This Video Will Convince You to Raise Prices in 2026

If you keep your prices the same this year, your business will bleed cash. In this video, I will show you 10 reasons why raising prices is not greedy, not risky, and not optional if you want to survive the next 12 months. Dozens of Augusta Lawn Care locations raised prices last year. Customer loss stayed under 10% across the board. Profits improved immediately. I am going to break down the exact math, the psychology, and the real-world mistakes that quietly destroy owners who refuse to raise prices. You will see why profit comes first before growth every single time. And if you're thinking, "My customers won't accept it," or, "Everyone is cheap in my city," that mindset is exactly what gets exposed in 2026. Watch this before you lock in another year of bad pricing. Number 1, low prices don't win trust. They trigger suspicion. High-value clients don't want cheap. You actually can lose your highest-value clients trying to be cheap because they're actually going to think that something is wrong with the service that you're providing simply because when they compare your quote to someone else, you look so so much cheaper than everyone else. Now I learned this the hard way in the past few months. At HomeWorks, we were usually around $250 to $350 for our top tier subscription level. Realistically, we were about the same price as Jobber, Service Autopilot, and a lot of other software systems, but we didn't bundle in a bunch of mobile users. And my thought was like, well then it's more flexible. People can adjust the price up and down throughout the year. But when people came and assessed the price, just the number that we showed, on the website, because we didn't bundle a bunch of mobile users into the subscription, they just thought we were like half or a third of the cost of Jobber or Service Autopilot. So for Jobber, it's like $600 a month. For Service Autopilot, it's about $900 per month. We were at like $300 per month. And so we surveyed our customers that took sales calls and were interested in the product and came to the sales page and said, why didn't you choose HomeWorks? And a lot of them just said, well, You're so much cheaper than everyone else that we just figured that there— you must have lower value, that you must have a lower quality product. When in reality, we have way better support. Our product is super strong. We have a fantastic team and we're adding features much faster than either of them. And so we actually decided, oh, we just need to bundle in 10, 15, 20 users into each subscription to get our prices about the same. And we're still on the lower end, around $500. But still, that comparison of different software packages, a lot of people just assumed that because we were so much cheaper on the sticker price, that we were somehow way less valuable. Now, same thing was true with Augusta Lawn Care. So Augusta Lawn Care, we passed last year 200 locations around the world, US, Canada, Australia. However, we always have had a very discounted initial franchise fee that allows you to lock in your territory license and get exclusive leads in an area. We started to have a problem with selling to people that had million-dollar businesses or investors that had hundreds of thousands of dollars they wanted to invest in multiple locations right from day one. And the problem wasn't value. They saw the value. They talked to owners. They were impressed with everything we were offering. In fact, a lot of them thought it was too good to be true. And they actually got suspicious because our initial franchise fee to lock in the territory was only $24,000 last year. We got again, surveys, and said, we are comparing you against Grounds Guys and they're $35,000. We're comparing you against US Lawns and they're $50,000. So why are you so much cheaper? Why are you half the price of US Lawns? And so this year we have raised the initial fee to be $35,000 for no other reason but to make sure that people aren't suspicious of the value you're creating. And so I learned this the hard way because I lost out on high-value clients. High-value customers, owners of Augusta Nation, simply because the value discrepancy looks so crazy. They actually didn't believe me we could perform the service for that price. And when compared to our competition, we looked like we were too cheap. And so your customers, whether you're doing lawn care or HVAC or painting or pool service, if you're so much cheaper than everyone else, maybe it's because you're super efficient. Maybe it's because you have economies of scale. Maybe it's because you're not trying to price gouge your customers. However, price is a huge value indicator to customers. And so they will perceive you as less value if you have a lower price. And the best customers aren't trying to save every single penny and every single dime. They want the highest value product. So what we did is we raised our prices to the point where, okay, now we're competitive, people aren't suspicious, and we took that extra money and just made more valuable products and more valuable services for our members. Number 2, your best customers don't get the cheapest used brake pads. They value brand, reliability, and longevity. So if you go to like a tire