You're almost certainly charging too little

There's a specific kind of stuck that small service businesses get into. The calendar is full. The work is good. The reviews are strong. And there's never any money.

It's almost never a volume problem. It's a price problem, and it's invisible because everything else looks like success.

The test

Take your last twenty jobs. How many did you win?

If the answer is close to twenty, your price is too low. A win rate above roughly 80% means you aren't being chosen — you're being defaulted to, because you were cheapest. Somewhere between 50% and 70% is where a healthy business usually sits. You should be losing work on price regularly and shouldn't be losing sleep about it.

If you've never lost a job on price, you've never found the ceiling. You've just been standing well below it.

What a raise actually does

The arithmetic here's worth doing properly, because it's more dramatic than people expect.

Say you turn over £200,000 with £150,000 of costs. Profit: £50,000.

Raise prices 10%. Turnover £220,000, costs unchanged — they're mostly your time and your van, and neither got more expensive because you charged more. Profit: £70,000.

A 10% price rise produced a 40% profit rise.

Now suppose you lose a fifth of your customers doing it. Turnover £176,000, costs fall to maybe £125,000 because you're doing less work. Profit: £51,000. Slightly more money, twenty per cent fewer jobs, and a day a week back.

Both outcomes are better. That's the part people miss: there's no version of this where you're worse off, unless you lose almost everybody, and you won't.

Raise it on new customers first

You don't have to have a difficult conversation with every existing client on Monday morning. Put the new price on the next quote you send. Then the one after. Watch what happens.

What happens, almost always, is that people say yes. Then you spend a fortnight quietly furious about how long you left it.

Move existing clients at a natural boundary — renewal, new year, a new scope — with notice and without apology. "From January my rate is X" is a complete sentence. You don't owe a justification, and offering one unprompted invites a negotiation.

Stop pricing your time

Hourly pricing punishes you for getting good. Get twice as fast and you earn half as much per job, which is a system that pays you for being slow.

Price the outcome. The client doesn't want four hours of your attention; they want the thing working. What's it worth to them that it works? Price a meaningful fraction of that.

The number that matters

Not turnover. Not revenue. Not how busy you're.

What's left after everything, divided by the hours you actually worked.

Most owners of small service businesses have never calculated this, and a significant minority discover they're earning less per hour than the people they employ. If that's you, the answer isn't more jobs. More jobs makes it worse faster.