Episode 193 – It’s Time to Raise Prices

Introduction

Small business owners in the customization industry are facing unprecedented challenges due to rising prices. This resource guide provides practical strategies to help your business thrive in a changing economic landscape.

Market Research and Competitive Analysis

• Research competitors and trends – Price shop around and see how you REALLY are in the market. Also ask about ‘hidden’ fees. Set up fees, art fees, delivery, etc.
  • Do you have a fee to set up my logo?
  • Do you deliver or do I pick up? Fees?
  • I am trying to budget this all out, what other costs should I expect to make sure I allocate the right money?
• Understand customer perception – ask other business owners you know if they have had price increases. How did they deal with them? How large were they?
• Define your pricing strategy
  • Do you want to be the price leader?

Keeping it Simple

• Avoid complex financial details.
  • Don’t break down the cost of your ink, paper, deliveries etc. This leaves room for holes in your pricing strategy. Just keep it simple – ‘my costs are up, my retail is up’
• Offer added value.
• Confident price change communication.

Transparency Matters

• Be open about price increases.
  • Consequences of non-transparency.
    • If you try to dance around the truth customers may see this as dishonesty.
    • Insights from Harvard Business Review.
    • “Call the action a price increase, not a price adjustment, a price change, or another euphemism. While this may seem like a small thing, euphemistic messaging can cause serious harm, fraying the relationship with loyal customers.” Many consumers are keenly aware of overall economic conditions, so when you tell your customers you’re raising prices, it just confirms their expectations, and most accept it.
• Use clear language.
• Postpone price increase for certain customers – let them know it’s coming, and why you are postponing for them.

Customer Satisfaction is #1

• Prioritize customer satisfaction first.
• Satisfied customers accept higher prices.
• Price-sensitive customers are likely to stay if satisfied. If they still won’t stay with higher prices, you have to decide if they are worth it.
  • e.g. a low maintenance customer may be worth keeping at a lower margin. However a customer that is constant trouble, no referrals, frequent returns, frequent complaints… might not be worth it.

Additional Pricing Strategies

• Target new customers – Go after more unique niches or higher end customers.
• Offer contract discounts – Can you get customers to commit to months or a year of service. e.g. make updated uniforms for their business every season, or update signs on storefront for each holiday.
• Create bundles – price of shirts is up, but if you do shirts AND hats you get a discount.
• Selective price increases – only price increase certain items. Maybe your low-price leading items stay the same, but your upsells increase.

Handling Customer Objections

• Address objections with confidence
• Brainstorm with your team or other business owners
• Practice the conversations
• Understand most customers will understand why this is happening

Conclusion

You empower your business when you control your prices. If you are racing to the bottom or let fear control your pricing, you will eventually start suffering consequences. Increasing pricing doesn’t mean you are greedy, you are doing your best to stay in business and reach your financial goals.

Transcript

Hello and welcome to the Custom Apparel Startups podcast. My name is Marc Vila, and today we’re here to talk about that it’s time to charge more. Growing your business with higher prices.

And that’s what this podcast is going to be all about. It’s just going to be talking about why you should maybe charge more and how to do it while growing your business at the same time. One of the concerns of business owners are, “am I charging too much? My competition is undercutting me on price. How am I going to make the amount of money that I need to make while also keeping customers?” And that’s what we’re going to talk about today. So let’s dive right into some of the details.

All right, so in this slide show here, really just talking about how in the customization industry, so T-shirt shops, sign shops, awards, whatever you’re doing, we’ve got rising prices that are all global things, right? Thread pricing is increasing, the materials that are used to make ink and toner and paper. All these things are going up and our prices are slowly increasing as a small business owner or a medium-sized business owner too. And how do you figure out what to do next? How do you actually make sure that you are maintaining the right profit margins so at the end of the day, you’re doing what your business should be doing? Making money, achieving your dreams, all that good stuff. So as the economy’s changed at the time of the recording of this podcast, we’ve been dealing with increasing prices over the past couple of years and we are here to help you kind of get past that and move on to a more profitable pricing structure and how to deal with that with your customers.