shop or brake shop, the best customers are not asking for the absolute cheapest brake pad. They realize that a brake pad offers a source of safety. And if they value their loved ones, they're going to get things that are gonna keep them safe. And if you're like, Okay, well, I want— I understand that the brake pads for my car are $800. Is there any way we can get it to $300? Your highest value customers, the people that actually care about their vehicle, their family, and the safety of the people that they're driving, are not going to nickel and dime over the brake pads. They're instead going to look for the best brand. This is why your trucks, your website really matter, because brand is very quickly identified by customer in terms of, Where are you at on the pecking order? If I go into a brake shop, if I go into a tire shop, I'm looking for those well-known brands that I've seen many times before. I'm looking for reliability. I'm looking for longevity. Is this a brand new business that just showed up last week? Or have they been around for 10, 15, 20 years? A lot of times your brand and the reliability that customers give to your brand comes with how long you've been in business. And so a lot of times people are like, why is this bigger company, they're so much more expensive. They don't do anything as good as me. They've been in business for 25 years. You just got started this spring. Many times customers are going to assess not just based upon your price, but based upon the brand, the reliability, and the longevity that you have. Now, I remember learning this the hard way because I had a big— it was to me at the time, big $25,000-$30,000 project, but I bid it low because I wanted the job for the winter. And in general, I'm okay with lowering my price somewhat in order to secure jobs during my off-season. However, I lowered the price by about $5,000. Basically all my profit margin I wiped out 'cause I wanted to keep my crew busy in December and January. And I still remember this was the perfect job for our crew. I knew we could get the job done efficiently and profitably even though I had cut basically $5,000 off a $20,000 job. It was about a mile from our shop space, so I would drive by all the time. So I gave the price to the customer, sent it over, And about 3 weeks later, I drove by the project and saw that my competitor was doing the project. Now, I had a really good relationship with this customer because I knew them from our HOA. And so I actually went up to them and said, hey, I saw you chose so-and-so for doing the project and I just really would appreciate why. I'm not going to try and convince you of coming back. I just want to know so that I can improve my business. I was living with my parents at the time. And so he was the president of our HOA board. And so I asked him, like, hey, just give me some feedback here. He said, well, to be honest with you, Mike, we actually paid $24,000 for the job. And I was like, what in the world? It was a $20,000 job. I offered $15,000 to just get the job on the schedule and they paid $24,000 for the job. I said, oh, wow, that's amazing. And I said, we were $15,000. You paid $24,000. Can you explain to me why you paid so much more? Especially knowing that I would do my absolute best to make sure the job was done well. And you're not far from where we live. And he said, well, we went with the other company because of a couple of things. Number one, their website looked really solid. We drive by there and see their trucks all the time. We also saw a lot of their online reviews. And when they sent the estimate to us, they accompanied the estimate with a video. And it was just a video of the estimator saying, we look forward to doing business with us. And they kind of walked us through a couple of the points. In the project that were a little bit gray when we would walk the property with them. And so that day I determined not happening again. If someone else is making $9,000 of straight profit on top of the jobs that I'm bidding, I'm doing something wrong. And so I still remember because it was going into our slow season. I remember I am going to take this offseason and learn everything I possibly can about websites, reviews, and videos because those are the three things they mentioned. And so I spent months looking at search engine optimization, web design, how to get traffic to convert better, conversion rate optimization, speed of loading the stinking site, like all these little things. And that actually then started Home Service Web Design, where now we've built over 1,000 websites. I started thinking about like, how can we make sure that I don't lose customers that are not price sensitive and are just sensitive to the value that my brand provides and the reliability that I'm actually going to get the job done correctly? Because They had like a $1.5 million house. The $9,000 that they gave to my competitor to do the work was a great deal for them knowing without a shadow of a doubt the work was going to get done on time, on budget, and it was going to be something they could be proud of and they wouldn't have to go in and do the work again. And I couldn't say the same thing about myself. My business was like 2 years old. We didn't have the nicest trucks. We