Once you’ve established yourself or business, and you’ve taken on as much as you can handle, and you’ve got customers waiting out the door, you’re probably ready to start charging more for your services. How can you successfully accomplish this and retain your customers? You have to increase in increments, and slowly.
Let’s say for this example that you charge $25 per hour and you’ve been doing so for the past year. Now you’d like to increase your rate to $50 an hour. Now, if you suddenly increase your rate overnight to $50, you’re likely going to lose all your current clients, and the ones that stick around will not be happy.
The best way to do this is set increments over the next year, and you need to email or contact all your current clients and let them know about the rate increase. Give them time to get ready for the increase. Tell them that in two months you’re going to increase from $25 and hour to $35 an hour. Sure, you’ll lose some clients, but not many, and at the same time, you’ll get new clients to replace them.
Then, after about 6-8 months, send out another email and let them know you’re increasing your rate again in two months from $35 to $50 an hour. The process will repeat, you’ll lose some clients and gain some more. But now, you’ve increased from $25 to $50 and it took you close to a year, but you didn’t lose any clients and gained new ones. You also eliminated the bottom feeders and cheap skates.