How to raise your prices without losing your regulars

The fear is always the same: put it up and they leave. What actually happens in a small service business is that a handful of people go, most do not notice for a week, and the ones who stay are the ones who were already worth having. What loses clients is not the increase — it is finding out about it in the chair.

When it is overdue

• You are fully booked weeks ahead. A waiting list is a price signal, not a compliment.
• Your product costs have risen and the service price has not moved for a year or more.
• You are working through lunch to fit people in.
• The number on your price list is one you would not accept from a colleague doing the same work.

How much, and how often

Small and regular beats large and rare. A rise of five to ten per cent once a year passes almost unremarked; the same money taken as a thirty per cent jump after four years feels like a different business. If you are badly behind, move in two steps six months apart rather than one.

Change the price of the services where your time is worst paid first — usually the long ones, and usually the ones with the most product in them. Work out what an hour of each service earns you after materials before deciding which number moves.

The notice that keeps people

1. 1Four to six weeks' warning, in writing, to everyone — not only the ones due in.
2. 2The date it starts, and the new prices in full. No "prices from".
3. 3One sentence of reason, plainly: costs, or time. Not an apology and not a paragraph.
4. 4Existing bookings honoured at the old price. It costs little and it is the part people remember.

The wording

"From 1 November my prices are going up: a full head of colour will be £X and a cut and finish £Y. Anything already booked before then stays at the current price. Product costs have gone up twice this year and I have held them as long as I can — thank you for sticking with me."

That is the whole message. No justification of your skills, no comparison to salons down the road, no discount attached to soften it. A discount offered alongside a rise tells people the rise was negotiable.

What to watch afterwards

Rebooking rate, not comments. Count how many of the clients who came in the eight weeks after the rise booked their next appointment before leaving, and compare it to the eight weeks before. That number tells you what happened; the one loud message you got does not.