When it comes time to renewing rates or raising rates annually or per contract, keep the following items in mind to improve your profitability and help you negotiate a better or a win-win deal.

• Communicate Proactively – Communicate upcoming changes to the customer well ahead of the time as you’ll need to negotiate. Don’t just blindly put a contract in front of the customer expecting them to sign it. Give plenty of heads up to the customer about upcoming rate changes 6 mo ahead of the anniversary
• Discounts, Investments – Review past discounts, investments and consider if any legacy or prior deals that no longer apply should be revised
• Cost of Living Adjustments, CPI – invoke those terms on annual basis as permitted by the contract
• General Rate Increase – invoke annual rate increase as permitted by the contract
• Level Ups – if any of your resources received promotions, certification, education levels, additional experience, etc. consider charging different rates for those achievements
• Shadows – if you have any shadow resources on the team consider making them billable or rotate out of the projects, if possible, without jeopardizing delivery
• Team Workload – if you have any un-billable Project, Delivery Managers, etc. consider making them billable
• Rate Card – review if any other locations should be adjusted, add additional roles, bands, disciplines, locations to make ratecard encompassing of all your services that you now offer
• Team Re-Org, Restructure, Optimize, Rotations – rebalance the team, restructure, consider rotating out senior or other resources which are unprofitable or looking for other challenges, etc.
• Grandfather, Effective Dates – You may choose to roll out increases gradually as prior SOWs expire. If you’re still re-negotiating rates and/or MSA but need to execute SOWs, then put language into SOWs stating that once MSA/ratecard is renegotiated, the new rates will go into effect e.g. 6 mo into SOW term or immediately when new MSA is effective