So the first thing we want to do is market research and competitive analysis. This is something that is widely overlooked. I’ve interviewed and spoke to tons of customization business owners, and I ask them, “how do you determine your pricing? What have you looked into your competition?” And most people just don’t do it. They’ve maybe heard something from some customers, they’ve maybe seen a brochure somewhere, but they haven’t really done a real structured competitive research. So the first thing is just to just price shop your competitors. Either do it yourself or ask somebody to do it. You can hire somebody to do this for you. If you look online, you can find places that will do this or honestly, just have a friend or family member do it. But call them up and ask them about a real world order, something that you would fulfill, something that your customers have asked for or would ask for. “I’d like 10 shirts front and back.” “I’d like 25 hats.” Whatever it might be.

When you’re doing this price shopping though, it’s important to understand what I think about as hidden fees. And this is one of the challenges that your customers face when shopping to you. And this is true of basically every industry in the world. We all know this. You call somewhere up, they tell you, “oh yeah, come on down, it’s $25 to do this event.” And then when you actually go to buy it, you find out that there’s a disposal fee or a setup fee or a credit card type of charge or a delivery fee. There’s fees on fees. And this is stuff that if you’ve bought concert tickets, if you’ve bought a car or if you’re buying custom T-shirts or signs, you find the same thing. So when you’re price shopping, ask about this stuff. “Okay, I actually just, I’m budgeting”, this is how I would say it.

“Thanks, your pricing’s great. I need to budget everything out and the folks that are going to approve the budget are pretty strict if I am way off. So I just need to make sure that I understand the complete pricing structure of this. Do you have a setup fee? What about the art that I’m going to give you or any fees to set that up? Are there any delivery fees or minimum type of fees or minimum size order?” Ask these questions explicitly. If you don’t, then what will happen is your customer and you are going to think that this T-shirt shop charges five bucks a shirt when you realize it’s 150 piece minimum and there’s a $50 setup fee and a $50 art fee, even if you bring your own logo. So this is really important to make sure that you ask about the hidden fees, the final cost, what’s included, what’s not included.

And then the last bit of this market research is just understanding how customers view the current pricing structure. So there are some things in this world that people think are just a really good deal. One of the things that I’m noticing now in my world is if you want just internet for your house or your business, you just want internet alone. You don’t need cable or any of these things. A lot of folks I talk to now, they just think internet’s pretty cheap. They’re like, dang, 50 bucks. I’m getting this really high speed up and down, the uptime’s really good. That’s something in my area at least that’s something I run into where people think the price is pretty good. Alternatively, people will complain about gas prices, that gas prices are really high, they feel really high.

And realistically these numbers may not be true to reality. They may not necessarily be actually valuable. Even the gas, I had someone complaining about gas prices the other day and I said, “how much do you spend a month on gas?” And “I don’t know, I don’t really drive a lot.” Okay, et cetera, et cetera. They spend like 40 bucks a month in gas. So they used to spend 20 a few years ago, now they spend 40. It’s not really a deal breaker in their life, but their perception is very negative on it. Meanwhile, when I asked them about the cable thing or the cable internet thing and they’re spending like 80 bucks a month when everyone else in the room was spending 50, they thought they were getting a fine deal. So the main point in that is that understand how customers view the pricing of this stuff. So ask other business owners, ask friends of yours, anybody you can.

Ask them about things in your industry and what they think. So if you have a friend of yours price shop, for example, and they call two or three shops and ask how much a sign or a shirt or something like that is ask them say, “what did you think about that pricing? Does that seem high higher than you expected? Lower?” I’d also ask your current customers, and we’ll get into talking about pricing conversations with them. But you could ask them, say, “Hey, in general when you’re buying customization stuff, I know you buy shirts from me, but your store also has signs and things like that. How do you feel about the overall prices of this stuff? Do you think it’s more expensive than it should be, less?” This will help to guide you in your direction on not only how you can price structure, but also how the conversation goes when you’re talking to your customers about increasing prices. So it’s going to give you a really great insight if you do these things.

