Peaceful Profits Podcast Ep. 38 - Why I Raise Prices 2x Per Year
Synopsis:
In this Peaceful Profits episode, Mike Shreeve explains why he raises his prices twice a year—and why you should too.
By making price increases a habit, you create external accountability, improve your offers, and add profit margin without chasing more clients.
Mike shares how tying growth to regular price raises forces innovation, beats inflation, and transforms your offers into living, ever-improving systems that clients love.
Transcript:
Why I Raise Prices 2x Per Year
[00:00:00] Hello, my friends. Hope you're doing well. Mike Shreve here. Thank you very much for listening to today's episode. We're going to talk about why I have a habit of raising prices in my business at least two times a year and why I recommend that you develop the same habit as well. If you are a freelancer, consultant, coach, agency, et cetera.
Now, the first thing you have to understand is that you need to have some core fundamentals in your business before you can really reap the benefits of price raising. So for example, you need to have Lead flow. So you need to have the ability [00:00:30] to control your supply demand curve. In other words, you need to have 50 to 100 leads.
I prefer 50 to 100 customers coming into your business every single day. You need to be able to have a good nurture systems that people know and trust you. You need to have the right offers in place, et cetera, et cetera. So all the basics need to be there before this really matters to you and your business, or more importantly, before you can actually reap the true benefits of a habit of price raising.
So if, earlier this week we talked about one of the ways to beat inflation is to consistently raise your prices over time, and that is, it's a benefit, right? It's not even close [00:01:00] though, to what the real benefit of habitual price raising is. And it really comes down to understanding human nature, understanding yourself.
And understanding how to set accountability pressure points and checkpoints within your business. So I found many years ago that one of the pressures that works exceedingly well in my business is price. Now here's what I mean by that. For me as a person, the way that I [00:01:30] think, and I think most of the people who are listening to this podcast think this way as well.
I don't think I'm special or unique in this way. I think the majority of the people that we attract into our world tend to think this way. If I'm going to raise the price on something, I feel I need to justify that increase. So I feel like I need to justify that increase. If we understand human behavior, we understand human behavior.
Here's the thought process that goes through whenever oftentimes I'm working with people. I say, Hey, you should raise your price. They say, okay, I'll raise my price, but first I need to do X, Y, Z. And I agree [00:02:00] with that. Yeah. Make your offer better if you sell how we sell. So we don't do product launches.
We don't, make a new product every five days. We have Two or three core central offers that we run evergreen 365, I'm not into the product launch thing. I did that for a decade. I don't like it anymore. So that means we don't need to constantly be creating offers. We have core offers that we run for years and years.
Of course, you should improve that, right? That makes sense. If you want to raise the price, make it better. But let's be honest with ourselves. You and I sitting across the table, let's look each other in the eye and agree that humans [00:02:30] If they don't have external pressure to perform something, typically don't perform it, especially if they're a business owner, when there are real external pressures that are distracting you from what you have to do.
For example, I wake up in the morning and Teams has this fire to put out, or this client needs this, or that, and you have this whole list of things that you need to do, and those are external pressures taking your attention off of what you ought to be doing. So if we think to ourselves, okay, I would love to raise my price, but first I need to do ABC X, Y, Z.
Then we know that as a business owner, the likelihood of us [00:03:00] procrastinating the implementation of ABC X, Y, Z is very high. If we believe that we can raise our price whenever we want. Yeah, I'll get to it later. Yeah, I'll raise my price soon But you know that I want to work on this and I'll do this and I'll do that and etc And so the problem with that remember what we talked about earlier is that sorry in the last step in the other episode We talked about inflation, but not just inflation being a [00:03:30] Machine that's operating in the background, making your business less valuable every single day.
You have inflation, it's constantly going up. You have ad costs, constantly going up. When inflation increases, what else increases? Team cost, right? So you have to pay your team in accordance to inflation, so that goes up. Everything is getting more expensive in the background, while you are procrastinating raising your price.