didn't have the best website. I didn't send no video along with that estimate. In fact, I sent them an email. I remember going back after talking to the man. I went to the quote and I could see when the estimate was opened. And what's funny is they actually accepted the estimate of the competitor before even viewing my estimate proposal. And I know that because he showed me their quote and he showed— it showed on there when it got accepted. And it was before he even opened my estimate. And the problem was is because it took me 4 days 4 days to put together my proposal and war in my head about the discount I was going to give them and go back and forth and send them the quote. And in that same period of time, a competitor came in, gave the quote at a way higher price, submitted a video, but had a great brand and the customer accepted the job. My estimate wasn't even seen before they accepted the price of someone else. The best customers don't think about your price. They think about your value. They think of the brand. They think about the chance and the likelihood of you actually getting the job done. On time and on budget. And so this is another reason why at HomeWorks we created the estimate decline reasons, where when someone declines an estimate, they have to tell you why and you give them a selection of options. But I need to know why people are leaving because we all just assume it's price. I assumed it was price when I gave them a $5,000 discount and I was $9,000 less than my competitor. I just assumed it was price. And a lot of us don't do the extra work of going and asking customers, why did you decline our jobs? And being able to learn from that and adjust the systems in our business. And that's why at HomeWorks we have the estimate decline reasons. It's also why we allow you to attach a video with every single estimate. Every single time I see that feature, that one story from like my second year of business flashes in my head. I was like 19, 20 years old, and I just remember thinking like, man, that was— that could have made our whole offseason. At the time, I just needed to feel like 1 or 2 employees. That could have made our entire offseason by filling us up with 4 to 6 weeks worth of work and it would have been a perfect job for us. But I lost the job because I simply did not have a video on my estimate. I didn't have a great website with reviews online. Number 3, inflation already raised your prices. You just pretended that it didn't. Fuel, labor, insurance, software, trucks, all of that's gone up massively and not raising prices It's not that you're kind when you don't raise prices. It's lying to yourself about your margins. Let's break this down. This is the part that we have to understand. If you have a 10% profit margin business, which means on $1 million in revenue, you make $100,000 in profit. That's 10% profit. If there's inflation of 5%, which on average the past 5 years, we've had about 5% inflation, meaning that things go up in price, your fuel, your insurance, your labor, all of that. On average, let's say it goes up 5%, meaning that half of your profits got ate away by inflation. Everyone's like, oh, well, yeah, we'll adjust our prices and we'll go up a few percentage. No, no, no. If inflation's 5% a year and your net profit margin is 10%, half of your profits are getting eaten away every year just by inflation. In fact, our starting hourly wage for Command Center back in 2017, 2019, 2020 was $14 an hour. So it was before COVID so 2019. And we got lots of team members to join. It was not hard to find people. Now that's about 5, 6 years ago. Now the base pay, the starting wage entry level is $22 an hour. That is a 57% increase in just wages, let alone rent and insurance and everything else that goes into running a business. And we've also added health benefits. We've added a 401(k). We've added paid time off. All of these things, It basically almost doubled the cost of labor per hour. And so if your prices aren't going up, you're simply relinquishing all of your profits to inflation because the cost of everything continues to rise whether or not you increase your prices. A lot of people wonder what makes HomeWorks different than any other CRM like Jobber, Service Autopilot, or Housecall Pro. There's a couple of big things. One of them is that we actually have an office with real support people from the US. They're going to answer phones, chat, and video calls throughout the day. The other thing is we're not owned by private equity. I own all the company and I'm making sure that this tool is built for your home service business so you can take it to the next level. All right. Number 4, we're going to appeal to your logic side of your brain. The math side. Do the math. Because every dollar of revenue you lose, you're going to lose $0.10 of profit. Every dollar you raise prices, You get $0.100 of profit. Let's say you're like, I'm gonna raise prices. You get a huge backlash and you actually retract it. You say, I'm not gonna raise prices. And because of that, you lose 10% of customers. That's like literally the worst case scenario that could ever happen with a price increase is you freak everyone out, people leave, and you have to retract the price increase. Bad news. All right, what