Episode #257: How To Know When It’s Time To Raise The Prices In Your Wedding Business

Should you raise your prices in your wedding business? How do you know when it’s time to raise your prices?

Many wedding professionals don’t raise their prices because they’re afraid to rock the boat. They’re afraid to mess up what they already have. And I get that!

But I want you to know that you don’t have to just go off of the way you feel to make pricing decisions. So often when we go off of the way we feel in business, it leads us astray.

There are some very clear signs that show you when it’s time to raise your prices. And I’m going to take you through them one by one so you know whether it’s time to raise your prices or not.

What are those signs? Listen to this episode to find out!

In this episode we’ll cover:

• How to know when it’s time to raise the prices in your wedding business
• How often to raise your prices
• Signs to look for that indicate that you definitely should raise your prices
• The issues of “suspicious pricing”
• How to align your pricing with your ideal client
• How pricing is part of your marketing and how to nail it

How To Know When It’s Time To Raise The Prices In Your Wedding Business

I am your host, Heidi Thompson, and my entire focus in my business is helping wedding professionals find a simple roadmap to follow to book more of the weddings that they want to be booking and to build businesses that give them freedom and flexibility.

Something that I have been talking about a lot lately in my membership, the Wedding Business Collective, is raising prices. A lot of the members have been talking about raising their prices, and asking different questions about raising their prices, and today I wanted to talk to you about how to know when it’s time because many people don’t raise their prices because they’re afraid to rock the boat.

They’re afraid to mess up what they already have. But I want you to know that you don’t have to go off of the way you feel. So often when we go off of the way we feel in business, it leads us astray. There are some very clear ways to know when it’s time to raise your prices. And I’m going to take you through them.

You’re In High Demand & At Capacity

So the first way to know that it’s time to raise your prices is you’re in high demand. Now you can interpret this a couple of ways. It could mean you’re getting a lot of inquiries. Hopefully, you’re also getting a lot of bookings. Maybe you are having, you know, multiple people inquire about the same date.

You have absolutely no problem with the lead flow in your business. You are bringing in plenty of leads. You are in high demand. People are seeking you out and they are in many ways fighting over the limited availability that you have.

If you are in a position where you’re getting more leads than you can book or if you’re hitting your capacity, this is another way to know that you need to raise your prices. You’re in high demand, you are hitting the upper limit of what you’re able to take on in a given season, and you’re finding yourself turning people away. Anytime we’re turning people away because we don’t have space for them, that is a really good indication that it’s a good time to raise your prices

And it’s also a very good reason because it very much aligns with just supply and demand. When you have a limited supply of time and dates that you can work with people and you have increased demand, naturally what happens in the market is the price goes up, so people will absolutely expect that, and they will see it as, you know, that’s a good thing.

That means that person is in demand, which then makes other people want to work with you.

Your Expenses Went Up

Another reason, other than demand and capacity, that you would want to raise your prices is because expenses went up, which they really have for everybody over the past year or so, due to inflation. So typically when expenses go up, most businesses raise their prices and they pass that on to the end client, the end customer.

Most of the time we see expenses going up year after year. That’s just the way it works. And your prices should be increasing with that. So I want you to look at have your expenses gone up at all this year. And anytime you have an increase in expenses because you know you’ve made some change in your business, maybe you’ve brought on a team member or something like that, you want to think about raising your prices in that instance as well.

You’re Delivering More Value

Another reason why you would want to raise your prices when you know it’s time is that you are delivering more value. Now, this is a natural product of delivering a product or a service and getting good at that, getting good at the client experience, and improving it. Typically the people we work with in our first year have less valuable experience, it’s still great, don’t get me wrong.

But in the third year, or a fifth year, or a tenth year, you have streamlined things. You have improved the client experience. They are getting more value out of it. So I want you to think about how have you started delivering more value to the client.

Pricing Is Part Of Your Marketing

You have to keep in mind that your pricing is a part of your marketing. A lot of people don’t think about pricing this way. It is a very important thing to keep in mind because your pricing influences how you’re perceived, which of course is part of your marketing and part of whether people are going to want to work with you or not.

