Pricing for Small Businesses

Picking the number

After the cost recipe and the market check, you have a floor and a ceiling. The floor is whatever the cost work said. The ceiling is the top of the market range plus, if your value story justifies it, a deliberate premium.

Sit between sixty and eighty per cent up the range from floor to ceiling. That's the sweet spot for most small businesses. Below it you're leaving money on the table. Above it you start fighting with the market for every sale.

Don't end the price in nines. "Charm pricing" - £49.99, £999, £4,999 - reads as supermarket discounting and rarely fits a small service business. Round numbers signal confidence. £50, £1,000, £5,000. The rare exception is for products on a shelf where competitors all use charm pricing and you need to compete on the same plane.

Writing it down

Three rules for the page or the email.

First, the price goes near the top, not buried at the bottom. The customer will scroll to find it anyway. Putting it up front signals you're not nervous about it.

Second, the price comes with a one-line explanation. "£1,200 - covers the design work, two rounds of changes and the launched website." That sentence does most of the work. It tells the customer what they're getting and pre-empts the question they were about to ask.

Third, every price is followed by what happens next. Not a sales paragraph. One line. "To go ahead, reply to this email and I'll send the deposit invoice." Or "To book the package, click here." People who can see the next step take it.

Explaining the number

Some customers will accept the price without comment. A few will push back. The pushback isn't always a request for a discount - sometimes it's just a check that you can defend the number.

When asked "why is it that much?", the answer is short and grounded. "That price covers the parts, the labour, the call-out and a six-month guarantee on the work." Or "It's based on the typical four to six weeks of work for a project this size, plus the support after launch." Resist the urge to apologise, list every step or get into a long defence. The shorter the answer, the more confident it sounds.

When someone asks for a discount

Three options. Hold the price - "That's the price for this scope." Reduce the scope to fit a lower price - "I can do this version for the smaller budget." Offer a payment plan rather than a discount - "I can split this over three payments if that helps." Almost never just drop the price by ten per cent because someone asked. That trains every future customer to ask too.

When you do choose to give a discount, attach it to a reason. A repeat customer discount. A multi-job discount. A discount for paying upfront. The reason matters because it tells the customer that the discount isn't available by default, only by meeting the condition.

Keeping prices consistent

Write a price list. Even if it never goes public, you should have a document that says, for every standard offer, what the standard price is. When a quote needs to go out, you copy the line from the price list rather than inventing the number. Once a quarter, review the list and adjust if needed.

The price list is the single biggest pricing improvement most small businesses can make. It removes the in-the-moment decision, removes the wobble and forces consistency across customers. It also makes the next chapter - raising prices - dramatically easier.

What to do this week

Pick three of your most common offers. For each one, write down the current price, the floor from the cost recipe and the ceiling from the market check. Pick a number that sits sixty to eighty per cent up the range. Update your standard quote template to match. The next quote you send goes out at the new number.

Make the offer clear. The price on the page is the most visible part of the offer. The next chapter is about how to move that number up over time without losing customers.