In the survey behind our newsletter issue 31, 36.4% of consultants said pricing was one of their biggest problems. Only finding clients ranked higher. So this week I put the two side by side.
I used the same made-up year from issue 31: $96,000 billed. Raise your price 10% on that same work and you earn $9,600 more. Same clients, same hours. To earn that $9,600 by selling more, you need a new client, a pipeline, and weeks of follow-up.
One takes a conversation. The other takes three months.
If you want to earn more next year, charging a bit more to the same clients is far less work than finding more clients.
WHAT WORKS
Put your numbers in two columns.
Column one: what you would earn if you raised your price and did the same amount of work.
Column two: how much more work you would need to earn the same at today's price.
Most consultants never do this sum. They judge their price by feel. Nobody has complained lately, invoices get paid, so the price must be fine.
The sum tells a different story.
At +10%, $96,000 becomes $105,600. Your week does not change. No extra calls, no extra proposals, no extra invoices to chase.
To reach $105,600 at today's price, you have to do 10% more work. More scoping, more revisions, more onboarding, more admin. And one more client who might go quiet in month four, like I wrote about in issue 30. The money is the same. The work is not.
Raising your price changes one number. Selling more changes every week of your year.
At +20% the gap gets bigger. A higher price gets you to $115,200 with one line on one proposal. Getting there at today's price means giving away a fifth of your year.
This will not tell you how much to raise. It shows you what avoiding that conversation costs, in money, so you stop guessing from a feeling.
That is the easy half. The rest is the four-step AI prompt that turns your invoice export into both columns, plus the two mistakes that make silence look like your clients are happy with your price.
Read the rest of this issue on our website: https://ankushchauhan.com/what-works/raise-the-rate-not-the-count
The quotes that never became invoices are the ones this method cannot see. Alacrio watches the proposal threads in your inbox and tells you which ones went quiet before they turned into a yes, a no, or a discount.
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