Hey, Pro Organizer! Raise Your Prices!
“No matter who you are, no matter what your pricing is, I want you to stop while you’re doing right now and think, what are my current prices? When was the last time I raised my prices?”
I just have been thinking about something lately and I wanted to get it out there—I want to talk about pricing.
I've had so many people come lately, people in our Inspired Organizer group and other organizers that have just said, “Hey, I'm really struggling with, I think I need to raise my prices, but I don’t know how to do it.”
So people are getting caught up on the “how."
And I just want you to think about first of all—no matter who you are, no matter what your pricing is, I want you to stop while you're doing right now and think, what are my current prices? When was the last time I raised my prices?
And by the way—if the answer to that is, oof, I haven't raised my prices in two years or three years, or I haven't raised my prices ever…
And if you're sitting there thinking, man, I'm having to work a lot of hours to make what I need to make, I want you to think about where your pricing is.
And I want to just stop right now—because I know the next thing that almost everyone is thinking, because I think it myself, anytime I raise my prices—if I raise my prices,
“I'm never going to get a client ever again.”
When I first started in my business many years ago, I charged $40 an hour and I realized pretty quickly that was not sustainable.
But that was the amount of money that when I first started, I was like, oh, I think this is all I can charge for my services. And every single time I have raised my prices since then, and I have raised them several times, I have had this same thought process. So if I have had it, I guarantee everyone else is having it.
“I am never going to get a client ever again.”
“All my clients that are at my current prices are not going to follow me.“
All these thoughts come into your head, right? I totally get it.
Here's what has actually happened—every single time I have raised my prices.
I have not lost clients.
In fact, oftentimes I have gained them.
And this is not just my experience. I'm not telling you just my experience—I'm telling you the experience of many, many, many organizers that I work with at Pro Organizer Studio. I want you to think about, when was the last time I raised my prices? What do I need to raise my prices to, or what would feel good to me to raise my prices to so that maybe I could work a few less hours or maybe I can gain a new clientele?
By the way, sometimes when you raise your prices, you actually get better clients.
There are some people that are not price shoppers. By the way, are price shoppers your ideal clients? They're not my ideal clients. Sometimes if you raise your prices, you find a different clientele, it might be more of your ideal client that you're looking for, and the people that are going to find you and connect with you and want to work with you are always going to find you.
I promise you.
One of the roadblocks that I run into when I tell people, raise your prices, is the “how to.”
A lot of people get stuck on the how to. So it's not the concept of raising the prices that stops people. Sometimes it's the how do I inform people, how do I change it?
And you know, one of my favorite suggestions to make to people, which is very hard to do in actual practice, is we're not going to overthink this.
Organizers—we all love to overthink things and we're not going to overthink this. There are a few things that you can do very, very easily. You can go to your website right now if you want to, if you're sitting at your desk and you can go raise your prices on your website without thinking that hard about it.
So anybody new that's coming to you can come to your website and say, okay, this organizer is X number of dollars per hour, and these are what their packages look like. Whatever that looks like for you, you can do that on your website right now and not even have to think about it, not have to notify a single person that you've done that.
This is just the step that you take to raise your prices for new people that are coming to you from today.
Now what you have to think about is what is your strategy for current clients? There are a lot of things that you can do, and you can choose what feels good to you.
I will always say one of my favorite things about our business is we get to do things however we want to. If you feel more comfortable, you don't even have to tell your current clients that your prices are going up.
You can keep your current clients on your current pricing structure if you want to. You can also take those clients and say, “Hey, I am raising my prices. After X date, your package will go up to blah, or your price per hour will go up to blah.” Whatever that looks like for you, you can absolutely give them a grace period of when they're going to that new pricing.
Something that I have seen done successfully is that an organizer, especially if you're doing packages, you can say, “Hey, you can lock in your current pricing for packages until X date.” Sometimes that encourages people to buy a big package at that lower rate. You can also choose to tell them, Hey, your pricing will go up in a year or six months, or whatever.
The other thing you can do is do it on a client by client basis.There might be some clients that you say, I'm going to raise my prices to this person, but I'm not going to raise them to this other person. But getting caught up on the how. And getting really worried about the, oh my gosh, how am I going to tell people and what am I going to tell people?
Often is the biggest stopper for raising prices, and I really wanna take those roadblocks away from you. There are tons of things that you can do to make it easier.
So I want to give one caveat to the, “whenever I have done this, I have not lost a client.” I have sometimes used this to purposely lose a client. And this is just a thing that happens. If you were a newer organizer, it might not have happened to you yet.
If you're an experienced organizer, you're like, “Hey, girl. I feel you. I know what you're talking about.” There are some clients that are not our ideal clients and sometimes we would like to encourage them that perhaps we are not the organizer for them. I have someone I will be honest with you, that I have used this strategy on because this person constantly tries to get discounts and get free hours for certain things. And this is a person who's able to afford my services and it has been a frustration for me for a long time.
I have had a policy with some clients that I have kept them at an earlier pricing structure, and recently that person contacted me and said, Hey, I'd really like to do some hours. And I was like, sure, I would love to do that, I just need to let you know here's my new pricing structure and I no longer give a friends and family discount and X, Y, Z. I went through this whole thing and then I was ghosted, which is fine with me.
