How to reprice a contract at renewal without losing the account

You need more money from a client who is currently happy. That's a specific conversation with a specific structure.

The contract is up in ninety days. You've tracked it and you know what you didn't know when you bid it: the crew spends longer there than you assumed, and the margin is thin or gone.

Now you have to ask a client who is perfectly satisfied to pay more. Handled badly this reads as either incompetence or opportunism. Handled well it's routine.

First: work out the actual number

Don't open with a percentage. Percentages invite a counter-percentage and you end up splitting a difference you never justified.

Reprice from scratch, using the hours your crew is really spending — not the hours you bid:

If you're currently at $1,850, the honest ask is $2,163 — about 17%. That number has a derivation behind it, which matters, because you may have to show it.

Decide what kind of increase this is

There are three, and they are not interchangeable:

• Cost pass-through. Wages, insurance and supplies went up. Easiest to justify, easiest for the client to verify independently, hardest to argue with.
• Scope correction. The work grew — they added a suite, headcount rose, the break room got busier. This is the strongest position you can be in, because the change is theirs.
• Underbid correction. You got it wrong. Hardest conversation, and the one where honesty outperforms cleverness.

Most renewals are some mix. Lead with the pass-through and scope portions, which are defensible on their face, and be straight about any remainder.

Timing

Open it 90 days out. Not 30. Two reasons: at 90 days there's room to negotiate scope instead of only price, and it signals a planned business conversation rather than a hostage situation. Renewal deadlines create pressure, and pressure makes clients shop.

The structure that works

1. Lead with performance, briefly. One or two lines. Complaints handled, coverage held, a problem you solved. Not a victory lap — just re-establishing that this is a relationship, not an invoice.
2. Name the change plainly. "Our labor and insurance costs have risen since we set this price two years ago, and the scope has grown with your headcount."
3. Show one number, with its arithmetic. Not a spreadsheet. The monthly figure and the two or three lines behind it.
4. Give a choice, not an ultimatum. This is the whole technique.
5. Say what stays the same. Same crew, same nights, same contact. Increases feel safer when nothing else moves.

Give them a scope lever

The single most useful move in a repricing conversation is to make frequency and scope negotiable alongside price. Then a client who genuinely can't find more budget has somewhere to go that isn't your competitor.

Option C is the one that most often gets taken, and it's the one to construct carefully — pick reductions the client won't feel daily but that genuinely remove hours. Anything you cut has to actually come out of the crew's night, or you've simply agreed to a discount.

Know your walk-away before you start

Your floor is not a mood. It's a number: the price at which this contract covers loaded labor, its share of overhead, and nothing else. Below it you are paying to keep the account.

Decide before the meeting whether you'd keep it at break-even. Sometimes yes — a marquee logo, a route anchor, a client who refers. Usually no. Either way, deciding in advance means you're choosing rather than flinching.

If they say no

Some will. A client who won't fund a documented cost increase on work they're satisfied with is telling you something useful about what the account will be like for the next twelve months.

Give a clean transition — 30 days, no drama, no degradation of service on the way out. Cleaning is a referral trade and the way you leave gets talked about. Then reuse the hours: a replacement account priced correctly from day one is worth more than a legacy account that never was.

The prevention

Repricing is remedial. The reason it's hard is that twelve months elapsed before anyone noticed. Log actual crew hours against the bid from month one, and the renewal conversation becomes a small adjustment made early rather than a large one made under pressure.