happens in this case? If you have a million-dollar business, this is a million dollars in revenue, 10% profit margin business, and you lose 10% of your customers, Your business is going to go to $900,000 in annual revenue and you're going to make about $90,000 in profit. Not good. Our profit went down by 10%. Our revenue went down by 10%. Not good. Okay, let's look at scenario 2. And this is the upside of a price increase. We talked about the downside. What's possible is that you lose 10% of your profits. You spook customers and you don't raise the prices because it all backfires on you. Let's look at a better case scenario. You increase your prices by 10% and your business goes from $1 million in annual revenue to $1.1 million in annual revenue. Here's what's crazy. Your profit just went to $200,000. That's 100% increase. That's a doubling of your profit. 'Cause you were at $100,000 in profit and now you're at $200,000 in profit. Because every dollar you raised was straight profit to the bottom line. And we all overthink that extra loss of 10%. Of revenue at the expense of doubling our profit. And so, you know, everyone's like, well, you got Thomas Jefferson, we're going to do the pros and we're going to the cons. Great. We just did it. And the cons are that you lose 10% of revenue and 10% of profits. The pro is that you double your profit. That's what could happen. And so we're also afraid of— we go defend, defend, defend, defend. And we never go on the offensive of we need to raise prices. And by doing that, you double your profits. Nothing you do this year, Nothing you do this year is going to double your profits as fast as raising your prices. It's the biggest lever you have in the business. I don't care if you get better trucks, better equipment, an all-star employee, you all of a sudden figure out the best customer acquisition model in the world. You run ads and just money is flowing in because all these leads are just— Nothing will double your profits like raising your prices by sending out one email or one text message to all of your customer database. You could literally double your profits in the next 24 hours by just making a decision. You don't have to buy trucks. You don't have to hire people. You don't have to run ads. You just have to send an email that says, "We're raising prices." That is high leverage. Low input, high output equals high leverage. And there is nothing you will do this year that will move your profit needle, move the margin as much as raising your prices. Number 5, raising prices is upgrading brakes before adding horsepower. Growth without profit makes the crash fatal. There's going to stuff happen in your business that is negative. But when you're growing at an incredibly fast rate and you don't have a lot of profit, that's when the crash becomes fatal. That's when the little hiccup, the one project that goes bad, a $20,000 job that now takes you $50,000 to fix. That could completely kill the business. If you're growing, I love growth, don't get me wrong, but if you're doing it unprofitably and you don't have enough cash in the bank, that's when little bumps become huge obstacles and potentially fatalities happen in the business. Just to hopefully prove the point, last year, dozens, over 25, Augusta Lawn Care locations raised prices by more than 15%, some as high as 50%. 50%, 5-0, meaning if they were charging $60 per cut, they were now charging $90 per cut. Here's what's crazy. Not one single location lost more than 10% of customers, and not one of those locations raised prices by less than 15%. Because I don't believe in raising prices by 1%, 2%, 3%. Oh, we're doing an annual inflation. No, like, just tear the Band-Aid off, raise price by 15, 20%, and Even with people raising prices 25%, 30%, 50%, that was the highest one, 50% price increase. And none of them, including the people that raised prices by 50%, none of them lost more than 10% of their customers. Here's why. The value you're providing is way up here. The price that you're charging is way down here. And everything in between here is lost opportunity. And so when you raise prices, as long as value exceeds the price that you're charging, The customers will stay with you. And so focus first. This is why it was sticky for Augusta. Focus first on providing high value. Answer your phones, have a great website, have great reviews, show up on time, have automations, have a credit card on file, have a great customer portal, use software. These are all things that add value so that when you raise price, people don't leave. In fact, at Augusta Long Care, we actually require people to raise prices as part of our 7 stages of wealth. For Augusta Nation. So the owners have 7 stages that gets them all the way from starting at zero all the way to having multiple locations and investing outside of just lawn care. Those are the 7 stages. But very quickly after we've passed $500,000 in annual revenue, we're raising prices. We're going into profit mode. It's on the 7 stages of success because it's imperative to be able to actually make profit. The reason you got into this business is to make profit, not to buy trucks, not to hire a bunch of people, not to figure out how to run ads, not to create a fancy website. It is to make more