I wrote an email, if you’re on my email list you may have read this, about an ad I got recently. It was for an electric bike and it was less than a hundred dollars and my instant gut reaction was:

“Hell no, there’s no way I would get on that thing. That thing is going to explode It’s going to destroy my legs with a cheap lithium battery that’s probably going to explode. It can’t possibly be of good quality.”

Now, do I know that? No. It could be great. It could be that the owner of that business just wanted to massively mark things down. But the interesting thing that happened is that when they had those prices insanely below market rate, it didn’t make me want to work with them more. It didn’t make me want to buy from them more.

The only thing it did was make me suspicious. And I think we really need to consider if your prices are suspicious. Because for many people, you know, they don’t want to raise their prices. They maybe they do want to raise their prices, but they feel like they can’t.

And they feel like it’s good to be on the cheaper side of things, because then more people can work with them and it’s more accessible, and I get that. But you have to also keep in mind that your pricing is part of your marketing, and it says something about what to expect from working with you.

You’re Underpriced & It’s Suspicious

If you are massively underpriced, people don’t perceive that you are providing a ton of value in your massive they perceive it as suspicious. This is too low. This is too good to be true. I’m not going to mess around with this. This is probably a scam.

These are the kinds of things that go through our heads when we see pricing that just feels like it’s too low. It actually undercuts the feeling of any value at all being provided, even if you provide a ton, just like that bike. That bike could be awesome. I don’t know, but I would willingly pay like ten times more for it and feel a lot better about it.

And I’m not willing to pay the cheaper price because I don’t think the quality is there. I don’t think it’s going to be a good purchase, even though it’s for a lower amount. So I want you to think about how your pricing communicates the value that you are providing to your clients. Does it show them the value that they are going to get?

You want them to feel like they’re getting more value than the actual price. That is important. But you also don’t want it to be that situation with the electric bike where it’s less than 100 and it should be like, at least a thousand dollars. That’s too much of a gap. It’s too suspicious.

So I want you to think about what your pricing is saying about you and what it’s doing in your marketing because we all make judgments based on these things that we see and that was like my instinctive gut reaction. I’m sure you’ve probably had those as well and it all has to do with what we perceive in terms of the value that we’re getting versus the price.

If that gap is too big, then it just becomes suspicious. It doesn’t become a good deal. It becomes unbelievable. It becomes untrustworthy. So, I want you to think about how you are being perceived with your price.

It doesn’t mean everyone needs to have super sky-high pricing. I just want your pricing to communicate the value that you’re actually providing. And if you’re delivering more value, which most of us are as we get better at the things that we’re doing, as we get better at the process of working with our clients, then your price should increase with that.

Your Competitors Have Raised Their Prices

Another way to know it’s time to raise the prices in your wedding business is if everyone else has and you haven’t. And I’m not saying this in like a, if everyone jumped off a bridge, would you too? I’m saying this because you may have initially set your prices to place you in a certain range within your market.

It’s entirely possible, especially after the last year, after the last several years, that everyone else in the market has changed things so you are no longer in the position that you think you are. You may be too low, which I definitely see a lot. More often than not, I see people who are too low as opposed to too high.

And it’s interesting because being too low feels like it’s a good thing, but like I said, it can really undermine the way that you are perceived. So if everyone else in your market has moved up in terms of pricing and you have stayed where you are, you have functionally moved down as far as the couples who are just doing research now are concerned.

They don’t know where you were a year ago. They don’t know what the market looked like two years ago, five years ago. So if the market has changed, if your competitors have raised their prices and you haven’t, that’s an indicator that it’s time to raise your prices.

Now, I want to make sure that you don’t use this against yourself because I know a lot of people will. They will say, “Oh, well my, my competitors haven’t raised their prices, so that means I shouldn’t raise mine, right?”

No. I’m not saying that you should only raise your prices if your competitors have. I’m saying that this is an indication that you need to. It’s not the only indication and I don’t want you to use that as an excuse to not raise your prices.

Other people’s poor business decisions are never a good excuse to do something or to not do something. So just don’t use that against yourself because I can very much see somebody doing that and arguing “Well they haven’t raised their prices so I shouldn’t.” No, I’m not saying like follow the leader I’m saying look at where you are in your market, where you want to be, and how you want to be perceived.

