebuild it from today's purchasing costs rather than laying a percentage over the old one. That's how you find the items that have been below cost for years — usually technical services and out-of-hours staffing.

The client who leaves

The occasional client leaves over an increase. Often it's the one with the most exceptions, the latest changes and the longest payment term.

That isn't a consolation — it's arithmetic. If a four percent rise drives someone away, the margin on that client was already too thin to carry the work.

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