065. How to Know If You're Ready to Raise Your Rates

Today, you are in for a treat! We are talking about one of my FAVOURITE topics – how to know if you are ready to raise your prices. I absolutely love talking all things money and prices, and especially to empower women to charge what their services are worth.

If you clicked on this episode as soon as you saw the title, chances are you feel like you might be ready to raise your prices and want to hear what your coach and mentor Elley has to say about it! If this is you, you are going to LOVE this episode. Maybe you’ve just stumbled across it and are ready to learn a thing or two.

No matter who you are, I truly believe you are meant to be here and listening to this podcast episode. Let’s get started!

In this episode, you’ll learn:

Recognising what your services are worth
Why being in alignment with your prices is SO important
My secret for earning more and working less
5 ways to know that you’re ready to raise your prices

Tune in to the episode here:

🎙 Listen on iTunes – elleymae.com/itunes
🎙 Listen on Spotify – elleymae.com/spotify
🎙 Listen on iHeartRadio – elleymae.com/iheartradio

The Episode Breakdown:

Welcome back to a brand new episode of The Empowered CEO Show with me, your host and back-pocket mentor, Elley Mae.

One of my favourite things is talking about money, selling and raising your prices, especially when it comes to women and charging what our services are worth. I am so excited because today we are talking about how to know if you’re ready to raise your prices.

I’ve broken this down into five sections covering different circumstances, situations or feelings that may arise when you know that you’re ready to raise your prices. Keep in mind, this is different for everyone! You may relate to just one or two of them, or it may be literally all of them.

So let’s dive in to how to know if you’re ready to raise your prices.

Number 1. You know that you have undervalued yourself

The first way that you may know that you’re ready to raise your prices is that you know for a fact that you heavily underpriced and undervalued your service offering when you first launched it. This is probably one of the easiest ways to realise if you’re ready to raise your prices – if you just know that when you first put it out there, you didn’t charge enough for it.

Maybe it came from a place of not knowing if you were worthy to charge more. Maybe you had a coach or mentor that said to charge less. Maybe you just had no idea what to charge and chose the first number that came to you, thinking you could change it from there – which, to be honest, is a great way to start, as it’s far better to take action than to sit around looking for the perfect price.

If you’re feeling this way, it’s very likely that you’ll be at a point where you’re wishing you had charged your clients you’re currently working with at a higher rate. It’s not a resentful feeling, because you chose your prices and your clients chose to go with it. But it’s the feeling that since putting that price out there and working with your clients, you can now see that you’re not valuing your time, energy, expertise and all those things that come into pricing your services.

If you can see that you have heavily undervalued yourself, then you’ll just know that it’s time to raise your prices. It’s probably the most common and easily recognisable way to tell.

Number 2. You don’t feel good about charging your current rates

This is a really interesting one, and is one that a lot of people come across. It’s when you don’t feel good about charging your current rates, and receiving that money from your clients doesn’t feel as exciting as it used to, even if you’re booking clients.

This is when you get to a point in your business where you’re working with clients, booking new clients and getting amazing people into your programs, and your prices seem to be perfect but there’s something inside of you that just doesn’t feel good. This price doesn’t feel right and it feels like you need to raise your rates.

Unlike the first one, this is more of an intuitive knowing and internal feeling that receiving that money just doesn’t feel right. The price just no longer feels aligned with where you’re at.

I’ve talked about being in alignment with your prices here on the podcast before, and how being in alignment with your prices is so important in selling it and feeling confident in it. You need to feel confident in your prices for your audience to feel confident in your prices. So even if it’s working and people are signing up and paying, if you aren’t feeling confident in your prices and receiving that money isn’t exciting and doesn’t feel normal, then that is also when you know that you are ready to raise your prices.

Only you will know that. You can go to your coach, your mentor, your partner, you can talk to anyone about it, but it ultimately depends on how you feel about it.

If you feel good about charging your current rates, stick with them. If you don’t feel good about charging your current rates, check-in with yourself and ask yourself, what would feel good?

Number 3. You want to earn more and work less

This is one of my specialties – I’m all about earning more and working less. If you want to reduce your work hours and have more time freedom, but also not see your income drop, plateau or completely vanish, then you know that you’re ready to raise your prices.

There comes a point in business where you’re trading time for money. If you are a service provider and are charging hourly, I highly recommend going package-based if you can. It’s one of the best ways that you can switch to a more flexible and scalable pricing system.

Charging hourly is very corporate of us. It’s like going to a day job, working 9-5 and getting paid X amount of dollars an hour, which equals X amount a week, which equals X amount a year. A lot of people then go into business and start doing the same thing. All of a sudden, once you set income goals of $10,000 or $20,000 a month, you realise that if you’re only charging X amount per hour, then you’re not going to be able to get to that point unless you work an extra X amount of hours.