Do you see how dangerous of a loop that is? So you're a good person, you believe, I'll raise my price when I make my [00:04:00] You're also a person who procrastinates things that don't have external pressure. And while this machine of increasing price is happening in the background of your business, you yourself are being distracted by the day to day and you're losing power, buying power specifically.
Every single day in your business. So what you can do to combat that, and I highly recommend that you do this. You can literally habitualize price raising. For us and our team, we set [00:04:30] two times a year that we're going to increase prices. Now, I personally like to increase prices on everything.
That makes it very clear to me that everything that I have for sale needs to be improved. What it does is it prioritizes offer development as a core central piece of how we grow as a business and it actually becomes a growth mechanism. Because, if I am devoting time, energy, [00:05:00] resources, etc. into making my offers better, which then allows me to easily justify raising the price, I have added margin, aka profit, revenue, etc.
Into the business, which is what I'm trying to do with everything else. So we think to ourselves as business owners, I need to increase my revenue. I need more money in the business. And what do we always look to? We always look to get more clients try and lower my costs on Facebook ads, try to, we always look to marketing and sales for [00:05:30] fixing revenue issues when we have in our hands.
A lever we can pull to significantly increase revenues called raising our price. So if we make it a habit twice a year to raise our price that forces Us and our teams to put offer development on the table in equivalence to meaning in terms of priority, trying to reduce ad costs, trying to get more clients, [00:06:00] trying to improve sales, trying to improve marketing, et cetera.
And as a result, what will happen? Our offers are going to get better. And the reality of the marketplace is that the best offer Is the easiest to sell. Okay. So the better your offer is, the easier it is to sell. Now, what does easy to sell mean? Easy to sell means you sell more of them to fewer people.
In other words, it costs you less. So if you think of sales as a per unit cost per person to get exposure to your offer, and it takes fewer people to [00:06:30] purchase your offer, you are reducing your ad costs, marketing costs, sales costs by making a better offer. That's easier to sell. And if you look at your offers as these things that can be improved every six months.
Then you start to do what we all want in the help industry, but very few people actually achieve, which is Build a more peaceful, less product launch based, less frenetic, less shiny object style business. And you realize, instead of going and creating a totally new offer, which I might not even need, you might introduce all these different unknowns, such as, [00:07:00] is this new offer even gonna sell?
How can I fulfill on this offer, and the offers that I already have, and et cetera, et cetera. You can really drill down and say, I'm gonna take that same time, energy, and effort, I'm gonna make the offer that I already know sells, I'm gonna make it better. Make it more sellable and deliver bigger, better results to our clients.
And that's exactly what we do here at Peaceful Profits. If you look at what our offer was a year ago and what the pricing was a year ago, you find that we've made significant improvements on that same offer. And that has justified [00:07:30] continual price increases. And we will continue to do that far into the future.
That's the game that we're playing. It is, how can I make this better? And I want to leave you with one last thought, which is when you put that external pressure of every six months, I'm going to hold myself accountable to raising my price. And you get into the habit of it. What happens is on a very basic, psychological, biological, I'm not smart enough to know any of that, but mental level, when you prioritize improvement of the offer and you give [00:08:00] yourself six month windows, you will be amazed at what you can come up with as solutions to creating your offer.
One of the biggest mistakes I see in people who are running help businesses is they come up with their offer. They launch it to the market, and maybe they spent like a week at most trying to think about what that offer is. They launch it to the market, it sells, and then they think, I'm done.
And that's scary to me because what it, what they're saying when they do that, when you launch an offer and then you never improve it, what you're saying is, in that week or [00:08:30] whatever that you spent putting it together, those were the best ideas you're ever going to have. Which, I hope you know, in your heart of hearts, that's totally false.
If anything, once you launch your offer, that's when you start getting significantly better data and information. You see where people are stumbling in your coaching program, where you see where clients are having a hard time with your ad service, or as the problems come up in your offer, instead of those being seen as these horrible events, right?
