Pricing Mistakes That Crush Wellness Practices (And Uncrushy Fixes)
Most practices lose money in the same ten places, for years, without ever writing it down.
Most practices lose money in the same ten places, for years, without ever writing it down.
Underpriced and calling it kindness You set a number three years ago. It felt polite then and it still feels polite now, like a cardigan you've outgrown but keep wearing to weddings. This page works out what it has cost you, and what to do about it.
You chose £45 for the massage because £50 felt like bragging.
Three years on, you're still on £45. Your hands click in cold weather now, like a radiator bleeding itself.
The number you picked to seem modest has become the number that defines you. Nobody else remembers why it's £45. You do, and it still stings a bit, like a paper cut from an envelope you didn't need to open.
Wellness marketing choices: some helpful comparisons to consider:
Better ways: practical guidance on this topic:
A price is not a personality trait, though yours has clearly settled in and put its feet up. Ask it to leave. It won't go quietly, but it will go.
Undercharging feels responsible, the way leaving a light on feels responsible, in case a burglar's having a hard time and needs to see what he's doing.
It is a slow leak in a bucket you keep topping up, and calling that generosity is how the leak stays hidden.
You can refill a bucket for years. You will still, eventually, notice the floor is wet.
The virtue was never in the low price. The virtue, if there's one anywhere in this, is in the mopping, which you have been doing for three years without once checking the tap.
A friend of ours prices her reiki sessions by asking herself what she'd feel comfortable charging her own mother.
Her mother has never once booked a session. Nobody's mother has. The price still behaves as if she might turn up any minute with a fiver and an opinion about the parking.
The client in your calendar is not your mother. She's paid the parking, taken the afternoon off, and would like you to charge like you mean it.
Charge the client in the room, not the one in your head. The one in your head never pays, and frankly she's stopped even offering.
Fifty-eight per cent of UK small businesses spend under £250 a month on marketing, and run every bit of it themselves, evenings, weekends, one thumb on the phone.
The same fifty-eight per cent have no written strategy behind any of it.
That's a great many sensible people steering by feel in the dark, the way you'd rearrange the airing cupboard blind, fairly sure you know where the towels are.
You can run a practice this way for years. You can also find, one ordinary morning, that you've built the whole thing around a hunch.
A hunch is not a business model, however comfortable it's become. Yours has had three years to get comfortable.
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.
Buying a Facebook ad course before deciding what to charge is like learning to drive before you've picked a destination.
You'll definitely go somewhere. It's just unlikely to be anywhere useful, and you'll have the petrol receipts to prove it.
Tactics bought before the pricing question is settled become expensive equipment for a trip nobody planned.
A ring light. A scheduling app.
A course on reels, unopened, module three, forever.
Self-check: score your practice:
Decide the destination first. The car can wait.
The cost of underpricing sits nowhere near a spreadsheet.
It's the massage therapist doing six sessions a day, back to back, no lunch to speak of, and still short when the boiler needs the man out.
Six sessions a day is not a business plan. It's an act of endurance being mistaken for one, and the body keeps the receipts even when the accounts don't.
Tired is not the same as thriving, whatever the banned-word list would have you believe. You know the difference in your shoulders by four o'clock.
Doing your own pricing and positioning properly takes real hours every month. Checking it against your costs, your energy on a wet Wednesday.
Handing it to a specialist who does this daily is the other option.
Both are legitimate. They're simply different bills, one paid in your time, one paid in cash.
Free is not one of the options, whichever bill you pick. Somebody always pays. Currently, it's you, in hours you never write down.
A better rate isn't a matter of confidence, chin up, shoulders back, big smile at the mirror.
It's arithmetic done honestly for once.
Confidence is a nice feeling to have while you do the sums.
Confidence is not the sums. The sums are the sums, and they don't care how you hold your shoulders.
Nobody wakes up and decides, with good and considered reasons, to charge less than the going rate.
It happens one apologetic discount at a time.
A tenner off for a friend of a client. A rate frozen because raising it felt rude that one Tuesday and every Tuesday since.
Eventually the discount is the price, and everyone's forgotten there was ever another one, the way nobody remembers why the good teapot lives at the back of the cupboard.
A discount is not meant to be permanent housing. Yours has moved in, put up curtains, and started getting post.
Catch it now, while it's one line on a spreadsheet, easily changed, nobody hurt.
Leave it two years and it's a business built entirely around undercharging, structural now, load-bearing, the way damp becomes part of the wall.
You didn't design it this way. It simply grew there while you were busy with clients who did matter.
A pricing problem left long enough stops looking like a problem. It starts looking like your personality, and personalities are much harder to renovate than spreadsheets.
A pricing problem left long enough stops looking like a problem and starts looking like your personality.
Sort your pricing before it sorts you, properly, this month, with no more apologetic discounts. Fix your pricing now
We see them too, from the outside, which is where they're easiest to read. We have a visual river and a story garden built for exactly this moment in a practice. Come and find out what we mean over a proper coffee.
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