The fear is always the same: put the rate up and the phone stops ringing. But you don't need to keep every customer to come out ahead — you need to keep enough of them. This tells you how many you can lose and still be better off than you are now.
Raising a price is easier when you know exactly what you can afford to lose. I'll send you the numbers so you're holding them when the conversation happens.
The arithmetic on this page is the easy part. Saying the new number out loud, to a customer who remembers the old one, is the part that stops people \u2014 and that's what the book spends its time on. Which work to raise first, how to tell existing customers, and which ones you should be glad to lose.
The business side of a skilled trade: what to charge, which jobs pay, and what it's worth without you. Twenty-one tools.
Not out yet. The form above is how you'll hear when it is.
Every trade owner has run this argument in their head. Put the rate up ten percent and some customers walk. Lose enough of them and you're worse off than before. Safer to leave it alone.
What that argument misses is that the work you lose costs you money to perform, and you stop paying for it the moment it goes away. You don't lose the whole invoice \u2014 you lose the invoice minus the materials, the hours, the fuel and the wear. On thin margins, that difference is enormous.
Put real numbers on it. If you charge $95 an hour and it costs you $80, every hour earns you $15. Raise to $104.50 and every hour earns $24.50. You could lose nearly two out of every five hours you sell and still finish the year exactly where you started \u2014 while working substantially less.
That's not a trick. It's what happens when a price increase lands almost entirely on the profit line, because your costs don't move when you change your rate.
The thinner your current margin, the more work you can afford to lose. That reads backwards until you see why: when you're barely making anything per hour, a rate rise multiplies your profit rather than adding to it.
It tells you the point where a price increase stops paying. That's genuinely useful, because most owners have no idea whether their tolerance is two percent or forty, and they assume the worst.
It doesn't tell you how much work you'll actually lose. Nobody can tell you that. But two things are worth knowing. Losses from a modest increase are usually far smaller than owners expect \u2014 a single-digit rise rarely shows up in call volume at all, because most customers aren't comparing you against a competitor at the moment they call. And the customers you do lose are disproportionately the ones you'd have wanted to lose: the price-shoppers, the slow payers, the ones who question every line.
Run the tool at five, ten and fifteen percent and look at what each buys you. Most owners find the difference between five and ten is small in risk and large in outcome. If your calculated break-even rate is well above what you currently charge, the honest answer is that you need a bigger increase than feels comfortable, possibly staged over two rounds.
For recurring or contracted work, yes, and with notice \u2014 that's a relationship, not a transaction. For ordinary call-out work, no. The next quote carries the next price, which is how every business you buy from handles it.
Then you've learned something worth far more than the lost margin: your work is competing on price, which means it's substitutable. That's a positioning problem, and it doesn't get better by charging less. It gets better by being the person who shows up when they say they will.
This is the hardest case and the honest answer is: sometimes yes. If you're not busy and you're also not profitable, more of the same work at the same rate takes you nowhere. But if you're genuinely short of work, fix demand first \u2014 a higher rate on an empty calendar is still an empty calendar.