Your Ideal Client Has Changed

Another way to know it’s time to raise your prices is that your ideal client has changed. Now, I talk a lot about defining your ideal client, getting really clear, and cloning your best clients. I wrote a whole book on it and I teach on this a lot. The thing a lot of people get tripped up with ideal clients is they feel like it’s a permanent decision, and it’s often not.

Who we want to work with changes over time, and that’s perfectly okay. So if you find yourself wanting to work with a different client, even a slightly different client, you need to think about your pricing in terms of that particular ideal client.

Do you need to raise your prices? Sometimes what I see people do is fall into that suspicious pricing trap when they change their ideal client because they want to start working on higher-budget weddings or more “luxury” weddings.

They are moving up in the budgets that they’re working with and the scale of the work that they’re doing, but their pricing hasn’t changed. So they start to fall into that suspiciousness trap where it seems too cheap.

Like, why are you at this price and all of the other vendors for my wedding are so much more expensive? It really makes people second guess. So you want to make sure that your pricing is really aligned with your ideal client. If that has changed, then your prices need to change accordingly.

You Initially Underpriced

Another way to know that it’s time to raise your prices is if you initially underpriced when you started your business. This is something I see a lot of people do and it’s that same idea of like, “Well if I start low then I’ll, I’ll get more clients and it’ll be good to get work and it doesn’t really matter if I’m not really paying myself.” But then you kind of build yourself into this prison because the people who are attracted to you are going to be people who want to work at that price point.

You’re changing your ideal client when you’re raising your prices so you have to rework your marketing. You have to rework your messaging. So many wedding professionals go through this. They start off too low so then they need to raise their prices significantly and I’m not saying do that all at once.

We’ll talk more about that in the next solo episode I have for you about pricing. But if you initially underpriced, if you feel like you initially undercharged, you probably have some catching up to do.

It’s Been More Than A Year Since You’ve Raised Your Prices

You want to be revisiting your prices if it has been a year or more since you’ve raised your prices. You want to at least evaluate at that point. Now I’m not saying you have to raise your prices every single year. I’m not going to tell you what you have to do in your own business. That’s ridiculous. But you want to at least evaluate.

You want to at least check the pulse, see what’s happening, look at have expenses gone up, are you hitting your capacity, are you in high demand, are you delivering more value, have the rest of the competitors in the market raised their prices, has your ideal client changed, have you realized that you’ve underpriced for the amount of value or the amount of work that you’re doing?

You want to have that check with yourself at least once a year. Once a year is a great time to do this, but if you want to check in with yourself more frequently, that is totally fine as well. I would just say it needs to be at least on an annual basis to make sure that the rest of the puzzle pieces haven’t changed around you and you haven’t adjusted your pricing to match.

So if it has been a year or more, you need to evaluate your prices. I’m not saying you have to raise your prices. You might want to stay right where you are and that might be a strategic decision. Wonderful! I want you to make a strategic decision either way.

Not a gut-instinct decision. Not a, I feel like I can’t do this. I feel like I should do this. A truly strategic, put yourself in the CEO seat, you’re running this business, decision.

You Want To

The last reason to know when it’s time to raise your prices is quite frankly because you want to. You are allowed to just raise your prices because you want to, because you want to earn more money, because you want to earn more money per customer, per client, per wedding.

And of course, there are many things you need to take into consideration. You can’t just raise your price to a million dollars because you feel like it because it has to be in line with the value you provide. It has to be in line with where you’re at with your demand and your capacity. It has to be in line with your ideal client and what their expectations are but just wanting to raise your prices is also a perfectly valid reason to do so.

I would recommend looking at all of these other areas that I’ve talked about before you just decide to do that, but it is a perfectly valid reason.

On my next solo episode of the podcast, I am going to cover mistakes that wedding pros make when raising their prices. There are many of them and I want you to avoid them. And I’ll also share a powerful way to raise your prices and actually use that to get a surge of bookings.

So many wedding pros fear that raising their prices is going to drive clients away but what if there was a way to actually use your price increase to book more weddings?

Almost no wedding pros use this powerful method and when they do, they easily turn those dangling leads who were ghosting them into bookings. So make sure you are subscribed to the podcast. Subscribe in whatever podcast player you are listening on so you get notified about that episode because you definitely don’t want to miss it!

 

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Links & Resources:

The Wedding Business Collective
Episode 152: Pricing For Profit In Your Wedding Business with Fiorella Neira

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