There are only so many hours in a day – you already know that. And who really wants to be spending all of them working? I work a couple of hours a day, 3-4 days a week, and my income doesn’t drop like it used to. The proof is in the pudding.

So if you want to reduce your work hours and have more time freedom but not see your income drop, you need to raise your prices. Especially if you want to avoid burnout and your mental, physical and emotional health plummeting, reducing your work hours and raising your rates is one of the best ways to do that.

Number 4. You have big income goals that your prices don’t allow you to reach

This situation is when you have bigger income goals, but you know that in order to hit those bigger income goals, you would have to take on heaps more clients to reach them. This one goes hand-in-hand with the previous point of working less and earning more.

If you have big income goals but your current prices don’t allow you to reach those income goals, that’s an issue.

A lot of my clients come to me having only thought about what their services are, what they’re valued at, and how many clients they can take on – not about the fact that they’re not going to get to their income goals if they keep charging their current rates. So we break down their service offerings, their capacity to take on clients, but also their desire to take on more clients.

For example, my desire is to focus on only 3-4 women in my 1:1 coaching program and give them EVERYTHING – check in every 24 hours, support them, hold them accountable, check-in with all the amazing things that they’re creating in their business and their life. That is a far stronger desire than to stretch myself out with many clients that I have to split my energy and time between. For me to give those clients that level of support and that VIP all-inclusive experience and also hit my income goals, I need to charge a higher rate and take on less clients.

If you want to be making more money but you want to build an intimate community and go all-in on helping, or have bigger income goals and don’t want to take on heaps of clients in order to hit those goals, then that’s when you know that you’re ready to raise your prices.

Number 5. Your expertise and experience have grown

This one is a little bit different to the others. You’ll know that you’re ready to raise your prices when your expertise and your experience have grown.

It doesn’t have to be you getting a certification, working with a coach, taking a heap of courses or going to a seminar, although those things are definitely great ways to grow and fast-track your growth.

It’s your experience. You gain experience as you do what you do with your clients. You gain experience as you grow your business, your mind, your personal development and learn more about everything that you do in business and life. The more that you gain experience, the more that you gain expertise and get better at what you do. You refine your services, you get better at doing them, you do them quicker. All of those things come into play when it comes to raising your prices.

I always tell my clients to raise their prices at least once every 6 months. So a friendly reminder, if you haven’t raised any of your prices in the last 6 months, now is the time! Go to your website, update them.

As your experience and your expertise grows, so should your prices. They should definitely reflect each other.

So how do you know if you’re ready to raise your prices? Let’s recap…

Number 1. You know for a fact that you are heavily underpriced and undervalued your offer when you first launched it.

Number 2. You stop feeling good about charging your current rates and receiving that money doesn’t feel as exciting or as normal as it used to.

Number 3. You want to reduce your work hours, have more time freedom but not see your income drop, plummet or completely vanish.

Number 4. You have bigger income goals but you don’t desire to take on a heap more clients in order to reach them, you’d rather keep small, intimate, tight-knit relationships with your clients.

Number 5. When your expertise and your experience have grown, as you grow as a business owner and as a human being and invest in yourself – all of those things that help you grow and flourish and get better at what you do constantly.

Finally, I have one last point that I think is probably the most important and encapsulates everything I’ve talked about.

You’ll know that you’re ready to raise your rates when you just feel intuitively guided to.

You don’t know why you don’t know how you don’t know what it’s meant to look like. But you just know that it’s meant to happen. It just feels right to raise your prices. Maybe a number comes to you, maybe not, maybe you just know that it’s meant to be a higher rate.

It’s this intuitive feeling inside of you that just knows that your current rates aren’t aligned and you need to raise them. Sometimes that’s all it takes. And when you know, you know. There’s no questioning it. Your energy is so important when it comes to your pricing, you need to be in alignment with it.

Now, this part is so freaking important – you get to raise your prices when you want, how you want, no explanation needed. You don’t have to tell your audience ahead of time, you don’t have to make a huge deal out of it. You can do it in whatever way that feels aligned for you.

This is your business and you make the rules.

When it comes to pricing or anything around money and selling, you have to feel confident in it for your audience to feel confident in it. Trust yourself, trust that intuitive guidance and trust that your ideal clients will be there to pay even if you raise your price. Your true ideal client desires to work with you in the way that you most desire to work with them.

So go raise your rates! If you don’t want to announce it, don’t, if you do, do, but raise them. See you guys in the next episode!