Finally raised my commission rate after 19 years and lost two clients in one week
I raised my base botanical commission from $450 to $550 at the start of the year. First real increase in three years, and I'd been charging that rate since before I even left the lab. In the first week I lost two regular clients over it. One of them wrote back a polite paragraph about their budget and I never heard from them again.
Here's the uncomfortable part. I did the math on what the old rate actually paid per hour, counting the specimen sourcing, the prep drawings, the two rounds of revisions on each piece, and it worked out to roughly $13 an hour. Thirteen. I have former colleagues who make that as a graduate stipend while they sleep.
And yet the moment I raised it, I felt like I was being greedy. I still haven't fully reconciled that. The clients who left were not the ones who complained about the work. They were the ones who got a good bargain for a decade.
I have three commissions on the books at the new rate and two of them came from complete strangers who never blinked. I keep telling myself that says something, and I keep not quite believing it. When did everyone else stop flinching when they named their own price?
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Sure the $13 an hour is the part that'd stop me cold. I've done that math on my own work more times than I care to count, and it's always a dose when you actually write it out. You spend years convincing yourself the craft is the point and the money's a separate thing, and then you sit down with a pencil and it turns out you're earning less than the lad stacking shelves in the supermarket.
Here's the thing I've landed on after going through it myself. The clients you lost? They were never paying for the work. They were paying the old rate, and the difference between $450 and $550 was never the real gap. The real gap was the two rounds of revisions and the sourcing you were eating yourself. Anyone who stays with you after a rise is staying because they value what you actually do. The ones who leave for twenty percent? They were always one moody Tuesday away from leaving anyway.
Two in one week is a hard dose though, no two ways about it. But nineteen years is a long time to be the cheapest thing in the room, and you're not. The new rate is still probably less than you're worth. Stick with it a few months and see who shakes out. The good ones tend to come back around when they price up what replacing you actually costs.
You've put your finger on exactly the thing that keeps me up. I know the craft is the point, and I'd hate to live in a world where it isn't. But I also know what a fair hourly wage looks like, and $13 was never it. The uncomfortable truth is that I was subsidising my own work, and I'd been doing it for so long I'd stopped noticing.
I think you're right about the lost clients. If the relationship had been about the painting itself, a hundred dollars would have been absorbed or at least negotiated. The silence told me everything. The ones who write back politely and vanish are the ones who were always shopping for a price, and that's their prerogative. It just took me nineteen years to stop being one of the cheap options.
Did you find your own increase held? I am curious whether the work that came after made up for the ones who left, or whether it just got quieter and more honest.