money. And so if we don't ever pull the lever of profit and raise prices, we just stay on this treadmill of growing and growing and growing. For what? Number 6, if your prices can't absorb mistakes, you don't have a business. If one error wipes out profit, your pricing model is all wrong. Already broken. Look, in every home service business, because we deal a lot of times with equipment, machinery, personal property, we deal with employees, we deal with new customers coming in all the time, you're going to have stuff that goes wrong. Mistakes will happen. Damage cases will happen. You will have callbacks. Weather will change, especially if you're working outside. That changes everything. You will have turnover of your employees and your best team members. You will also do bad estimates where you just mess up dramatically on a project. And you've got to have that margin to be able to make sure that when those things happen, it doesn't wipe you out. I was reminded of a story of Justin. He was on one of the turnaround shows from a brand new Leaf Lawn Care. And he had a great team, phenomenal team members. And they were doing over $800,000. It was like $860,000 in annual revenue. And he was doing over $150,000 in profit. But he was working around the clock. He had a great little business, really nice shop space. He lived on site, had a really nice, like, barn and in-home situation. Great team that had been with him for a long time, making good profit. Like, $150,000 is nothing to sneeze over. It's really good. But he was working around the clock and his wife was wanting more time with him. He also wanted to offer opportunities to his team members. I really want to pay my employees more. I just lost a guy who's been with me for 7 years. He got a job at a local warehouse to make $30 an hour. I can't compete. As we dug through his numbers, and his pricing, I realized he is massively underpriced. There's customers who have been doing service for 8 or 10 years and not raised their prices. Is it just a matter of like you're afraid of what customers will say? Yeah, yeah, yeah. But you haven't raised prices for how long? Like, I tried to raise them, but I don't know who, what, where, when, and how. We're going to tear the Band-Aid off, double our profits, and increase everyone across the board by 15%. Now, 15% is not bad on a $70 mow. Yeah, you're raising prices to $80. Yeah, yeah. That's not bad. Right. And you're at capacity. It's not like you can take a bunch more customers. Yeah, yeah. So that's probably number one. And the reason he didn't is because he wasn't tracking it in his software. He didn't know what his budget hours versus actual hours were on all these jobs. And so he just kept serving the customer and they were faithful and loyal to him. And he's like, I'm not going to raise price on them. At first, everyone rallies around that. Everyone's like, oh, good on him, not raising prices. Let's go. Not being a capitalist. Okay, great. But the problem was he had to work 7 days a week and couldn't go on vacation with his wife who was wanting that simply because he was not willing to raise prices. Now, if he just raised prices by 10%, 10% on $860,000 is $86,000 a year. Guess what you can afford for $86,000 a year? A pretty decent general manager or have Cruz take stuff off of his plate so he doesn't have to be working 7 days a week. Although we have altruistic, ideas of like, "Oh, we're not going to raise prices. We're going to be good to all our customers. They've been loyal to us." Realize that by doing that, you're actually just on the short fuse that eventually you will get capped. As much as I love him, he would have gotten sick. He would have broken an arm. He would have broken a leg. Something would have happened. And at that time, no one's there to step in. And it actually hurts the customer. The people that he had served for 10 years no longer would be served if all of a sudden he got wiped out. If all of a sudden his team couldn't take care of the properties because he wasn't there to instruct and train them. Although you might be having a good notion of these customers have been loyal, therefore I will not raise prices. By not raising prices, having the margin and having the time to make sure that the business is sustainable. That's really the word we're going here. Like, we wanted the business sustainable. And in order to do that, you have to have profit margin. Justin just needed to raise his prices by 10 to 20%. He'll give himself that margin, hire a general manager, or just offload things to his crew. Allowing him the time to spend time with his family and make the business sustainable. And that kind of business he could very easily keep doing for the next 10 or 20 years and not risk burnout. Number 7: Cheap prices force you to hire cheap solutions. Low prices don't just affect customers. They cap wages, training, and leadership quality. You don't lose A-players on your team because of culture. You lose them because the math never allowed for excellence. This reminds me of a story of Matt from Courtney's Lawn Care that we visited a couple of years ago for a turnaround show. And at the time we went for the turnaround show, Matt was paying his employees cash under the table and not reporting them as W-2.

