I have a mobile pet grooming company and we base our prices on a few factors.
At first I checked what the pricing was like from others that were doing mobile grooming in our area. That was a mistake. Groomers, like many creatives, are notorious for undercharging and not doing sufficient price increases to keep up with inflation.
A little over a year later, half the mobiles in our area went under because they couldn't afford a vehicle repair and hadn't planned ahead for those sort of expenses. Luckily, we knew they were undercharging so we started higher than them, but not high enough and still had to do a 30% price jump to keep up with where the surviving mobiles switched over to. I think it's a more accurate price for our services now but it might be able to go up a little bit more.
Since we have so many regulars it's very taxing to raise their prices. After this big jump we'll probably wait until early next year to reassess how much more to increase it.
This price change was the best decision we've made. One of the things that allowed us to pull the trigger on the price change was the realization that losing some clients is not a bad thing. We played around with the equation: $P*G= $S meaning P is our average service price, times G # of grooms, then our total sales would be S.
We soon realized that even if we were to increase the price by so much that we lost enough customers to where our total sales dropped a bit, we would still be better off for it because that would be a lot less wear and tear on our groomers and our vehicles, less gas, less product, less burnout, and we'd be able to start fitting in more of the people who we didn't have the availability to take anyway.
We ended up losing a lot less people over the change than expected and are still running a waitlist. We were able to hire more experienced groomers recently so we'll be catching up closer to our demand shortly. We're also in a major metro area that is chronically short staffed on groomers so that plays into our demand level which gives us more pricing flexibility than other areas would have.
From one service to another we consider the scope of work based on how long each of the different services would take the same groomer to do (because everyone's skill level and timing is unique) then we use that as a multiplier to determine average service prices by breed. We add another modifier to this for the risk, bodily strain, or experience level needed to perform a certain service. Most salons in our area don't do this enough so they end up with large, high maintenance breeds being underpriced for their workload -- one of the major causes of groomer burnout.
We also had to consider pricing within our niche of mobile grooming much more than the prices of traditional salons because our labor is higher and our equipment and maintenance costs are different in order to provide grooming services at people's homes. We have drive time, and we groom one dog from start to finish rather than batching them like an assembly line in a salon. We also need more experienced groomers because they have to be able to do these grooms on their own without being able to ask the groomer at the table next to them for feedback as they would in a traditional salon environment.
This is an example from a premium brand perspective. It's important to consider all your additional costs that need to be covered with this sort of brand placement because you need account for all of that and still have healthy margins in order to be able to show up the best that you can. If you're not priced high enough your customers can feel it and your employees can feel it because there's no wiggle room for vacation time, equipment upgrades, etc. if you don't plan for them.