So you can use this strategy if there are some people that are on your books that are a challenge in a way that is not pleasant or enjoyable to you. Okay? So when I say I've never lost a client, that is true except for the ones that I have chosen to let go of using this strategy.
The other thing to remember is nothing is ever written in stone. So whatever you decide—now, let's say that you decide you're going to keep current clients at the pricing that they have right now. There is nothing that says that in December you can’t say, “Hey, just letting you know my prices are going up in January. They actually went up for new clients in September, but I am raising my prices, and I would love to keep you as a client. Here is my new pricing structure. If you have any questions, let me know.”
You can decide to keep them on current pricing now and then decide to raise them later. The world is your oyster, you guys.
But what I want you to take from this is, I want you to consider raising those prices because I guarantee no matter where you are, no matter what your pricing is—pretty much no matter who the organizer is, I'm going to look at their pricing and I'm going to tell them, you know what? I bet you could raise that. And everybody thinks, oh my gosh—I am not comfortable with that. I want you to get comfortable with being uncomfortable. Sometimes we need to get out of that comfort zone so that we can really stretch ourselves.
Now, the other thing I want to tell you is—because nothing is written in stone and because we can change, if you raise your prices and you decide for whatever reason that you're not comfortable with either how much you raise them or that you raise them at all, or you realize maybe I did too much of a jump, whatever that looks like for you, you can also change the other direction.
If you go from $50 an hour to a $100 an hour, and then you realize, that was a little bit too big of a jump, you can take that down to $75 an hour. And there's nothing wrong with doing that either.
But if you're at $50 an hour, I'm telling you to raise your prices.
All right? I'm talking to you, $50 an hour person. I want you to raise your prices. The most important part about pricing in my opinion, is being able to present it to a client without stuttering, without stopping, without pausing very confidently.
So if you go into a client conversation and they say, how much is this going to cost me? And if you go, well, you know, it's, it's X amount of dollars, but I mean, I can probably give you a discount. I can give you my friends and family discount. I mean, we could probably work something out if that's too much for you.
NO! I want you to go in and, whatever amount of money your services are, whether you are doing packages, whether you are doing project pricing, whether you're doing per hour pricing, I want you to be able to go in and confidently present that pricing structure to a client.
This is the investment for my services.
By the way, this is a great time of year to be thinking about it. So I'm posting this on August 28th. Labor Day is coming soon—it’s this weekend, this upcoming weekend.
To me, Labor Day is like a second new year. And I know that may be silly, but it kind of is a delineation of, in the United States, (I understand we have people that follow us in the Southern Hemisphere and this is reversed) we're going into fall ,and kids are back in school and it's kind of a delineation of—summer is over, so vacations are over and all of that kind of stuff is over.
We're thinking about getting back into work mode, and that's a time that a lot of people decide, oh man, I really want to get organized.
The other thing that you have to think about is a lot of people love to get organized before the holidays. They realize, oh my gosh, I have family coming into town two months from now, and I have got to get my house in order.
So this is your message on this fine Monday morning of Labor Day Week, go look at your prices. Next Tuesday would be a great day to raise those prices.
By the way, today is a great day to raise those prices! I heard something the other day, and I think that this is a very common phrase that maybe I just have never heard before, and it was “the best time to do something big is, 10 years ago, the second best time to do it is today.”
So I, I just, I love that phrase, like, we can't go back and be like, I wish I would've done this a long time ago. Nope, it's a great day to do it today.
So, go to your website, raise those prices today on your website. Then figure out what you're going to do in terms of communicating to your current clients and to past clients that may be coming back to you.
You've got it. If you have any questions, please email me. hello@proorganizerstudio.com if you need some cheerleading, if you need some support. I'm here for you.
Just remember every single time, this is not just my experience, it's the experience of tons and tons of organizers that I've worked with—every single time I have raised my prices, it has been a great thing for my business—especially if you're sitting here going like, man, I'm tired and I would like to have another admin day at, or, I would like to be able to do X, Y, Z.
The other thing I am always going to tell organizers, please, this is my pet peeve. If you are charging people the credit card fee for you to take credit cards, please stop doing that. I'm begging you. Please don't charge credit card fees. Please raise your prices and amount, even if it's $5 an hour, raise your prices and amount that accounts for that. Also, I'm going remind you, you get that back on your taxes. It's an expense. You do get that money back, so raise your prices. Don't charge them those fees.
And that's another thing that you can do is you can look at are you charging clients for things that you could bake it into your pricing and then give it as a bonus to them. For instance, donation drop-offs. If you charge for donation drop-offs, maybe you raise your prices a little bit and give complimentary donation drop-offs to one spot.
This is your Monday morning reminder—it’s a great, great week, it's a great day, it’s a great time to raise your prices. And what I'm going to challenge you is even if that price change is not huge, even if it's $5 an hour, just do a little bump. Give yourself a little bit more breathing room, see how it feels, and then you're going to have the confidence to do a little bit bigger jump.