Pricing Strategy for Wellness Practices
Pricing is not a marketing task you finish in an afternoon. It's the load-bearing wall of your practice, and this is everything you need to set it properly.
Pricing is not a marketing task you finish in an afternoon. It's the load-bearing wall of your practice, and this is everything you need to set it properly.
Somewhere a number is fossilising Most rates get chosen once, in a hurry, and never looked at again. We'll walk through why that number needs revisiting, what it's costing you on the sly, and how to set one you can stand behind without flinching.
You picked a number three years ago, on a Tuesday, probably between clients, possibly while the kettle boiled.
It felt reasonable at the time. It has had no updates since, no opinions, no idea your rent's gone up twice.
A price sticker left on a jumper from 2019 tells you what a shopper was willing to pay for it once. It says nothing about what it's worth now, hanging there, still in the wardrobe, still fitting.
Your rate works the same way. The number people undersell is always the one nobody revisited. Not the one they got wrong. The one they got right, once, and then forgot to check on.
You've had training since then. You've had supervision, experience, three difficult cases that taught you something no course could.
The number hasn't moved to reflect any of it. It's sitting exactly where you left it, like a coat on a hook nobody's worn since the good weather.
Sit down with your rate the way you'd sit down with an old address book. Cross out what's out of date, write the new figure in, and stop pretending the old one still applies.
Wellness marketing dispatches: some observations from the field:
Guides: practical guidance on this topic:
A rate that never changes is not stability, it's neglect wearing a nice cardigan. Review it every year, same as you'd review the boiler cover, before it becomes an emergency.
You've probably drafted a cancellation policy at some point. Firm wording, twenty-four hours' notice, the lot.
Nobody reads it properly. Underneath, it isn't firm at all, it's the tone of a client apologising for asking.
A rate and a cancellation policy are the same conversation wearing different coats. Charge properly and the cancellations sort themselves out, because there's suddenly something worth protecting on both sides of the booking.
Think about the last time you cancelled a hair appointment. Pay nothing towards it and you forget it existed by teatime.
Leave a deposit and you remember it the way you remember a dentist, with a small guilty flinch.
Clients treat your time the way your fee tells them to. Undercharge and you're training people to view the hour as optional, a nice-to-have, something to shuffle around like a dentist appointment nobody wanted.
A policy is just a rate, explaining itself twice.
Raise the fee and watch the diary behave differently, without a single new line of policy wording.
You don't need firmer language. You need a number that makes the hour worth keeping.
Here's a figure worth sitting with: 71.8% of UK therapists earn £30,000 or less a year, and most of them followed sound, sensible, widely repeated growth advice to get there.
That's not a small pocket of stragglers at the back. Most of the room is reading the same three blog posts, doing the same networking breakfasts, landing in the same place.
You've been told to build your caseload, post more, get referrals flowing. All useful. None of it touches the number itself.
You can fill a diary entirely and still be underpaid, the way a bath can be full and still cold.
Volume was never the problem. It was never going to be the fix either.
The generic advice works on outreach, never on the fee itself, because nobody wants to be the one telling you your number is the issue.
It's an easier conversation to have about your Instagram than your invoice. So that's the conversation everyone keeps having, while the bank balance stays exactly where it was.
You are permitted to fix the number before you fix anything else. It's the shorter route, and it's the one most people skip.
Nobody writes "I panicked and picked a figure that sounded roughly professional" on their website. Most rates are born somewhere between a deep breath and a shrug.
It sat fine for a while. Then it started showing up in odd places, a flicker of dread before a session, a small huff when the diary pings.
A guessed number turns into a low simmer of resentment towards your own calendar. Not towards the client. Towards the hour itself, which starts to feel like something taken, not given.
You notice it in small ways. You stop looking forward to the regulars.
You feel a flash of relief when a booking cancels, which is not a feeling you signed up for when you trained for four years.
That flash of relief is data. It tells you the fee and the effort have come uncoupled, like a trailer that's slipped its hitch on the motorway.
None of that gets fixed with a better client. It gets fixed with a better number, chosen on purpose, not panicked into being on a slow afternoon.
Good to know: Whatever's on your mind here, and however your practice's specifics play in, this is what specialist agencies take care of - so you can get on with running your practice. Happy to help ease your mind, if it'd be useful.
A low fee feels like it should widen the net. It doesn't widen anything. It just changes who swims into it.
A low rate doesn't attract more clients, it attracts different ones. The kind who ring at eleven at night to reschedule, because thirty pounds an hour buys very little respect for your evening.
Compare it to a car boot sale. Price a lamp at fifty pence and a stranger will haggle you down to twenty, on principle, standing in the drizzle, because the price told them it was worth arguing over.
Price the same lamp at forty pounds in a proper shop and nobody argues. They pay it or they don't, and either way your evening stays your own.
Your fee sets the terms of the relationship before you've said a word to the client. The number does the talking before you've opened your mouth in the first session.
You are not choosing between more clients and fewer clients. You're choosing between a diary full of people who value the hour, and one full of people testing how far it bends.