The next thing is just this quote that we found here. “Price leadership is the dominant strategy which helps companies maximize profits through economies of scale.” It’s a bunch of fancy words and it sounds really cool, but the big thing about it is, the way I’m interpreting it for this is you want to be a leader in your pricing strategy. And Philip who made this quote may have been talking about being the lowest price or being the most profitable or whatever it is, but that doesn’t necessarily matter for this presentation. But what inspired me when I saw this was, if you are truly a leader in setting pricing, meaning that you know you’re pricing with proper structure, you’re pricing your goods with education, you are having good conversations with your customers about pricing, all of it is very thought out and meticulous and on purpose, you can be a leader in setting these prices for your business and also for kind of your local market or your market in general, which is really empowering for you.

So the next thing to talk about is just keeping it simple. Okay? So when you are talking about increasing your pricing, discussing this with your customers, the first thing is cost transparency, right? This is something where you get on the phone with your customer and you start saying, “well, the prices of the T-shirts went up and it cost more to ship them to me. And I’m also having to buy more ink to keep my prices down.” And you’re getting into all this stuff with them. When you give them two information, you’re potentially filling them with holes to shoot down while your prices are going up. So they’re going to say, “oh, well, oh, the shipping is too much? Maybe I can just get shirts locally and bring them to you.” Which is not what you want. You want to order from your wholesaler and mark those up.

So you don’t want to leave holes in your pricing strategy. So just for cost transparency, keep it simple and just tell your customers, “pricing is going up all across the board in my industry” and keep it like that. From operating the equipment to blanks and everything, pricing is going up. And then when we’re beginning in these thoughts and this conversation, we want to focus on value. So the thought that you want to do here is in your mind, you’re looking at numbers. You’ve got a spreadsheet, math, your calculator open, you’re doing margins. Everything is numbers, numbers, numbers. So in your head you’re programming yourself.

“I’m about to tell my customer it cost $100 and now it costs $120.” And you’re thinking about those two numbers. “Gosh, that’s 20% more”, anxiety in the conversation. Frustration, you’re so concerned about that $20 that you need to change your mindset to really be thinking about the value you’re going to provide and the value you provide to your customers. And we’ll talk about a little detail about value and customer satisfaction in a bit. But what you want to be thinking about consistently in this is highlighting what makes what you sell, what you offer, worth the price.

So as you’re talking about increasing pricing, I want you to think about all this stuff. “Yeah, prices have gone up, but I’ve got a direct to film printer. These other shops, they’re going to are still using screen printing. They can’t do the full color logos that I can do. I’ve got a great field of the shirts”, all these things you’re thinking about, or maybe you do white toner printing and you say, “well, I can do really small orders for these customers and I can deliver it to them like the same or next day.” So think about all these value things you can offer.

And then the next with keeping things simple, just confident communication. It’s important as you’re preparing for this, you’ve got written out and thought of how you’re going to communicate this in a confident way. You don’t want to come into it timidly. You don’t want to come into it scattered. “Pricing, I have to talk to you about something. It’s really bad news. There’s a lot of things going on, you know about, well, the thing with the president and the thing”, you’re going all over the place. You’re not full of confidence. It’s not simple at all. It’s all over the place and your customers are going to feel the same anxiety you have and that transfer of your anxiety to them is going to make them question whether or not they want to still do business with you. So you’ve got to have confident, simple communication.

So moving on, transparency. So you want to be open about price increases when it comes to your customers. You need to just literally tell them what’s going on when it happens, try not to surprise them. Find the communication in an open, in a good place when it’s appropriate to have that conversation. So if you know your customer is ordering in two weeks, they’re probably planning some work out. Don’t increase the price by just dropping them an invoice that’s higher and hope they don’t notice, right? That’s something that they probably will notice and they probably won’t like it and they’re going to go ahead and say something, right?

Now, this is not simple. So I’m going to explain the complexity in this because there’s a couple different things to consider. Let’s say you have an e-commerce store where you sell T-shirts and you now have gotten to the point where you’ve got a thousand products on your store, okay? Probably unrealistic to just email every single one of your e-commerce customers who probably have never bought from you before, half of them, and tell them that the prices of the T-shirts are going up, right?

