I can hear you thinking. What could this possibly be but I promise you when you read on you will agree with me 100% and not even be offended. Because  I am a vet and I am not.

We are just not good at increasing our prices.

However the general public might perceive us as expensive. They don’t really see that we have to equip ourselves like a hospital to be able to give the service to their pets that we are aspiring to provide them.  No GP has to buy an aneasthetic machine, Xray, Ultrasound and all the surgical and dental equipement surgeons and dentists would be proud of. But we do.

So depending on when you graduated you might still be working with the figures you have got in your head from when you first started.

Your estimates are low and you are not putting your prices up because the staff says the clients wouldn’t like it. How am I doing so far?

You know that your prices will need to go up because the wholesaler, pharmaceutical companies and the laboratoris just put all their prices up. If nothing else you will have to match it ( with or without a margin)

I have got the solution for you. Don’t put your prices up…..Yourself. Give this task to somebody else in the practice. Preferably somebody good with computers and numbers orientated. Just say put all the prices up by 5 % tonight. In most software systems this can be done by a click of a button. You can go in the next day and ajust your vaccinations and neuterings to where you want them to be taking your demographics into consideration.

When I was in practice for 3  years in England my mentor at the time said he was depress a few years back and just wanted to walk out of his clinic. His solution at the time which was drastic stuck with me. He thought if he put his prices up by 35% he would get rid of high maintenance clients that always complained about the price. His active client number increase and all the clients stayed.

I was not brave enough to do that at the time but it always stuck in my mind. When I was running a practice in Australia I read an article about price increases and it set a challenge to up prices by 15% which was still a sizeble increase but only half of what I was told was possible.

We told the staff that we would increase their pay at the same time and if lots of people complained we might make the increase less.

When I check a month later NOT ONE client had complained about the price increase or even noticed.

So Today with every salary increase for my staff I get somebody to put the prices up by 10% once a year.

• Have somebody else do the increase ( it is not a vets job)
• Increase your prices at the same time you give your team a pay rise
• Only do it once a year to keep disruptions to a minimum