How to Raise Prices Without Losing Patients?

Welcome to Pelly biz podcast. I'm Dr. Kelly Alfui. I have grown and established brick and mortar practice in Northern Virginia called Ortho Pelvic Physical Therapy and also founded Pelvibiz, which is an online business consulting company that helps healthcare providers make more money and be healthy while doing it, especially in the pelvic health realm. What's up, guys? Welcome to Pellibiz podcast. I'm your host, Kelly Alhui. Today I'm going to talk about how to raise prices without losing clients. Now, most of you guys were headed into 2025 and you guys are thinking the economy is not so great, there's a lot of uncertainty and you know, how am I going to raise prices when most people right now are struggling? And the reality is if the value is there, you can raise the price. If the value is not there, you cannot raise the price. Plain and simple. So there's many different ways that you can do this. So this is more tactile strategy. Probably podcast today, I'm assuming. Let's see where it goes. We'll see. I don't ever plan too much of this stuff. I just kind of talk off the cuff, so kind of what comes to my head. But I'm gonna teach you how to basically raise your prices without losing the clients. So I would say, number one, you must increase the value. So you're probably thinking, okay, Kelly, great, you said increase the value. What the heck does that mean? Well, great question. Increasing the value can mean a couple things. So how you increase the value is, number one, you can. That doesn't mean that you have to go study 20,000 other Con Ed courses to increase the value. Wrong. What you do do though is say, okay, what businesses do I have around me? All right, well, I have a chiropractor, I have a massage therapist, maybe I have a nail lady, maybe a Botox lady. Okay, I want to see if are they willing to give me maybe a service, I give them a service back and they're willing to be part of our value add to our actual number one service, which is our hour long treatment sessions. Okay, so if they were to come in for a treatment they would get then, like cold therapy, like we have a free cold therapy session, they buy into a package. That's adding value to my clients. With Kelly and or people on Kelly's staff not having to do more, that's a value stack. Another way to add value is survey your clients. What do they feel currently could be better at your company? What do they feel? One instance could be like for us, it was like improving our H E P or our home exercise program. So I added on an app that my clients can download and they can use. So because I have the app, that's an increase in value. The reason why it's an increase in value is I'm bringing their exercises directly to their iPhone so that they have their exercises right there. They can upload them, they can, well, they can just look at it. It's right there for them and they can do their thing. So it takes less of their time to do the thing. There's less resistance. So that way we get a better outcome. When you have a better outcome, you increase the value to the product or service, okay. And if you also decrease the resistance to it, that's a win win. So now the value has gone up. That means I can raise my price. Okay. Also, if you condense the period of time that it takes to get the result, okay. That increases the value. Just so you know, if you also package things a certain way. So let me give you an example. If I gave you these, for those that are watching, if I gave you this pair of scissors and I just gave them to you like this, okay, you'd be like, great, it's scissors. But if I gave you a cute box that has hearts on the outside with the fluffy paper inside and I put a bow around the scissors and I put the scissors directly into that box and you had to open the box, it's really cute. With the paper with the bow on the actual scissors, which one would your perceived value be more? Just me handing you the scissors or the scissors in the box? The scissors in the box are going to win every single time. The reason why is because the perceived value is of that box making this thing look cute. The scissors, okay, is going to win. So when you are thinking about packaging up your service and or product, if you just make it look cute and make it look more high end, the value goes up. The value goes up, people. Okay, so, so those are just quick examples of how you increase the value. I can go on and on about that, but that's just quickly of that. Next thing I would do is, I think I kind of touched on this. But you got to survey your people first and see what they want more of. If you are just guessing and saying, well, I'll just increase my prices today because I feel like it, but you're not changing anything. That's how you lose clients. I'm just letting you know so you don't change anything and you Say I'm going to increase prices today. Nope, that's not going to get you anywhere. Your clients will go. Bye bye. The other thing that you can do is could you add to your service? So hear me out on this one. Maybe in the rooms that you have, maybe at first you just had a sheet on the bed, maybe you put now a warm hot pad on the bed and you also add in a pad that has red light therapy and you can put that on everyone's belly. So while you are doing, after you do visceral work, if you do that, you put the red light therapy on their belly and then you start doing internal work or you start working on their inner thighs or you do something below the waist and then that right there, because they're getting red light therapy, maybe they're getting heat to their belly. Whatever. That right there increases the value because that is a feel good. It makes them, it's a different service. Maybe you have cups that have red light therapy that increases the value to your service. Just so you know, dry needling. It can increase the value to your service. It's technically kind of an add on. Okay. And so when you're doing all this, how to not lose clients is basically I always give a time period and I don't have certain people on different prices depending on when they started with me and all that kind of stuff. It gets too confusing. Trust me, tried it, don't do it. Highly recommend, don't doing it. But basically I give people pretty much a month and I say, and I send out an email and I basically say once a week for