Price hikes

[Julian @pariSoma]

Hi everyone,

I was curious about what your experience is with price hikes. Have
you done them? How did you go about notifying members? What was the
response?

Our costs are going up (inflation, higher rent, etc.) and we need to
account for it.

We are considering slightly increasing prices here at pariSoma, by $25-
$50 per membership and are working on the best way to communicate this
to current members.

We want to communicate this soon, so they have 2 months of advance
warning before they kick in on January 1st.

I plan to ask members how they feel about it, but I just wanted to
learn more about everyone's experience and if you're considering doing
the same for 2012.

Look forward to seeing your thoughts.

For everyone in Europe for the coworking conference, hope you have fun
and wish I could be there!

Cheers,

J./

[Susan Evans]

Hey Julian,

We just raised the prices here at Office Nomads in October. I'd be happy to go through our process with you in more detail, but in general, here's what we learned:

• Keep your members posted, and keep the conversation open as to why you need to adjust your prices. We held a "State of the Nomads" meeting (which we do regularly) and brought up the price change before making any announcements so that we could gather good feedback. 
• Mention the changes in multiple places (people will always miss just one announcement)
• Explain the changes in detail, and be honest about why you're making them (people are more receptive to the details than you might think)
• We grandfathered in our current members for 3 months so they could make the change more gradually. 

Overall, our response was pretty positive. In fact, we even got several emails saying "good for you!" which I found pretty surprising. 

Again, I'm happy to chat more if you'd need to. Best of luck!

S

__
Office Nomads         
officenomads.com  
206-484-5859

J./

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Coworking" group.
To post to this group, send email to cowo...@googlegroups.com.
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to coworking+...@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/coworking?hl=en.

[d...@cocomsp.com]

We raised our rates when we opened our 2nd space. We announced that
rates were going up in a month (the target date was the opening day in
our 2nd space) but that you could lock in the current rates if you
made a 6-month commitment before the deadline. It spurred a whole
bunch of signups of new members, while giving current members a way to
soften the blow (and mentally put it off to some distant point in
time).

[gerard sychay]

Julian,

We raised our prices after moving to a bigger space. Quite simply, I laid out in excruciating detail our finances and books to all our members, and gave them plenty of advance notice. No one batted an eye.  It's not like anyone is profiting of coworking - it was simply required to run the business. Everyone was cool with that.

HTH,
Gerard
http://cincycoworks.com

[Jazzman3]

Julian:

Thanks for you question about "raising prices" at your coworking
space. Nancy & I recently met with our DurangoSpace advisory board
and they recommended we consider a 20% increase (for 2012). So we
are working through options, on both our membership rates and our room/
space rates. Our rent goes up 3.5% in January 2012, we have added a
second 10MB Internet circuit and we have improved the space and
services in year one.
Our $20 day (base) day rate may be a bit low, and we know that our
visitor meeting space rates are too low. Since we need to make sure
the business model works, it is clear that adjusting the daily,
monthly and special services rates is important.

We'd be interested to know what your learned as you made rate
adjustments.

Jasper

DurangoSpace LLC
http://durangospace.com
Voice: 970-282-1340