I'm not going to spend this issue convincing you that you're underpriced. You already suspect it, and if you don't, no email is going to fix that.

This is about the part nobody teaches, which is the rollout.

Because here's what actually happens to most owners. Somewhere around December eighteenth, between the holiday party and the family stuff, you finally decide you're raising prices. You send a short email on December twenty ninth saying rates go up January first. And then you spend the first three weeks of January in defensive conversations with your best clients, who are annoyed less about the money and more about the fact that you sprung it on them during their own budget season.

Some of them leave. The wrong ones stay. You end the whole thing wishing you hadn't bothered.

The increase wasn't the problem. Eleven days of notice was the problem.

It is September twenty third. You have ninety nine days. That is a comfortable amount of runway to do this properly, and this is the last window where that's true.

Before you touch a client list, figure out what the increase is actually worth. This takes five minutes and it changes how hard you're willing to defend the decision.

Take your recurring or repeat revenue. Say it's $70,000 a month.

A twelve percent increase is $8,400 a month. That's $100,800 over the next year.

Now the important half. Because you're not adding labor, materials, or overhead to deliver the same work, that $8,400 a month drops almost entirely to the bottom line. If you're running a twenty percent net margin, you would need to sell roughly $42,000 a month in brand new work to produce the same profit.

Forty two thousand a month in new sales, or one email sequence.

Hold that number in your head, because in about six weeks somebody is going to push back and you're going to want to fold, and this is the number that'll keep your spine straight.

I use a simple structure and it holds up across almost every service category I've worked in.

Seven percent is invisible. If you haven't raised prices in over a year and you just want to keep pace without a conversation, seven percent gets absorbed with almost no friction. Nobody churns over seven. But understand what you're choosing: seven percent is a maintenance move, not a growth move.

Twelve to fifteen percent is the real one. This is where it gets noticed and discussed, and where the money actually shows up. Expect two to five percent of your book to push back and one to three percent to leave. That's not failure, that's the price of the transaction.

Twenty percent or more is a repositioning, not an increase. If you go here, you need to change something real about the offer at the same time. Different scope, different service level, different name. People will accept a twenty percent increase on a different thing much more easily than a twenty percent increase on the same thing.

For most of you reading this, the answer is twelve to fifteen on your recurring book, and a separate, larger number on new business starting immediately.

That last part matters. New prospects have no history with your old pricing. Raise their rate today. Right now. You do not need a ninety day rollout to charge a stranger more money.

Do not send one email to everyone. This is where most of the damage happens.

Pull your client list and sort into three groups.

Group A. Your best clients. High margin, low drama, pay on time, refer people, been with you a while. Usually twenty to thirty percent of your book.

Group B. Solid, profitable, unremarkable. They pay, they don't cause problems, they don't send referrals. The bulk of your list.

Group C. Low margin, high maintenance, slow pay, scope creep. You know exactly who these are. You thought of two names before you finished reading the sentence.

Each group gets a different treatment, a different message, and a different timeline.

Group A gets a phone call before they get an email. Not a long one. Four minutes. "Wanted you to hear this from me before it shows up in an email. Rates are going up in January. Here's what's changing, here's what isn't, and here's what I'm doing to make sure you're taken care of." Then give them something small: locked pricing through a longer term, first access to scheduling, a small credit. You are not buying them off. You are signaling that the relationship is different from the transaction.

Group B gets the letter. Clean, confident, no apology, thirty to sixty days before the effective date.

Group C gets the full increase with no cushion, no call, no grandfather option. You are quietly hoping some of them leave. Be honest with yourself about that. If your C clients are twelve percent of revenue and forty percent of your headaches, losing half of them is a great outcome that frees capacity for better work.

This is the part that makes or breaks it. Dates, not intentions.

Week of October sixth. Decide the number. Pull the book. Sort into A, B, C. Write the letter once. Half a day of work, total.

Week of October thirteenth. Raise new business pricing. Every quote that leaves your office from this point forward is at the new rate. No exceptions, no "well this one's a friend of a friend."

Week of October twentieth. Group A calls. You personally. All of them. Block two afternoons.

November third. Group B and Group C letters go out. Effective date January first. That is sixty days of notice, which is more than almost anyone gives, and it removes the single biggest objection before it's raised.

December first. Follow up with anyone who hasn't acknowledged. One short email.

December fifteenth. Deadline for any grandfather or prepay option you offered. Hard stop.