The same thing’s going to happen in the grocery store. You’re not going to get a notice every time you walk in. “Milk’s gone up, eggs have gone up.” That is not what we’re talking about here. We’re talking about transparency in customers that have repetitive orders, that consistently come back, are ordering typically the same type of things. And you want to increase the prices on those particular customers. So every month, you charge their credit card $500 and you provide them X product, and then now the price is going up to $550, 10% price increase.

You want to communicate that to them, just transparently do it. “Hey, costs have gone up. You know what’s going on in the world and economically, it’s not a surprise. I want to go ahead and let you know that I do have a price increase on the regular product that you order. You’re going to order it again in two weeks. It’s not a ridiculous amount of money, it’s only $50, but I just wanted to let you know.”

Now the second thing you could do with a little bit of transparency is let customers that are loyal potentially know ahead of time where maybe new customers might not get that price. And I’ll give you an example of this. So let’s just say you charge $500 for X package of goods, shirts, hats, branding, printed goods, signs, whatever it is, and this is a $500 package. Now you’re going to increase the price 10% to $550. New customers, you just quote them $550. You don’t have to tell them that prices increase. They don’t know anything about the past, we’re only talking about the future. And you can just be very transparent and simple about what your price is. “Here’s my price, no setup fees. It’s just $550 out the door done.” And they can evaluate that and you could provide all your value and all those things to them. Now, current customers, maybe you have a few customers that spend $500 a month every month, they’ve been doing it for years. You can contact them and delay the increase because of the value that they have provided you over time.

“Hey Mr. Customer, I want to let you know I got some news to deliver you in kind of a good way. So what we have is I do have a price increase coming up. It’s a 10% price increase on that package that you order from $500 to $550. Okay? Now this is due to rising costs, et cetera. However, because you’re such a good customer of mine, all new customers are getting that price going forward. But for you, I’m going to delay that until 2024, until next year. So for the next three months, you’ll pay the same low price that you have. But the beginning of next year, I just want to go ahead and let you know about that so you have time to adjust your budget.” This can be communicated and appreciated really well with your customers knowing that they are getting a little bit of a favor from you. And I’ll just make sure that that’s honest. I wouldn’t want to lie about that. I actually would want to do that if that was the truth.

Now, there are some consequences if you’re not transparent, if you try to dance around the truth, if you try to sneak things in and customers notice, they will feel lied to, cheated, you’re being sneaky. You just don’t want that reputation. You want to be the place where people go to, they trust, they consistently want to come back to. They know that if they call you up and they say, “Hey, I normally order those printed banners also, I’m looking for 500 mugs. Can you do that for me? How much are they? X dollar amount? Great.” They trust you. They know you don’t try to weasel them. They don’t feel the need to go around and necessarily shop around. “Hey, I know you always treat me well, you’re always honest with me, so I’m going to do that with you.”

When I was researching this and looking around at some different things, I noticed something that was from the Harvard Business Review and they’ve always got some good stuff over there, those folks at Harvard. Here’s a quote that I had found. “Call the action a price increase, not a price adjustment, not a price change or any other euphemisms. While this might seem like a small thing, euphemistic messages can cause serious harm, fraying the relationship with your loyal customers.” And I thought that lined up right with the previous note that I had made when I had found that I said, that’s exactly what I’m saying is that being transparent, being honest, don’t try to weasel it around. Just say it.

Customers are aware of economic conditions. They know what’s going on in the world. They buy gas and they know the price has gone up. They’ve seen their electrical bill go up, they’ve seen other goods that they buy go up, they know prices are going up. So be honest, be transparent, let them know what’s really going on, increase your prices and they’re going to get it. And most of them are going to accept it and we’ll talk a bit more about why some of them will accept it more than others.

And then the last is just kind of the same thing, but it’s a note that I put here and it’s in the notes from the podcast, but just use clear language. If you need to increase your prices, just say “the price has gone up a hundred bucks.” Just say “the price per shirt has gone up 10%, which is 50 cents or $5”, whatever the number is, just be transparent with that. Don’t try to say it in a weird way, so maybe they don’t notice. That might seem like a good smart way to get around things, but you’re dancing around dishonesty.