four weeks. And I'm like, hey guys, just so you know, exciting news. We got this new red light therapy. We got new hot beds, we got this new app that's happening. Oh by the way, we got these new providers on and we'll also be raising our prices by January 1st. Okay, great. Please reply back to this email if you would like to lock in your current rate because you can prepay for your current rate at your current rate and then you know the price goes up as in January 1st. So what they can do is then they can call the office and say, hey, I would like to prepay my four sessions that I have left at this current rate before prices go up. Okay, great. That's going to be, let's just say sessions were 202-2468. That's going to be $800. They pay for it that day. Now when you are raising your prices that actually you get more money that month. Because people are like, well, I don't want to pay more. So of course I'm going to. Of course I'm going to buy into this rate right now. So a lot of times that's how you're able to raise your rate and get more money even before that rate change. Because you can lock people into the current rate and they're going to be handing you a sum of money rather than just $200 for that session. They're going to be handing you maybe 600, 800, maybe 1,000, maybe 2,000, maybe 3,000, so that they can be locked into that rate. So that's huge, guys. And basically you just say, after this date, going forward, this is the rate change. The other thing you can do is hit it from a package perspective. And it's called price positioning. This is where you can say, okay, I'm going to raise my single visit price to let's just say 250. And let's just say normally you're at 200. So you can say, my single visit price is 250. I'm going to raise my price to that. However, I really want people to get into packages or memberships, however you want to word it, both of them work. Okay, so if you're in my membership or package rate, that's going to be $200 a visit. So which one do you think most people are going to do? They're going to want the discount, right? So they're going to just automatically, kind of. Not automatically, but they're going to want to. You're going to try to want to move them into the package. And once they're locked into the membership or the package, that means that the likelihood of them actually being able to get the result is. Is going to be huge. Because now they're committed to doing the full plan rather than being like, okay, I'll come for this session, maybe this session, maybe this session. No, they are committed to actually getting that result. That is why I love packages and memberships. Again, however you want to position it, whatever is easiest for you, which I can go over the difference between on another podcast, but that's how you do it. And that's called price positioning. So that's the other way to raise your prices. If you don't want everyone to be at a certain rate, you can say, well, our single session is 250. And then if you buy into the package, it's going to be 200. So this would be good for. If you have trouble booking people out fully, then this would be A strategy potentially you would want to implement for price increase. So. So that's kind of two different strategies of how I like to coach people to be able to raise their prices without losing clients. And guys, we just raised our prices at orthopelvic. We're at 250 and we didn't have one person back out of it because they could have the option to get their current rate. So no one should be complaining because everyone still is paying what we originally said they're gonna be paying until this date. But we gave them the opportunity ahead of time to buy into that. So I think that's very, very important that give them the opportunity of that honor it and then you can, you know, change your price from there. So hopefully that helps. I know it's always nerve wracking, like if someone, I gotta call back and you know, yell at me because I'm increasing my price. No, most patience, I believe. And I find, you know, I've raised my prices a couple times and you know, I've coached many people to raise their prices. Basically what I find is a lot of times actually the patients are like, good for you. Like, that's really good that you're increasing your prices. I know goods have gone up. I know things have gone up. Like, good for you. I'm proud of you. I know this has got to be hard for you. You're like, yeah, it's freaking scary. I thought you would leave me. And then it all works out. So just do it if you feel like it's necessary and you feel that the value is there because of the results that you're getting. I would also put testimonials in that email that you send out about it. But as long as you show the value is there and that justifies the price, then great, you can charge whatever, but if you cannot show that value is there and people are not getting the results, you, you cannot raise your prices. So if you guys have questions about that or you have trouble with it, or you're very nervous, or you're just like, kelly, I'm going to set a date. Hold my hand and make sure I do this thing. Then again, reach out to me, Elvybiz on Instagram. Be happy to hold your hand and keep you accountable by a certain date that you raise your prices. Because I think all of us are super valuable and can give a lot to our patients, more so than we probably give ourselves credit for. So hopefully you guys enjoyed the episode and we'll talk soon. Thank you guys so much for listening to the podcast. This podcast is sponsored by Jane. They are the people that are going to have amazing scheduling system for your patients. They're going to provide you with a super bill. They're going to make templates for you. They're going to provide you with the best customer service. And because of that, they allowed us to have a code for one free month for those that are wanting to try Jane for their scheduling, checking out super bills, telehealth, all the different options. That code is K biz1mo. We'll put in the show notes, but K biz1mo that is the code for Jane. And thank you so much Jane for sponsoring this podcast. If you guys want more information and want to learn how that you can keep bettering yourselves, go ahead, click the link down below and make sure that you book a call. And we love to provide any clarity questions on any follow ups. Bye guys.