Capacity and raising your prices

A lean agency's constraint is not production; the agent and the studio absorb nearly any volume. Your constraint is attention: review, client communication, and sales. Managing that honestly, and pricing against it, is what this lesson is about.

Know your real numbers

• Builds in flight: each active build costs a few hours a week of briefs, reviews, and client management. Know your ceiling; for most solo operators it is a handful at once, and pretending otherwise burns clients.
• Recurring load: care plans and retainers cost minutes per client per week, plus report time monthly. This scales far higher, which is why the recurring book is where growth should concentrate.
• Sales floor: the hour a day of pipeline work (Module 4) is non-negotiable at every size. The classic failure is delivery eating sales for a quarter, then a dry pipeline eating the next one. Feast and famine is self-inflicted, and it is always this mechanism.

When you hit the ceiling, in order

• First, route more to the white-label team (Module 7). Instant capacity, known wholesale cost, zero management.
• Second, tighten the machine: better skills mean lighter reviews; better SOPs mean faster client handling. Often worth another client or two of headroom by itself.
• Third, a contractor for the specific bottleneck (previous lesson).
• And always: raise prices. The queue existing at all is pricing information.

Raising prices without drama

New clients simply get the new price; your menu is yours to update, and no announcement is owed. The signals it is time: everyone says yes without flinching, your slots stay full, referrals arrive pre-sold. Any two of those and your next proposal goes out at the new number. Value pricing (Module 6) still rules: you are moving up within what the outcome is worth, not past it.

Existing clients get grandfathered longer than feels natural, because retention is worth more than the increment, and then raised honestly when the gap gets silly: sixty days notice, a reminder of what the plan now includes (the quarterly improvements, the faster turnarounds), and the new rate. Expect to lose almost nobody; clients leave over neglect, not over fair prices.