BUSINESS
Pricing
IS THE PRICE RIGHT? Deciding whether to raise your prices is difficult enough in a normal year, but should you raise your prices for 2021 or hold off? The answer may be different for every business…
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ETTING the right price for your services is one that most people running timebased businesses find tricky. For some reason, we’re willing accept that a main dealer car mechanic can be charged out at £80 and hour, or that a visit from the boiler repair chap will cost us £60 before he even arrives at our home, yet we consistently base our pricing on covering our overheads and what we decide others would be willing to pay. Weirdly, we tell ourselves that because we are a caring profession, because we have empathy with our clients, often sharing in the most intimate details of their lives, their health and wellbeing, that we cannot charge too much. In general, we don’t think to increase our pricing when our own costs have risen or when we’ve added to our expertise. Many of us set our prices at the outset of our careers and either hold them until we can no longer afford to do so, or raise them in line with inflation without taking other factors into account. We benchmark our prices against other local holistic therapists, not realising that they too may be constantly undervaluing themselves, keeping prices low across entire towns or regions. This can easily lead to a situation where the majority of holistic therapists are barely sustaining their businesses.
delivering services mean that your overheads have reduced. Perhaps most of your income now comes from online sessions or you have renegotiated the lease on your premises so you are now more profitable than previously. Even so, it makes sense to benchmark your prices, consider premium add-ons and carefully review your costs to see if they can be reduced.
THE CASE FOR RAISING YOUR PRICES The majority of clients are happy to accept a price rise, not least because it is difficult to put a price on many of the intangible aspects of your services which clients particularly value, such
as the improvement to their health and mental or emotional wellbeing. In short, they may value your services more than you do. For many people, particularly those with chronic pain or health issues, their holistic therapy sessions are regarded as essential purchases, not a nice-tohave luxury. The chance are that the costs of doing business have increased significantly for you. You may have an annual rent rise for your premises, an increase in business rates and increased overheads for utilities and broadband. Factor these costs and others such as additional PPE, increased cleaning and laundry costs, additional
THE CASE AGAINST RAISING YOUR PRICES The economy is not in a good place right now. Businesses are closing and current forecasts suggest that there could be as many as 3 million unemployed people by January. Many of these will be in the hospitality and retail sectors. Some leading think tanks are suggesting that it will be very late in 2022 before the economy comes back to prepandemic levels and that’s without taking into account the uncertain potential impacts of a no-deal Brexit. It may be that your clientele is likely to be particularly badly affected or that new ways of
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holistic therapist 2020
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