January first. New rates live. Update your proposals, your contracts, your payment links, your website, and whatever automation sends quotes, because the number one way this falls apart is the new price never making it into the systems that actually charge people. If your pipeline and invoicing both live in Go High Level, block two hours and update every template and product in one sitting so nothing quietly keeps billing the old number.

Five parts. Keep it under two hundred and fifty words. Long letters read like guilt.

Open with the fact. Not a windup. "Starting January 1, our rates are increasing by twelve percent."

Give one real reason, stated plainly. Wages, materials, insurance, the fact that you've absorbed increases for two years. One sentence. Do not write a paragraph about the economy. Every reader has already heard it and nobody believes the ones who oversell it.

Say what is not changing. This is the part almost everyone leaves out, and it's the part that keeps clients calm. "Your crew stays the same. Your schedule stays the same. Your point of contact stays the same."

Give them one thing that's new. It doesn't have to cost you money. A faster response guarantee. A quarterly check in call. Priority scheduling. Photo documentation on every visit. Something that shows the price moved because the offer moved.

Close with a door, not a wall. "If you want to talk through it, grab fifteen minutes on my calendar." Most won't. The ones who do were going to call anyway, and you'd rather have that conversation on your terms in November than a surprise cancellation in February.

"That's a big jump." Agree with the premise, hold the number. "It is more than the last few years, and that's on me for waiting too long to adjust. This puts us where we should have been and it's what lets me keep the same crew on your account."

"Can you hold my old rate?" Only if you get something for it. Never give a concession for free. "I can hold your current rate through June if you go annual instead of month to month." Now the discount bought you term. If they say no, the rate goes up. Both outcomes are fine.

"I'm going to get some other quotes." Do not panic, and do not discount on the spot. "Completely fair, I'd do the same. When you get them, send them over and I'll tell you honestly how they compare on scope, because the cheap ones usually leave two or three things out. And whatever you decide, we're good." Roughly three quarters of the people who say this never follow through, and the ones who do tend to come back with a new appreciation for what you actually do.

A price increase with nothing attached feels like a tax. A price increase with something attached feels like a decision. The trick is picking additions that cost you time you were already spending, or nothing at all.

A standing quarterly call. Fifteen minutes on the calendar, four times a year. You get retention and referral conversations you were never having. They get to feel like somebody is paying attention. Costs you one hour a year per client.

Documented proof of work. Photos, a short summary, a before and after on every visit or engagement. Your team already has phones. This single addition does more to justify a higher rate than any argument you'll ever make, because it turns invisible work into visible work.

A response time commitment. "We get back to you within four business hours." If you already do this, say it out loud and put it in writing. If you don't already do it, this is worth fixing anyway.

Priority scheduling for anyone above a certain tier. Costs nothing when you have capacity. Worth a great deal to the client who once waited three weeks.

An annual review of their account. One page, once a year, showing what you did and what you'd recommend next. This one is worth more than it sounds, because it's also the single best upsell conversation you will have all year, and it arrives without you having to manufacture a reason for it.

Pick two. Name them in the letter. That's all it takes for the increase to read as an upgrade rather than an extraction.

Say you've got that $70,000 a month book and you go up twelve percent.

If you lose nobody, you're at $78,400.

If you lose five percent of your revenue in cancellations, you're at $74,480. Still up $4,480 a month with less work to deliver it.

If you lose ten percent, you're at $70,560. Flat revenue, ten percent less delivery load, which means your margin actually improved and you just freed capacity.

You'd have to lose more than eleven percent of your book for this to be a net negative on revenue, and even then you'd likely be ahead on profit. In my experience the real number lands between one and four percent, and it's almost entirely from Group C.

That's the whole risk. Now go do it.

I got tired of rebuilding this for clients every fall, so I put the entire thing into one working document.

Inside The Price Increase Playbook you'll find the ninety day calendar with every date mapped out, the A/B/C client sorting worksheet with the scoring criteria I use, three full letter templates written for different situations, the Group A phone script word for word, the objection responses with follow up branches, the churn tolerance calculator so you can see your own break even before you commit, and a systems checklist so the new price actually makes it into every place that charges a customer.

It's not a teaser and it's not a PDF of bullet points. It's the document I use.

Talk Soon,
Dan

Dan Kaufman
Founder, Dead Simple Growth and Pinnacle Masters

P.S. Reply with RAISE and I'll send you The Price Increase Playbook. If you tell me your monthly recurring number in the same reply, I'll also send back the specific percentage I'd use for your situation and what I'd hand your Group A clients to make the call land.