Overcoming the mindset challenges of raising your rates as a dog trainer/ animal behaviourist
If you find yourself frustrated that, despite spending countless hours working with clients, your bank balance doesn’t seem to accurately reflect your efforts, I’m going to tell it to you straight… you need to review your pricing.
Chances are, you haven't increased your rates in quite a while and, with the rising cost of living, it's possible that you're earning less than ever in real terms, despite continually investing in your professional skills and expertise.
Of course, having a successful business involves much more than just sticking your prices up (take a look at my post about the 5 pillars of business brilliance if you want to learn how the different elements of your business need to be balanced).
But the thing with pricing is that we often get stuck in our own heads about it.
We worry about whether our services are really worthy of an increased price tag… yeah, thanks for that, imposter syndrome.
We worry that nobody will want to pay more money and we’ll end up with no clients (a very understandable concern, especially in the current financial climate).
We worry that other trainers and behaviourists will judge us and think we’re getting ‘above ourselves’... Urgh, don’t even get me started on this one!
Mindset struggles like these often get in the way of making sensible business decisions, but it doesn’t have to be this way.
When faced with a pricing mindset block, I often ask my 1:1 business coaching clients what made them decide that the number they’ve currently set for their services is right and that every other possible number is wrong? I mean, why would £20 more be a ‘bad’ price? Who says? What about £5 more? What about £50 less?
You see, when it comes down to it, they’re all just numbers but sometimes we hold the idea of pricing so heavily in our mind that we get totally stuck.
Often, the number we decide on is actually quite arbitrary (and rarely aligned with what we actually need to earn – check out my free pricing calculator if you need help with this). Most of the time, it’s simply based on what we feel comfortable with. So, if you want to put up your prices but something in your mind is holding you back, often the key is to just get comfortable with the new number.
Want to know how I handle this?
Here’s my 5 step ‘getting comfortable’ process - this is what I do each time I make an incremental increase to my prices.
#01. Recognise unhelpful assumptions
For example, if I find myself thinking ‘oh nobody will pay that for me to help them with their growling dog when they could just google it’, I remind myself that this is an assumption based on my own thoughts and feelings rather than those of the people I want to work with.
Not convinced? Let me let you in on a secret… not long after I started my training and behaviour business, I was so overwhelmed with clients that I put my prices up to try to reduce the number of enquires so that I didn’t have to keep turning people away (yeah… sounds crazy, I know!). I was already sitting at the upper end of the local ‘market rate’ so assumed that this price increase would slow things down and allow me to catch my breath. What happened? I got more enquiries than ever! Yep… I had a lot to learn about business in those days.
#02. Make it real
It can be helpful to make the numbers feel more real, by considering what difference it would make to your life if you did put your prices up a bit. Even tiny increases add up so you can start small.
For example, if you typically deliver 15 hour-long training sessions a week and you charged just £5 more for each one, that would be an increase of around £300 per month in your pocket…. for nothing more than you were already doing!
Whilst that bonus £300 might make a big difference to you each month, the extra £5 your clients are paying is unlikely to be a barrier for them in most cases. To be clear, this is not about squeezing as much as you can out of your clients; it’s about being paid fairly for your time, skills and expertise, whilst making sure that you have a business which is actually sustainable in the long term.
#03. Set a date
Decide on a date that you’re going to increase your service prices and add it to your diary as if it’s a ‘done deal’.
The date itself is pretty irrelevant but you might go for the first day of the next month, the end of the year, the start of the financial year (or school year) or whatever feels good to you.
Alternatively, you could attach the increase to an event (eg. when I launch my new website) but if it’s something that’s likely to drift on for months then be mindful of that.
In general, try to make the price increase date no more than 2 months away… and ideally much sooner!
#04. Get familiar with it
Put your new pricing (the actual figures you’ll be charging for your services, not just how much they’ll be increased by) somewhere visible. Look at this often and remind yourself of what the prices look like.
For example, you could stick the prices on a post it note on your desk and each time you see it, just allow yourself to think ‘oh yeah, my XXX package is going to be £XXX soon’.
Talk about your new prices – even if just to your dog or cat! Get comfortable saying it. For new enquiries that come in, let them know that the price will be going up to £XXX on whatever date. This will encourage them to make a decision and will help you to embed the idea that it’s actually happening.
BONUS STEP…
Often, somewhere between steps 4 and 5, I become a little bit annoyed with myself that people are booking in at my current rate - I start to think about the extra money I’m ‘losing out on’ compared with if they’d booked a couple of weeks later… this is a sure sign that I’ve got comfortable with the new prices! When this happens, I don’t wait for the date I had planned (assuming I haven’t done a big announcement about it anywhere) – I just do it straight away. Of course, I would still honour the ‘old’ price for anyone I’ve already been in touch with.
#05. Just do it!
On the date set aside in your diary (if you haven’t already done it!), make the updates to your website and anywhere else your prices are written. Don’t make the mistake I once did… I changed the prices on my website but forgot to do the same to the online booking system, meaning that people got a nice surprise at the checkout until one of them kindly told me!
Don’t panic if bookings seem to drop off – unless you’ve done something massive like doubling your prices, this is usually just a normal variation that would be happening anyway in your business and things spontaneously pick up again. It’s easy to assume that everything is about the price increase when it very rarely is… there are so many unrelated variables that you’re probably not even aware of.
After a few weeks, review how things are. If all’s going well, put a date in your diary to review your prices again (with another incremental increase in mind) in a few months’ time.
I hope this is helpful when you next review your prices - I’d love to know if you try my 5 step approach and how you get on.
Aaaand… if you want to learn how to communicate your value and offer services that are an ‘easy yes’ for your potential clients (even at a higher price point), you might want to check out…
Unleash Your Potential
A one-of-a-kind programme designed to help you earn more money and enjoy a better work-life balance through a combination of 1:1 business coaching and an online learning pathway.
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