Just try to be pretty clear, “Hey, this package has gone up 10%. That means it’s an extra $50, it’s an extra $500 for you. And that’s what this price increase looks like. And I’m also looking to hold onto that price increase and keep that stable for all of next year. That’s my goal for this. So I’m just looking to do one in price increase for the next year and that’s it.” So there you go. Transparent, simple, clear. Just let them know what’s going on. Don’t dance around words too much.

All right, so now when you want to increase prices, customer satisfaction is number one. You almost need to, if you could go back in time and satisfy customers more, then it would be easier to go through and increase your prices. If you can’t, well, you can’t go back in time. If you can, you don’t even need to listen to this podcast. You should be doing other things.

But since you can’t go back in time, you want to go ahead and make sure that you’re doing things to satisfy customers. So maybe you want to increase prices, but you are not getting good reviews, you’re getting lots of complaints. Shore that stuff up first. Tighten that up first. Get happy customers. That’s number one. It’s going to make price increases very valuable for you and not a big deal for your customers. And it’s quite simple. You messed up on order A, you messed up on order B, you messed up on order C, order D increased your price. To me that just clearly, I just want to go try to potentially shop for somebody else, no matter what I’m buying. It doesn’t have to be the customization industry. It could be anything, right? It could be getting your car detailed, lawn service, anything.

If somebody’s not doing very well and then they increase their price, why stick with them? Maybe I can get a better price. I don’t know. So satisfied customers are loyal. If they feel valued, if they’re happy with the product and you say, “Hey, price has gone up 10%”, they’ll probably be just fine. Most of them will be. It’s happened all over the world. It happens everywhere every day. Now, some customers are highly price sensitive. We all have those, right? Every day they consider and they are concerned about price sensitivity. So identify them, consider who they are, what are they like? Are they a pain in the butt? Are they really easy to deal with? Very low maintenance. So what I would say is this, if you have a couple of price sensitive customers, maybe one of them is super low maintenance, right? They are some big corporate company, they send you an invoice or they send you a request in an email once a month, you fulfill that.

They pay on time, they never complain, they never do anything. They basically just send you money and you just send them things and that’s the end of the transaction every time. And you know they’re super price sensitive because they’re a big corporation, right? So if you increase prices, that person has to go up to their boss and their boss and get an approval and it’s a bunch of extra work and they’re probably going to end up having to shop you, right? Maybe you can delay the price update for those, right? You understand that customer, it’s not that big of a deal. And they are particularly low maintenance. So you can afford to go with a lower margin. Flip side, super price sensitive customer, very annoying, always complaining, always returns stuff and tells you to remake it. “Oh, this was a little crooked. Look at this piece, it’s chipped off” and they’re constantly complaining about stuff and you’re always having to remake things and fix things and put extra work into it.

You have to increase their price. You can’t afford to go lower margin on that type of customer. Increase the price, and they may be price sensitive and be bothered by that. And you just have to be transparent and honest and upfront with them. If they really do like you and they’re just a little bit of a pain in the neck, they’ll stick around. If they are going to leave you over that 10% price increase, they were inches away from leaving you anyway, right? So just understand those customers, those price sensitive ones, and also understand how to have a good conversation with them too, as mentioned before.

Another one is just kind of customer’s lifetime value when we’re talking about things. And if you have a customer who needs to stay at a tighter margin, but they’re reasonable to deal with, they don’t have to be the super low maintenance, but they’re reasonable to deal with, then well, how much are they worth over a year? Right? Okay, well this customer’s worth over one year, three years, five years. You look at that margin over time, I really feel I can stick it out with this customer another year without having to change things. And you can get other creative ways. Maybe you can offer them a different blank or a smaller prints or a different resolution to save yourself a money on ink or blanks, and maybe they’ll be okay with that too. So you can consider other ways for that, but consider the lifetime value of these customers.

