What is price actually for?
Price does three jobs.
It covers the cost of delivering. It funds the business so it can survive a bad month. And it signals what kind of work this is.
Men usually account for the first and forget the other two.
Why do men set it too low?
Not greed in reverse. Fear.
Fear of hearing no. Fear of being thought expensive. Fear that the work is not really worth that, which is usually a question about the man rather than the work.
So he names a number he is confident will be accepted, which is a number chosen to protect him from rejection rather than to reflect value. Then he delivers, and somewhere in the third week he starts resenting a job he priced himself.
What happens when you compete on price?
You attract the customer who chose you for price, and that customer will leave for price.
You also train your market. A man known as the cheap option cannot become the good option later without changing who he sells to entirely.
And the margin that gets cut is the margin that would have paid for the second pair of hands, which is the only thing that would have let him stop working every Saturday.
How do you raise it?
On the next quote, not on the existing customers.
Add a percentage, say the number without apology, and stop talking. The instinct to justify it is what loses the sale.
Some will say no. That is information, not a verdict. If nobody ever says no to your price, it is too low.