Me and Brandon is the only one on payroll. Everyone else wants cash and I want it now. Can't find really any good employees. None of the Americans want to work.

We always have bad luck. I don't know. Do you have an employee that you're like, oh, we totally trust them to be on a job site all day long?

Debbie, my ex-wife, the guys cannot stand her.

That might be why, though, you had 8 people join and within a week they all left. He could not find good employees. He was so frustrated by the fact he couldn't find anyone. There's a huge turnover and churn of employees coming through the business. None of them had driver's licenses. So he and his ex-wife would have to pick them up from their house in the morning and then drop them off at the end of the day.

2 of my employees can drive, so we have to pick them up, drop them off. I mean, it's, it's, you know, crazy.

News alert, if you have to drive 30 minutes to pick up your crew, 30 minutes back to your shop and then do the same thing at the end of the day, that's 2 hours of drive time wasted every single day. If you have to go pick them up. So it's no mystery that there was high churn. There was low wages. It was cash underneath the table. There was no systems in place. And so by not having the profit in the business because he was so underpriced, like literally $30 to $35 $1 per hour is what he was charging customers on some projects.

I hear you talk about $80, $90 an hour. We are on the high side at $45. I mean, very high. I got one regional company that is at $35 an hour. Everyone we've bid on, we've been 45% higher than them.

Because he didn't know his pricing. He hadn't tracked anything inside of his software. And so that trickled down to eventually where he couldn't afford to pay employees well. And because he couldn't pay— afford to pay them well, He ended up getting the lowest quality candidates. I ask people all the time when they say, "I can't find anyone to work for me. The labor market's bad. This generation doesn't want to work." I say, "Okay, wait a sec. If you were able to offer $8 more or $10 more per hour to applicants and people that were looking for jobs in your area, do you think you would get a better candidate?" And a lot of times I say, "Well, yeah, if I raise my base pay from $18 an hour to," $27 an hour or $28 an hour, I would probably immediately have a lot of applicants from my competition. The best people in my market, they probably want to come work for me. Realistically, it's not the labor market. It's the fact that you can't afford to pay them $27 or $28 an hour. You can afford to have profit sharing because there is no profit. You can't afford to do open book management because you don't know your numbers. You can't afford to do pay for performance because everything's completely disorganized in the business and some people are high paying, some people are low paying. And you don't know the math on every single job. And what kills me is Matt had not taken a paycheck for 6 years, and yet he was working. Even the day I showed up, he had worked all night long plowing snow. 6 years without taking a paycheck from the business, massive amounts of debt, and every single day dealing with low-quality employees because he had not raised his prices and therefore could not compensate high talent to the degree that they needed. Number 8. Turning off leads during spring rush is crazy. Raise prices. Make room for new, better paying customers. It boggles my mind when people, when they get really busy, just turn off all leads. They stop answering their phone. They stop responding back to estimate request forms. They stop following up with estimates they sent out. And all of a sudden they just like, oh, I've just got to focus on my existing customers. And in your mind, that makes sense. These are the jobs I've already sold. These are the customers I've already committed to. I'm not going to go out and allow new customers to get on the schedule. But here's the problem. By doing that, you are capping yourself from accepting new customers that are willing to pay a higher price. And so I challenge you next time when you're overwhelmed with work, leads are pouring in, you're working on the weekend. Instead of just saying no more leads, no more customers, turn off the phone, we're booked out 6 weeks, we're not taking any new customers. Instead of doing that, I want you to raise prices immediately. On all your existing customers, all your existing work. And by doing that, you're going to reduce your close rate and now you won't be booked out as far. And you're like, well, I still got to answer the phone. I got to do all this admin work. I got to follow— That's why instant quotes and over-the-phone estimates are so important, because now I don't bottleneck an estimator to be driving around all the time doing quotes. I can allow the quotes to keep coming in. They're answered at the phone level or on my website, over the phone. Instant quotes on my website. They're already handled there and I don't have to worry about slowing down my operations or my sales team. This kind of reminds me of is a story from an owner of Augusta Lawn Care that was out