So one of the last things here is just some additional pricing strategies. So for one, just try to sell up, target lucrative markets. If you are selling to a bottom tier price customer where they can’t afford much more, how can you move up? Can you go to a more prestigious type of business, right? If you’re working with one type of business that they operate on really low margins and they can’t afford to purchase expensive things, well, can you go up? Can you try to go to, if you sell to maybe some diners with really low pricing, can you try to sell to restaurant higher end restaurants, fine dining? Is there a potential you could do uniforms for them? So think about that.

Offer bulk discounts as another one. So offer to your customers, Hey, I have this price increase, but normally you order this much every month or every other month. If we can double those orders and maybe reduce the frequency, that’ll bring my costs down. So instead of doing a hundred items a month, we do 200 every other month. Maybe that’s a way for you to bring your costs down so you can order things more in bulk, whatever it might be, and help reduce their price.

And next is just offer a commitment. Hey, we’ve been doing this month to month for a while. Maybe I can keep your pricing the same if we can talk about doing a 12-month contract, so we know that every month I’m going to bill you this automatically, I’m going to deliver this item or these set of items automatically as well, and we’re going to do that for 12 months and we could review that again at the end of next year. So that’s a great way, and that’s very typical across the board for pricing everywhere is a long-term commitment means you could better plan out your future. There’s not a question of income and you can afford a little bit less of a margin.

The next one is creating product bundles. This one is simple. You should do this anyway, even if you’re not increasing pricing. This is just something you should do. People call up for shirts or they call up for signage for their store. “Hey, I also sell A, B, C products too, by the way. If you buy all of them, I have this one price for you. It’s a great deal. You actually save X percent. The pricing of the T-shirts is this, but if you buy shirts and hats and signs for the front of your shop every season, you go ahead and get this great deal.” And this just works great for upselling, increasing revenue in general.

And the last bit here is selective price hikes. So maybe you have a low cost item that brings people in the door consistently. It is a particular shirt with a print that you offer. Maybe you’re doing custom mugs and it’s your cheapest, simplest mug with a small logo. Whatever it is, this is like a low price leader for you. And maybe the margins tightened up a bit, but you don’t want to increase prices yet because gosh, so many people call you about that low price item and you upsell many of them. Maybe 75% of those people you end up selling more things to, or you don’t even sell that one. You consistently upgrade them to the better mug, like I’m drinking out of this red mug here. Maybe this is a dollar more than the white one. And you sell a bunch of those colored ones, right?

So you can potentially keep your low price item low or not increase it or increase it very little. And then your upsell items increase a bit more. So people walk in the door looking for item A, you talk to them about the benefits of items B and C, which are two upgrades, which you’ve increased the price of more than you have product A, and you know that 70% of those people are going to buy that upsell and you’re doing great. Further, it could just be certain equipment you have maybe embroidery. If you do a bunch of embroidery, you can afford to leave that the same without increasing those prices, but potentially stuff that involves ink, maybe your ink pricing went up and you have to do there. Or maybe your materials for doing vinyl printing and cutting has all been pretty stable, but T-shirt’s prices have gone up. So anything that’s a T-shirt, you maybe you need to increase the price a little bit. But anything that’s stickers, signs, all that, you don’t have to.

So be selective about that. You don’t have to necessarily increase everything. When you can keep it simple and just all prices are up 20%. That’s nice because you literally know what to increase everything. But sometimes that’s not the best strategy to go with. Really depends on your business and how complicated it is.

Now is just a few things about handling customer objections, right? So for one, you need to address objections with confidence. “I understand that prices have gone up in your business and this is just another price that’s gone up. I’m feeling the same thing. The cost of various things in my business have gone up. Margins are tighter everywhere, but I’m still going to deliver the great products. And in fact, what I’ve done to help with these price increases, I’m also offering this as a better service. I’ve tightened up my production so I actually can deliver things a couple of days faster for you now. I’m using a better quality garment. So I went away from the really cheap stuff that was the quality of that was reducing and the pricing was going up and I went to a little level up. So even though the price is a bit more for you, you’re actually getting a better product in the end.”

