Your supplier put their prices up in July. You noticed in August, when the invoice looked odd. You absorbed it for a few weeks because telling your customers felt awkward. Now it's October, and you've been selling at last season's prices on this season's costs.
So, sound familiar? It's one of the quietest ways a small business bleeds money, and almost nobody talks about it because there's no single moment where it hurts. No angry customer. No failed payment. Just a margin that gets thinner while everyone stays polite.
This week's fix is dull and it works: an automated price change notice that goes out to the right customers, at the right time, without you having to psych yourself up to send it.
The maths (all made-up numbers, swap in your own)
Picture a small business selling to about 80 regular trade customers. Average order is £250 and each customer orders roughly twice a month. That's £40,000 a month going through the till.
Say your cost of goods is £24,000 a month. Your supplier puts their prices up by four per cent. If you hold your prices, you eat that. Four per cent of £24,000 is £960 a month, or £11,520 over a year, gone because you didn't send an email.
Now say you do put prices up, but you do it badly: a rushed message, no notice, half the customers never see it and the old price list is still sitting in their inbox. Some orders go out at the old price anyway. You either honour them (more margin gone) or have an awkward chat (goodwill gone). You've paid twice and fixed nothing.
Again, those figures are illustrative. The shape is real, though. Price changes fail in the admin, not in the pricing.
Why this keeps getting put off
I've never met an owner who enjoys this job. Three reasons it sits at the bottom of the pile:
- It feels like asking for money. You'd rather do anything else.
- There's no deadline. Nobody chases you for a price update. The cost of waiting is invisible.
- It touches everything. Price list, website, quotes, invoice templates, the PDF you emailed in March. Miss one and you've got two prices in circulation.
So it waits for a "good moment" that never turns up. A machine doesn't have feelings about it. That's the whole case for automating it.
The system, step by step
You don't need a particular tool for this. A spreadsheet, a CRM, an email platform and an AI assistant will all do it. Here's the shape.
Step 1: One price list, one place. Every price lives in a single sheet with an "effective from" date column. Not a PDF, not three versions in three folders. If your prices sit in more than one place, that's the first fix, and it'll save you headaches before you've automated anything.
Step 2: Tag who buys what. Each customer gets a tag for the product lines they actually order. A customer who only buys the cheap range doesn't need a notice about the premium one. Sending everyone everything is how you train people to ignore you.
Step 3: Let the AI draft the notice from the diff. This is where an AI assistant earns its keep. Feed it the old list, the new list and the customer's order history. Ask it to write a short, plain note for each customer that lists only the items they buy, the old price, the new price and the date it starts. You read the drafts. You don't write them.
Step 4: Send with proper notice. Thirty days is a decent default for trade customers. Check your own contracts and terms, because some have notice periods written in. If you've promised a fixed price for a term, honour it and set the notice to land before renewal.
Step 5: Reminder at day 21, and again at day 28. Short. Same facts. Most people don't read the first one, and that's fine. The reminders are the safety net.
Step 6: Flip the price on the day. The new list becomes live, quote templates update, and the old list gets archived so nobody can send it by accident.
Step 7: Flag the stragglers. Any quote or order that goes out within a week of the change at the old price gets flagged for a human to look at. That one rule catches the expensive mistakes.
What the message should say
Short, direct, no grovelling. Something like:
> Hi Sam, from 1 December our prices on the items you usually order are changing. Here's the old and new price for each. If you want to place a bigger order before then at the current price, just reply and I'll sort it.
But notice what's in there. The reason isn't a three paragraph apology about inflation. The customer gets the exact numbers, the date and a way to act early. That last bit does real work: some customers will bring an order forward, which gives you a cash bump before the change lands.
Look, have a line ready for the customer who pushes back. "Costs on our side went up, so this is where it has to be to keep delivering the way you're used to" is honest and ends the chat. Don't over-explain. The more you justify a price, the more it sounds like it's up for negotiation.
Where it goes wrong
Two honest warnings.
First, don't let the AI send these unsupervised the first time. It'll draft them well, but you want to check the customer-by-customer numbers before they leave. A wrong price in a notice is worse than no notice, because now you've put it in writing. Review the first batch. Once you've seen it get a few right, you can loosen the leash on the reminders, but keep a human on the first send.
And second, keep the legal side straight. Business-to-business notice rules differ from consumer ones, and if you sell to consumers, price changes on ongoing subscriptions or contracts carry their own rules. If you're not sure, ask your accountant or solicitor before you automate the sending. Automating a mistake just makes it faster.
What it buys you
Once it's running, a price change goes from a job you dread for six weeks to about forty minutes: update the sheet, read the drafts, hit go. The sequence handles the rest.
And it moves you from reacting to costs to pricing on a schedule. Many owners find that once the admin is no longer painful, they review prices twice a year instead of waiting until the margin forces their hand. Same business, same customers, no heroics.
Your move this week
You don't have to build the whole thing. Do this:
- Put every price in one sheet with an "effective from" column.
- Tag your customers by the product lines they buy.
- Pick the next price change you've been avoiding and run it through the seven steps above.
So that's it. One afternoon, and one of the quietest leaks in your business gets plugged.
If you want to talk this through with people who are actually doing it, come join us in The Autonomous Business on Facebook. No gurus, no waffle, just real conversations with business owners building systems that run themselves.
Brewed by Steven, poured by Viktor
About Steven Tann: Steven helps business owners build systems that run themselves using AI. After 10+ years helping 7,000+ businesses and building his own autonomous operations, he's the bloke who actually does it, not just talks about it. Find out more at steventann.com.