When a client is, [00:09:00] says something like this didn't work for me and I don't like this. And when you start having that happen in your business, everybody does. Then what you can do is look at those events as opportunities to what? Increase your price. Why are those opportunities to increase your price?
Because they're opportunities for you to make your offer better. You can take that feedback, you can make the adjustments, you can make the offer better. And what happens then is you realize that your offer isn't just for you to build, it's something that you build in collaboration with the people who purchase it.[00:09:30]
So what that means is that when you very first make your offer, And at very first start selling, you've just started the offer creation process. You've only begun. Now you have the other person at the other side of the table called your client or customer, and together through them going through it and offering feedback, you are together going to collaborate and create something that is going to be even bigger, better, et cetera, which then justifies your ability to sell.
increase your price. When you look at your [00:10:00] offers as living things that are being constantly tested and, um, you have a feedback loop from the people who are in it. Then you now have what an external force of accountability that you can match with the external force of accountability called a commitment to raising your prices every day.
Twice a year. And now you have a mechanism. This is literally a way to increase the money in your business. It is a growth mechanism to then put these two [00:10:30] external forces together. Keep yourself accountable. Put it high on your priority list. And now you have an evergreen offer, which is constantly being improved, which allows you to justify increasing your price.
And you're not only beating inflation and add costs and etc. You're now adding margin into your business. This my friends is why we raise our prices twice a year shameless plug May 1st prices are going up They're going up quite extensively This time and the reason for that is the like exactly what I just said [00:11:00] It's the work that we have done over the past six months.
We have added a small army of team And coaches and trainings and systems, whether it's for our done for you offers or hybrid offers, our training program offers, our do it yourself offers, et cetera. Everything has been improved since the last time we raised our prices. I would say probably in the 15 years that I've been doing this might be the biggest single period improvement between price increases.
So prices are going up substantially. [00:11:30] Please book a call with our team if you'd like to lock in the current pricing. This is not fake scarcity. We do have limitations in how many calls we can take. If you can't get a hold of any of our advisors, if you're unable to get on their calendar, please send us an email, support at PeacefulProfits.com.
We'll try and figure out if we can get you on a call. If you've been on the fence about purchasing something from us previously, I do highly recommend that you go ahead and get in now because you'll pay the old price, But you'll get the new, better, improved offer, right? And we do that [00:12:00] for everybody that goes through this process, okay?
Again, May 1st is the deadline, there's no exceptions bills, invoices, etc. need to be paid by May 1st in order to lock in the old prices. Otherwise You can just pay the new prices moving forward. We're not taking our offers off the table or anything like that. They're just going to be significantly more expensive.
Okay my friends, that is it. Hopefully this has been helpful. Hopefully it's something that you, that has inspired you to do something about it. Because I am a firm believer that there is so much potential squandered in the help industry [00:12:30] by people who make an offer and then never try to improve it.
Because imagine, it just, it's a very simple thought process. Imagine thinking that the first version of anything you've ever done is the best version you could ever do. So now look at the offers you do, think about the results you give for people, and imagine if you prioritized getting better results. So it's not just about the money, right?
There's also an element here of joy. Of impact of influence of all sorts of things referrals and all that kind of stuff all the things that we desire from running a business [00:13:00] in the help industry. It's not marketing and sales that delivers that it's the offer and being able to improve that offer to be able to have the time and the space and the energy and the focus to improve that offer.
One of the best ways you can create that space is to tie it to your business. To a clear path of revenue increase, right? So one easy way to justify something in a business is to say if I do this it's going to make me more money that allows you to Prioritize it as an action worth taking well if you habitualize price increase [00:13:30] Two times a year, then working on your offer is a justification for your time, attention, energy, et cetera, because it is justifying one of the fastest, easiest ways to increase revenue.
That's it, my friends. Hope you have a wonderful day, and we will see you hopefully before May 1st. Again, PeacefulProfits.com forward slash call or support at PeacefulProfits.com, and we'll talk to you soon.