We’ve gotten a few things wrong as we’ve gotten our business going. We’ve offered a valuable monthly service to our clients which we fully believe in but we’ve priced it too low. We know we need to make a change and now we need to figure out how to do it. We are considering a few options:
1) Tell our clients we got it wrong and that we’ll have to raise prices. Since we have a month to month agreement they can decide they don’t like the new price and leave.
2) Not change a thing for our existing clients and live with the effects of our mistake. We’ll use the new pricing with new clients and over a longer period we’ll have clients at the new price point.
3) Raise our prices at the end of a predefined time interval, like year end.
We’re leaning towards option #2. We prefer to keep our word on what a price will be and we don’t want to risk losing those clients or worse, damaging our relationship with them. We believe that everything we say and do contributes to how others perceive us. When it comes to what we’ve said we’ll do we want to be seen like a rock, steady, dependable, and unchanging
But we also have to consider that we are in business and have to feed ourselves. Sometimes that means making hard decisions and having tough conversations that we don’t like. We have to ask ourselves whether we are just trying to avoid that tough conversation.