in Florida. And this is during 2021, 2022. He raised prices because he got sick and he had just started the business about a year in. He was really just trying to go after every single customer and he was in a really price-sensitive market. In Florida, there's areas where there is literally a lawn care service on every single block. You cannot drive down any street without seeing someone for the mowing truck. But in his mind, he had discounted the fact that the brand of Augusta Lawn Care and everything that we did offered value to the customer, making our customers less price sensitive. And when he got sick, he had about 60 or 70 customers. He just got started and all recurring mowing customers. And so what did he do? He immediately doubled his prices. He was in the middle of spring rush. He was drowning in work, gets sick, can't do the work, only has one employee. And so what does he do? He just immediately doubles, like 100% increase on price. So if you're getting charged $50, you're now getting charged $100. Here's what's crazy. Out of about 60 customers that he had as he was getting started, he lost 4 customers when he doubled his price. What that tells me is that value was way up here. His price was way down here. And the entire time he was telling himself that he could never raise prices down the road. This is why getting into a market with lower prices, capturing the customer, getting them inside of your system, and then showing, proving your value, showing up on time, having automations, having a card on file, having professional team members, Having logoed uniforms and trucks, doing all this, answering your phone, all these things that you do shows the value so that then you can raise price down the road. And so a great strategy, if you provide great service, is you get in with a lower price because now you're competitive with everyone else. But then you prove that your value is 2 or 3 times better than everyone else. And then you can raise prices like we do at Augusta. And very few customers leave. Number 9, higher prices, buy you time. Time buys you judgment. Here's the problem. When you have low prices and you therefore have low profits, you start to take on jobs that you know you shouldn't. You start to take on customers that you know you shouldn't. There's all sorts of red flags in the estimate process and you still take them on. It also, you start to take on employees that you know you shouldn't. It didn't take no rocket scientist during an interview. If they can't look you in the eye, they're 20 minutes late to the interview, they have no references, no resume, and have bounce from job to job, 10 different jobs in the past 12 months, there's a really good shot they're not going to work out. But you overlook those things and you take that employee on simply because you're desperate. And so desperation and then shrinking the amount of time that you have to make a decision is a recipe for disaster. And I see that behavior usually occur when you have low profits caused from low prices. I remember back when I was still in my first location of Augusta Lawn Care, I was hiring a bunch of techs. And we did not have a lot of money in the bank. And because of that pressure on my profit and money in the bank, I started to hire people and did not train them as effectively. Because when we first started, I would be like in the truck with them for a week or two. Their first day on the job, I would take them to lunch. I would go through their employee handbook. I would be all organized. But then spring rush would hit. And because I didn't have enough profit in the business, because I didn't have my prices high enough, all of a sudden I was throwing them in a truck. Here's a uniform. Here's the truck. Go. All of a sudden, quality started to decay. All of a sudden, I was out so busy generating revenue out in the field, I didn't have the time to actually set them up for success and do a good onboarding and training system. And so this is when the vicious cycle begins. You have low profit, you don't have a lot of cash in the bank. Okay, then what happens? You have low pay for your employees, and because you have low pay for your employees, you get low-quality employees that churn out. They leave consistently. And then, so what happens? They leave and you do more of the work yourself. So now you're out in the field, You're out doing all the jobs yourself. So what does that mean? You got to hire people fast. You got a pulse. You showed up for an interview. Great. Here's a job tomorrow. Let's go. We don't even sign paperwork. We'll get you on payroll sometime soon. So now we've hired them really fast and we're busy out in the field. So what happens? They have little training, not a lot of onboarding. Okay, then what happens? Well, that leads to low-quality service. That leads to customers complaining. That leads to customers leaving. That then leads to bad online reviews. That leads us Low close rate because no one wants to accept our jobs. That means low prices, which means low profit. And the cycle continues right back to low profit, low pay, employees that leave. And then we get busy out in the field that