Why "Just Raise Your Prices" is Harming Service Providers.
"Charge your worth."
You've heard it a thousand times. From the coaches who mean well to the podcasts and snappy Instagram Reels.
On the surface it's well intentioned. We all want to get paid well for our work.
But when we're feeling overworked and underpaid, the charge-your-worth brigade and their "just up your rates" advice can lead to disastrous consequences.
Like… pricing yourself out of your current market with no pipeline to replace it.
Working less and getting paid more is going to take a lot more than ‘up your rates’ (especially if you are an hourly biller).
So let’s get into the nuance.
The TLDR? Your pricing isn't the problem. Your positioning is. Until that's addressed, raising your rates is just a soggy peeling plaster.
Skip to:
Your worth is priceless, but your services have a value.
Let me be really clear on this.
Your worth as a human? Not up for debate. Priceless. Done.
But the value of your services is a different conversation entirely.
And that value is not determined by what YOU need to get paid. It's determined by what the buyer is willing to pay, based on what they value - THE MARKET.
Which is always subjective, you have no idea what that is. But you’ll soon find out… by those clients saying yes or no.
A generalist VA rocking 'admin support' and 'get your time back' on their website expecting £65 an hour because that's what the maths says they need? That's not going to land.
Not when someone from the Philippines will do the same work for less than half. Not when AI is automating away large chunks of what's currently on offer.
___
A graphic designer whose whole pitch is 'I do logos'? They're getting buried at the bottom of the Fiverr pile before the client even finishes scrolling.
That might sting.
But I'd rather be honest than watch you price yourself into crickets — paying yourself in £200 transfers and lying awake wondering how the mortgage is getting paid.
“Maybe I should work at Tesco?”
The maths most people haven't done
What tends to happen is this.
Someone's overworked and underpaid. They're maxed out, exhausted, and the numbers don't add up. So the internet tells them to raise their prices.
But before we even get to pricing, there's a more honest question: how much capacity do you actually have for billable work?
Not 40 hours a week. Not even close.
Once you account for admin, marketing, life, the school run, your actual energy levels and preferences…
…most service providers are looking at maybe 15-20 hours of genuine client delivery time per week. If that.
And if you need to market yourself more due to a change in business model… it’s less.
That's your true capacity. And it changes everything.
Because when you work backwards from reality — your actual capacity and the money you actually need to pay yourself each month — you start to see the real picture.
Not a number plucked from what someone else is charging. Not a rate copied from a coach whose business model looks nothing like yours.
My business pal Jo from Get Wildly Free talks heavily about capacity first pricing. Take a look here
Running a service delivery business is entirely different to running a coaching practice or a one-to-many membership.
And yet the advice is always the same: just charge more.
Or maybe… hire a team of associates. SCALE.
I don’t know about you, but I can’t think of anything worse than becoming project manager to a team. I did that… I 180’d back to a one woman band.
You need to know your real capacity and real numbers. The fact Emma charges £X is NONE of your business, it tells you nothing.
The hourly rate trap
So… you do the honest capacity and profit maths. Realise you've only got 15 billable hours a week. And think: right, I'll just double my hourly rate to make up for it.
Except the market won't support that. Because your current positioning doesn't justify it.
And hourly billing is already the wrong structure for that constraint. It ties your income directly to your time, which is the very thing you don't have enough of.
If your industry norm is hourly, I get it. It feels like the only option. But it's worth asking whether that structure is actually serving you, or just keeping you stuck.
Hourly billing literally incentivises you to take longer (why do clients like that?!).
More importantly, charging hourly has your clients valuing you against a commodity — a commodity they can always get cheaper elsewhere.
If you want to be seen as the expert you are, hourly billing is working against you. It flattens your credibility and reduces your value to a number on a timesheet.
And I am saying this from my experience, I was a by the hour gal and it really screwed me over for years.
It has a role in the early days sure, but experts have no business charging by the hour.
Want more on why hourly billing is NUTS, check out Jonathan Stark. He has tons online about it.
It's not about charging more. It's about positioning.
The pattern I keep noticing is this: the pricing conversation is never solely about pricing.
It's a positioning problem dressed up as a money problem.
Because if your positioning is vague, your messaging is generic and you're competing in a market that doesn't value what you do at the level you need…
A price hike won’t help you get paid more with working less.
You can't out-price dated or poor positioning.
So what do you actually do when the maths doesn't work?
In reality, you've got lots of options. Here are a couple of my thoughts.
None of them are a quick fix. But all of them are more honest than "just put your prices up."
Option 1: Go after a different market
If you want to charge more, you might need to be in front of people who value your services at that level.
And that means your whole strategy needs work. Your positioning. Your messaging. Who you're talking to and what you're saying.
It's not about slapping a higher number on your website and hoping the right people find you. It's about doing the deeper work of figuring out who those right people actually are and building everything around that.
That takes time. It takes clarity. It takes being honest about what makes your work genuinely different.
Option 2: Restructure the offer
If your existing clients value what you do at £2k but you need £5k to make your life work, raising the price on the same service won't bridge that gap.
What might work is creating a different kind of offer. One that allows you to earn what you need without doubling your hours.
Maybe that's packaging your knowledge differently. Maybe it's a group model. Maybe it's productising something you currently do bespoke. Maybe it's streamlining how you actually deliver the work, so you're not hand-holding every step.
The point is: the offer has to match both what the market will pay and what your energy can sustain. Those two things need to meet in the middle.
And surprise surprise, that shift means working on your positioning too.
Don't cut off the people currently paying your wages
And this bit matters.
If the market in front of you right now — the one that values your work at £2k — is the market that's actually paying your bills? Don't torch that while you figure the rest out.
You don't have to squeeze yourself into a clients budget that doesn't work for you. Hell noooo.
But you also don't have to walk away from paying clients without a plan or a pipeline for new work.
It took me 2 full years to move my business model from retainers to project based.
Partly the positioning work yes, partly the inner work required to step into that expert identity.
It was not a simple ‘up my price’ job.
Can you deliver something different that still fits within your energy and capacity for their budget?
Not by overdelivering or running yourself into the ground. But by reshaping the offer so it works for both of you.
And in the meantime, there are small shifts that can make the existing setup more sustainable.
Working with client A only on Mondays and Wednesdays (containing the work)
Moving all communication into one channel so you are not accessible everywhere
Automating the bits that drain you but don't actually need your brain to free up some space for your own business
Moving to packages with new clients instead of pricing hours.
Sometimes the answer isn't a bigger price tag. It's a smarter package.
It always comes back to positioning
What I keep coming back to is this.
The pricing conversation is never really about pricing.
It's about positioning. It's about clarity. It's about who you're serving and how well your offer fits their actual problem.
When that's solid, pricing becomes far less fraught. People pay for things they understand the value of. Your job is to make that value visible.
So before you raise your prices, go back to your positioning.
I know I am doing so right now… because business shifts.
Ask yOurself…
Am I in front of the right people? Is my offer structured in a way that works for them and for me? Am I being clear about the problem I solve?
Because "charge your worth" might make for a great Instagram caption.
But it's not a strategy.
Charlotte x
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