All of these different things you could do that, you go in it with great confidence, you address these things head-on and you’re not constantly apologizing to them. You shouldn’t be apologizing for trying to operate your business. You should be going confident and straightforward and just letting them know the facts, speaking simply, speaking with confidence, being very transparent and most of your customers will completely be okay with that.

One of the things you could do in handling customer objections is collaborating on responses. Actually brainstorm with your team if you have people that work with you, other small business owners that you collaborate with, people online. Here at ColDesi, we have owner groups of people who own businesses. And I love it when people go on there and they collaborate like this. These are the folks that consistently are successful. The people who collaborate, ask questions, study rather than the ones who just complain all the time, right? If you’re just complaining, you’re not getting anywhere, all you’re doing is venting. Don’t vent. I mean vent in businesses on occasion. Vent with your friends, right? Vent with your family maybe.

But when it comes to business, if you have other business owners around you talk to them, “Hey, I’m increasing my prices. What did you do? How did you tell your customers? How did they respond? What did you answer? When you answered that did it work? When it didn’t work, what did you say that when it didn’t work? Why do you think that was?” Have these conversations and share this with other business owners. Let them know what you’ve learned. Get some information from them. Write all this stuff down and physically kind of put down on a document. “These are the different things I would say. These are objections I expect to hear. This is how I can respond to them.” You’re building out a sales document for yourself, and you could do this in Microsoft Word, in a notepad, it doesn’t matter, but write all this stuff down this way when you get on the phone and a customer that’s maybe very aggressive is hitting you hard with an objection, you’ve got some answers right there ready to go, and you can speak confidently, transparently, quickly, all that.

And then the last on this is actually practicing that delivery. So you know what the objections are going to be, potentially. You’ve got some answers for them. Practice them. Do some role play with friends and family, other business owners. Make it fun. Do it over some coffee. You can make it a little bit of a joke, you can exaggerate a bit, but have fun. If somebody even knows some of your customers intimately, if they actually know this customer, both of you and you think you know how they would react, have that person role play being them. I mean, it can turn into definitely a fun team building thing for your business or a group of people, other CEOs or business owners that you work with. And it will actually help you when you practice this to do it in real life.

All right, so that wraps things up here on the podcast and really kind of leave it with the conclusion. When you control the prices of the business, you’re empowered. You’re the one in charge. This is your business. You are the one that’s making the decision. You control how much income you make, you control your success, how likely it is for you to stay in business, how likely it is to achieve your dreams, dreams grow to your business, to the size you want. You’re in control of all these things. Increasing your prices, being profitable, going after your dreams. That doesn’t make you greedy. It doesn’t mean that you’re going to go out of business because your prices went up.

All of these things are very alarmist. Those are fear things going off in your head. “What if I lose every customer? What if people think that I’m greedy? What if, what if, what if?” Right? All these ifs are just terrible for your business and they’re really bad for price increases because they will hit people super hard and fast where they won’t do anything. They’ll just delay it and delay it. And then they get to a point where there’s not enough money in the bank to keep going forward, or the business is just not profitable enough to motivate you. And you start saying, “I’m working 70 hours a week and I can’t even pay my bills.” So you don’t want to get to that point.

So if you’re a new business, great, because you can learn this lesson early. If you’re an existing business and you realize it is time to increase prices, go back through this stuff. Build out a plan and figure out what you can increase, how much of a change it’ll make in your margin over time. And then if you’re already at a point where you feel like you’re struggling a bit, I mean, go back and look at all of these numbers. Look at your customers, go back and listen to other podcasts and figure out the spots where you can increase your prices. You could be more successful and ultimately achieve the dream that you wanted when you started and started to grow this business.

So thank you for listening. My name is Marc Vila. I’m here at ColDesi. I’m the director of marketing at ColDesi. So go to ColDesi.com. If you haven’t been there before, you’re not familiar with who we are, you can check out all the different product lines we have and we have a ton more episodes. We’re nearing 200 as I’m recording this episode right here. So there’s a ton of information that goes back years, and some of those episodes that are years old are still super valuable information. So thank you very much for listening and have a good business.