Raise It. Explain It Once. Don't Apologize Twice.
When someone upstream of you raises their price and your margin is already thin, raise yours and explain it once, plainly: costs went up, here's what changed, here's the new price. Don't apologize for it; an apology turns into hedging that makes the customer wonder if you're not sure you deserve to charge it.
In the drycleaning business, we didn't do our own laundry processing — we subcontracted it out. That meant our margin on every single order was already thin before we did anything else. When the subcontractor raised their price, we didn't have a choice sitting in reserve. We had to raise ours too, or the margin that was already thin would have gone negative.
What we didn't do was hide it, soften it, or apologize for it three different ways hoping customers wouldn't notice. We explained the actual situation — our processing costs had gone up, and we were passing through what we had to. Just that. One explanation, stated plainly.
We braced for pushback. It didn't come, not in any real way. We didn't see considerable customer dissatisfaction, and the ones who did ask a question got a straight answer, not a scramble. What carried us through wasn't a clever pricing script. It was that we'd already built real rapport with those customers, and a business they trusted got a plain explanation instead of an excuse.
Revenue isn't the same as margin
It's easy to watch the top line and feel like things are fine. Revenue is the number that's visible — it's what shows up on the deposit slip. Margin is the number that actually determines whether raising prices is optional or mandatory. In a subcontracted business especially, your margin can be thinner than your revenue ever lets on, because someone upstream of you is taking their cut first. When their price moves, yours has to, whether you feel ready or not.
Explaining the number beats apologizing for it
There's a real difference between explaining a price increase and apologizing for one. An explanation is one sentence: costs went up, here's what changed, here's the new price. An apology turns into three paragraphs of hedging that makes the customer wonder if you're not sure you deserve to charge it. We said the first thing, not the second, and it's the reason the increase landed the way it did.
A customer saying "that's expensive" isn't a verdict
A customer pushing back on a new price is telling you something about how that one customer feels in that one moment. It isn't a market study, and it isn't proof the number is wrong. Some of our customers asked why. None of them needed us to apologize for an answer we could explain in a sentence.
The price still has to make sense for the business running it, not just for the customer paying it. Ours did. We said so, and moved on.