You lovely thing: some of the fields we serve:
Room hire, insurance, professional memberships, the hours spent on notes nobody but you will ever read. It adds up the way the electricity bill does, silently, then all at once.
Working out your true running costs takes ongoing attention if you're doing it yourself. It's not a one-off sum done on the back of an envelope in January.
Costs shift. Insurance renews at a different figure.
Room hire creeps up. The notes still take exactly as long, because nobody's invented a faster way to write a good note.
You can do this reckoning yourself, properly, on a spreadsheet you genuinely keep open. Or you can hand it to a bookkeeper, which is a fair swap too.
Handing the sums to someone who understands your trade is a reasonable trade in itself, as long as they know the difference between your overheads and a generic template built for a gym franchise.
Whichever way you do it, do it on purpose. A guessed cost is just a fossilised rate's quiet cousin.
Ask around your area and you'll hear the same figure, quoted with the same confidence, by people who all got it from the same place.
The going rate in your area is not a law of physics. It's what everyone else guessed too, copied from each other like a group project nobody checked properly.
Somebody, at some point, picked a number. Everyone since has treated it as fact, the way a family treats a rumour about Great Aunt Barbara that nobody's ever verified.
You are allowed to be the one who checks. Your training, your specialism, your caseload, your overheads, none of that matches the practice down the road, however similar the brass plate looks.
Your costs and your clients are unlike anyone else's, even the practice two doors down offering what looks, from the outside, like an identical service.
The going rate is a rumour with good posture. Check it before you repeat it.
Set your fee from your own figures. If it happens to match the going rate, fine.
If it doesn't, that's not a mistake. It's you doing the sum properly for once.
The obvious cost of a low fee is the fee itself. The less obvious cost is who walks through the door because of it.
Undercharging costs you the clients who'd have valued the work properly, the ones who arrive on time, do the reading, take the work home.
Cheap price, cheap regard. That's the trade you made without meaning to, the way you end up with a drawer full of takeaway menus nobody asked for.
Low-fee clients aren't worse people. A low fee tells everyone, including you, the hour carries little worth.
People believe what they're told, and your invoice is the loudest thing telling them.
A fair fee sorts your diary before you've screened a single enquiry. It does the filtering no intake form ever quite manages.
You didn't set out to attract people who treat the work lightly. You set the number, and the number did the rest, on the sly, over several years, without asking your permission.
Raising the fee for new clients while freezing it for the loyal ones feels generous. Like keeping the good biscuits for guests and eating the broken ones yourself.
Raising your rate for new clients while freezing it for existing ones feels kind. It just means you're running two businesses off one diary, and only one of them balances.
The frozen rate doesn't stay small on the sly. It grows a following.
Loyal clients tell other loyal clients, and soon half your caseload sits on a rate you retired two years ago.
You end up doing the same work, at the same hour, for two entirely different sums, depending on when a client first walked in.
This isn't loyalty pricing. It's an admin problem wearing a kind expression.
A single rate, reviewed for everyone at the same time, is the only version that holds up. Existing clients can be given notice, a grace period, warning well ahead of the change.
That's fair. Two permanent tiers, running side by side for years on the sly, is not fairness, it's a spreadsheet nobody's opened.
Pricing gets described as a wording problem. Better copy, a nicer webpage, a braver headline.
Pricing is closer to plumbing than marketing, invisible until it leaks, and then it's all anyone can talk about.
Nobody thinks about the pipes under the floorboards until the ceiling below goes brown and drips onto the carpet. Then it's the only topic at dinner for a fortnight.
Your rate sits under everything the same way, unremarked, until the month you can't cover the room hire.
Suddenly it's the only conversation in your head at 2am, louder than the radiator ticking.
No headline fixes a fee that was never worked out properly. You can write the loveliest sentence in the world about your services and the number underneath still won't add up.
Fix the pipes first. The website can wait a fortnight, the plumbing can't wait at all, not once it's started dripping.
You're not being asked to become an accountant. You're being asked to check the number holds water before you decorate the room around it.
January empties out like a beach at low tide. Everyone knows it, and everyone still gets caught out by it, every single year, like a surprise nobody remembers rehearsing.
A rate that only just covers your costs has no room in it for the slow months. It works beautifully in October and falls over completely come January.
You need the buffer built in before the diary empties. Not while you're sat staring at three cancellations in a row and a kettle that's stopped feeling like company.
Think of it as the loft insulation of your business. Nobody enjoys buying it, everyone's grateful for it in February, when the heating bill would otherwise be frightening.
Price for the whole year, alongside the good months, never just for them. The slow weeks are a known feature of the calendar, same as bank holidays, never a disaster to react to.
Build the margin into the number while the diary's still full and you're feeling reasonable. Not later, staring at an empty afternoon, feeling anything but.
Set a rate you did the sum on once, properly, and never have to apologise for again. Price your sessions
Deserves a conversation that matches. The discovery call goes both ways - your wishes and ethics, our ecosystem and listening wind, a story garden built for practices like yours. twenty-five minutes. Good coffee.
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