we don't hire and onboard and train the way we should, leading to bad quality. And this vicious cycle continues over and over and over. And I would say 80 to 90% of home services are stuck in that cycle. And there's one thing you can do to break out of it, and it's fix the very first step. Don't have a low profit margin business. You're like, that's easy to say. It is. Provide high enough quality service to where when you raise prices, people don't leave. That is the objective of every home service business. And that's what separates the top 10% from the other 90% that go out of business within 10 years. Whether or not you're able to provide high enough quality service where there's so much value provided to the customer that when you raise prices, no one leaves. If you do that, you will break that cycle, that vicious cycle of low profits, You have to spend more time in the field, not training your team, low quality service, a bunch of bad reviews, no one signing up for your service or leaving because they're bad. You have bad service and then you having even low prices, low prices, low profit, and the vicious cycle continues. Number 10, last but not least, when you do price increases, do it humanely. If it's going to cause financial hardship for someone, extend the date if needed. This goes back to when I raised prices at one of my locations by 27% across the board. We had been in profit mode for a couple of years and we were doing good, but I started noticing that we had— we went from like 27% profit to 24% profit. Now we're like 18%, 19% profit for the year. I'm like, okay, forget that. We're raising prices across the board by 27%. A blind price increase, meaning every single customer. I don't care about the numbers. I'm just doing it across the board. And we just sent an email out. And what I changed back then that I'm so happy that now I do any time I'm doing price increases, and I highly recommend you do when you raise your price, take the edge off the price increase. No one likes a price increase. As an owner, I don't want to raise prices. I also need to have a sustainable business that can continue to serve my customers. And so I must raise my prices. But I'm going to do it in a humane way. I'm not just going to say, "Hey, price is this. Peace out." I'm going to do it in a way where I explain why I need to raise these prices. And trust me, when I raised the prices 27%, our wages had gone up like 40%. And so I had no problem. And our insurance had more than doubled the 12 months before when we renewed. On all of our trucks and our general liability. So I was like, I have no problem. We need to do this. Now, when I raised the price by 27%, only a handful of people left, but no one blew up. No one freaked out, calling us names, calling me greedy, nothing. And I pared it down to the one thing that actually changed in that price increase email. And as the very end of the email, I simply said, hey, like in the email, I say, hey, this is a price. It's going to this price. Starting this day, if you have any questions, please let us know. Here's why the price is going up. But then at the very end, I had a couple sentences that really helped and it made it much more of a humane way of increasing the prices by showing that we actually were empathetic to the fact that we don't want you to have to raise prices. And the fact is, we know that people are getting price increase on a lot of different services. And so what we say is, hey, if this price increase is going to cause undue financial hardship for you and your family, please reach out to us. And so we didn't say, oh, we're gonna stop. We didn't make any promises. We said, if this is actually going to affect you really negatively financially, and when we raised the prices, it was close to Christmas. And so I'm like, look, if this is gonna cause a problem, especially during the holidays, like please reach out. And we did have a few people reach out. And what did we do? We extended their existing price for another 3 months to get them through the holidays. Now, I did not say, okay, yep, once they call us, we will just not raise prices. No, I am morally obligated to make sure I have a sustainable business and I pay my employees and I have enough margin to be able to attract the best talent. I have the obligation, and it's not fair to everyone else that didn't complain or call me back if I just immediately disqualify the price increase. But by having the humane approach of saying, hey, if this is actually gonna cause financial hardship for you and your family, please reach out, it just humanized me immediately. And for the few people that did, we extended their price, their existing price, by 3 to 4 months. And what's crazy is none of those people left at the end of the 3 or 4 months because now they saw us as someone who's reasonable and could understand that raising prices quickly could have an adverse effect on their finances. I hope these 10 reasons convince you to raise your prices this year and make more profit than you ever have. If you want 40 brutally honest truths that every home service business owner must know, check this video out right here.