In this five‑minute episode of Five Minutes of Momentum, Christine Corcoran walks solo entrepreneurs and small‑business owners through a practical framework for raising prices in 2025. She begins by warning against arbitrary percentage hikes and stresses the need to first assess the profitability of each offer using a proprietary profitability formula and calculator provided in the show notes. Once a profitable price point is identified, she advises mapping out a staged increase schedule across the year, applying the new price to all new clients immediately, and giving existing clients advance notice. She recommends timing hikes during periods when clients are financially strong (e.g., busy months for business owners) and avoiding low‑cash‑flow times like early December. Finally, she outlines a communication strategy that emphasizes the continued benefits and higher‑level service the client will receive, framing the increase as a value‑preserving move rather than a loss. The episode ends with a call to use the profitability workshop in the show notes and an invitation to reach out with questions.
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Welcome to five Minutes of Momentum. These episodes are a short five minute burst of inspiration, motivation and massive action. If you need that little kick up the butt to get things moving and to inspire you to take massive action, then every single Thursday, I'll be sending you through a five minute episode to download, digest and implement to finish your week off strong. Are you ready to get started? Let's go. Welcome back to five Minutes of Momentum. Hey, do you have a plan to increase your prices in 2025? If new you're. If you do, I want to share this one thing with you that I feel like is the most important thing to focus on when it comes to increasing your prices. One of the things that we often don't do is sometimes we think, oh, I'll just increase it by 10% or I'll just increase it by the amount that I think that won't annoy my clients. And that's where people go wrong when it comes to growing your business. We need to make sure that when we're adjusting our pricing, we take the time to really look at the profitability of our services and our offers. If we're not doing that, then you're just pulling a number out of your head and hoping, wishing and praying that that's going to give you the results towards the end of the year. And then you're going to get to do your profit and loss with your account and you're going to be like, why is there not much profit? And that's because if you have not detailed out the profitability of your office, you're basically just, yeah, pulling in a rod ahead and hoping that that's what your clients will pay. So if you plan to increase your prices, I have something for you. If you check out the show notes, I have my profitability formula. So this is a three part series of videos. They're super short, so don't stress like it's super quick to do and it includes a profitability calculator. So then you can look at your offers, you can think about how you're going to communicate your next level of value within your office. Because one of the things that makes us feel uncomfortable when it comes to increasing our prices is believing that people will pay it and believing that the value is there for people to pay. So we need to actually uncover what that value is so it makes it easier for you to communicate the value. And then I'm going to share with you how to communicate the price increase. And one of the things we really want to consider is then how you Go and sell it. So it's a super simple, and it's complimentary. You can check it out via the show notes. And there's a profitability calculator that you can break down to then determine with your services or with your offers how you price them to ensure that they are actually profitable. So that's the first thing you need to really consider when it comes to doing this for 2025. Make sure that you're creating a price point that is absolutely profitable that will serve the growth of your business. Okay. Next thing you want to consider is how you go about communicating that price increase. And one of the things we always look at too, is how many price increases do we need to do across the year? So where does your price need to be in order for it to be profitable? Because when you do the profitability calculator, you may get to the point where you're like, oh my God, it's really not profitable. No wonder I'm so frustrated. No wonder I'm so resentful towards people who are buying this service. No wonder I'm so burnt out. Like, you're probably going to go through all those motions. But the thing is, we need to know the information before we can make a change. So once you know that information, then you can determine, okay, what price point do I need to be sitting at in order for it to be profitable? And then if you look at that and you're like, holy hell, Christine, that's a massive jump. If you freak out at that point, it's okay, don't stress. You do not have to do that full price increase straight away, right? Or in one go, you can absolutely look at your year and go, okay, by the time I get to the end of financial year or by the time I get to the end of the calendar year, I would like my price point to be at this point point. So then you can look at how many price increases do I need to do across the year and you can spread them out so it's not so impactful for your customers that you can break it down and make it easier for them. So rather than doing a huge jump, I would look at one look at what your new price needs to be. And then I would consider, depending on your type of business, that maybe with any new client that you have come through, that you actually sign them up on the new price point that's fully that new price point. Because otherwise, you know, you're going to keep taking on new clients at the old price point. So I would start with all the new clients that come through need to be on that new price point. Unless you've discussed the price with them previously. And you know what I mean, like you need to be conscious of that. If I haven't signed on and maybe had a conversation with them in November and they haven't signed on, then I would possibly decide for myself whether I'm going to give a small increase that won't deter them, or do I say to them that you need to sign on by this specific date to get the 2024 pricing, so then you know, they have an incentive to actually sign up with you early on and that way you can lock that pricing in maybe for the month of January and then have the price increase. So you need to determine what's going to work best for you. And then I would look at over the year if you have a massive price jump that you need to create, maybe it's a hundred dollars on top of that Service, maybe it's $1,000 or whatever it might be. I would look at over the year when is the best time to do price increases for your type of customer? So depending on the type of client that you work with, there is going to be certain times. So I'm a big believer of doing it in busy times, most likely when your customer is busy and also when they're most likely making money. So if they're a business owner, I would then choose the months of the year where I would perceive them to making good money and then I would actually do the price increases at that point. Whereas, you know, I would never do a price increase in early December is really horrible. For a customer to be like slugged with a new price increase in the early of December before Christmas. So rude. Whereas you might do them obviously in January, but then even sometimes people get slugs with credit card bills. So I might do it in February. Right. So I really want you to think about like what's going to work well for your customer or even. And then also consider your business as well. So when is the best time to do the price increases and spread it out. So if you need to do four across the year, do four. It's not going to matter. Like at the end of the day, if you're doing smaller price increases across the year, that won't be as hard in order to sell in. And also hard for you to increase your existing customers to that new price point over the year could be less confronting. So have a consider that as well. And then you may even determine with some of your existing customers you may need to tell them well in advance. So I would absolutely give them advance notice of like from February 1st, this is, this will be the new price increase. And then I would also suggest what is going to be upheld with that. So whenever I communicate a price increase, one of the things you want to consider is how I communicate what they will continue to get rather than what you're taking away. So rather than actually like, focus on the positives is another way to do that. So like you're going to continue to continue to get that high level of service that we offer and for us to make sure that we continue that for our high level clients, we are implementing a price increase from February 1st. And so you wanted to share the facts and, and you want to take out the emotion as much as possible and communicate what will continue, not what will be taken away. So you want to just consider that. So, and I always think about it from the benefit of the customer. Like, how can I communicate what's going to benefit them? Like, obviously when I say that you might be like, oh, it's not going to benefit them to pay more, but will it? Like if you don't increase that pricing, can you actually continue to give that level of service, are you going to have to take on a whole bunch of extra clients and that's going to actually deter them because you're going to have less time to actually service them. Like you, you really want to think about how this is going to benefit them because for you to continue to do what you're doing with them, we need to actually have price increases and business owners know this. So if you work with business owners, even better. So I hope that this has benefited you. Have a think about it. Take the profitability formula workshop that I've got below in the show notes and if you have any questions, feel free to reach out to me.
