Playbook 13Find the Floor, Fix the Maths, Hold the Number

Raise Your Prices Without Losing Customers

If you are turning work away, your price is too low — that is what a queue means. This is how to raise it deliberately.

What you end up holding

“Know your true floor, correct the markup-versus-margin error, and send five quotes at the new number.”

The workflow — 4 steps

1
Work out the hourly rate you actually need, including the unpaid hours.
Quoting, driving and invoicing are not billable. 60% billable is a good year for a solo operator.
Open What Should I Charge? →
2
Check whether you have been confusing markup with margin.
A 25% markup is a 20% margin. Across a year of jobs, that gap is the whole profit.
Open Markup vs Margin →
3
Rebuild one real quote from cost, overhead and target margin.
Never below the break-even line — that is a job that costs you money to accept.
Open Job Quote Calculator →
4
Send five quotes at the new price and write down what each customer actually said.
One 'no' tells you nothing. Three or four tell you whether the price is wrong or the explanation is.

The evidence

Value-Based Pricing Over Cost-Plus

“Costs should determine the minimum price you can accept, never the price you should charge.”

— Thomas Nagle, The Strategy and Tactics of Pricing

Cost-plus pricing anchors you to your own inefficiency and caps your upside at whatever margin you happened to pick. Knowing your true floor tells you what to refuse; what to *charge* is decided by what the work is worth to the person buying it.

The older idea

The Worker Deserves the Wage

“The worker deserves his wages.”

— Luke 10:7

Underpricing is often framed as humility and is closer to a quiet apology for existing. Charging what work is worth is what keeps the work available — a tradesperson who prices below their floor eventually stops being available to anyone.

Go deeper on this

A playbook ends in a document. These journeys change what you can do — same subject, more of it.