Planning for Price Changes
It is common for small wineries to avoid raising their prices for an extended period of time. This is due to a variety of factors, including a lack of accounting input regarding price-volume trade-offs and management’s desire to preserve customer interest. Alternately, a winery may opt to make price changes based on a gut feeling. Neither of these strategies will help you maximize your profit margins and grow your business.
The Financial Impact of Price Changes
Perhaps the winery simply neglected to make price changes. That is still a decision that will impact the winery but produces exclusively negative results. When wineries choose to delay price changes, the cost of production steadily eats away at profit margins. This reduction in profit margins may go partly unnoticed or unattributed and encourage wineries to make ineffective price changes. Wineries should adjust their prices with relative frequency to match the rise of inventory costings and the value of labor. Planning for price changes is a key step for proprietors to undertake.
However, important decisions regarding price adjustments do not need to be made by a single person or section of the winery – rather, it should be a deliberate choice based on data from multiple individuals or teams. By facilitating a conversation between sales, winemaking, and accounting, a winery can make informed decisions.
Establishing a Team of Expert Staff
Each section of the winery provides valuable information. Effective accountants will be tasked with determining the true profit margins for each wine. While it may seem simpler to apply a blanket price increase, this ignores individual inventory costings. A generalized decision can negatively impact your price-volume trade-offs and result in lost profit. It’s invaluable for wineries to track data on individual SKUs throughout the year.
Each wine will have a set of associated costs: fruit costs, barrel costs, winemaking costs, and packaging costs. By keeping track of these SKU-specific profit margins, it will be easier to adjust the price for individual products.
The sales team can compile market data to estimate the price elasticity of demand. This can help guide the price change by demonstrating how much a 2-5% increase will impact the volume of sales. This insight on price-volume trade-offs is an invaluable factor for providing an estimate for a price increase range and its effect on the business’s profitability. This market data is also crucial for pricing individual wines to maximize profit. Your most valuable wine can generate a higher ratio of profit when marketed and priced appropriately.
How to Determine the Right Price Change for Your Winery
It is important for wineries to avoid making gut-feeling decisions. At best, these choices will be ineffective – at worst, they will negatively impact your profit margins and customer trust. Wineries should rely on a dedicated team to keep an eye on trends, track inventory costings, and reevaluate costs versus prices.
For the most part, wineries should plan to increase prices for their products. Production costs and the value of labor is steadily rising, and that cost should be reflected in the price to maintain a 45% or better gross profit margin. There are rare cases where a winery will elect to decrease price and increase the volume of a particular wine to reap more profit over time.
However, due to the extensive timeline needed for winemaking, it is difficult to increase product circulation quickly enough to improve profit margins. Wineries may choose to invest in additional labor and inventory to bottle more wine. Yet months will pass before a winery can sell their product to consumers. This lag between investment in the product and reaping profits (and the associated time value of money) can compound the difficulties and further reduce the return on capital caused by low profit margins.
Another possibility exists for wineries to improve their profit margins by decreasing the price of their wines. However, this is a rare situation. This is most common in wineries that already have high-profit margins, and even then, it is rare. As with all pricing decisions, choose to approach price decreases with carefully collected analytical data.
Instead, wineries will almost always increase the price (instead of the volume) to reflect the value of the product. It is likely that a winery may delay price increases due to fear of customer reaction. This is one reason why it is necessary to rely on data from the sales team. By allowing sales to collect and report data regarding market elasticity, management can make guided price adjustments and have a realistic estimation of the impact on consumers.
Employing Phase Planning
If a winery has delayed increasing prices for an extended period of time, it may be necessary to institute phase planning. Planning phases of price increases can preserve the overall price elasticity in your market, therefore encouraging consumer retention. Choosing to increase prices gradually will also allow for the sales and marketing team to evaluate the effect of each phase. This data can be used to adjust future phases as a winery restores its profit margins.
Price changes can and should be communicated to customers. This is especially true for phased planning, as the buyer will see multiple raises in price. The communication can be effectively handled by management and sales. Providing a brief snapshot of the accounting data is usually deemed unnecessary. Instead, communicate with consumers in generalities while maintaining transparency. By setting expectations, customers will be more receptive to price increases. Effective marketing has the potential to reduce price elasticity.
Though it is possible to manage larger price increases or phrased price changes, it is ideal to make more frequent changes. Reviewing costing and pricing quarterly encourages wineries to track and record data throughout the year. Insightful inventory costing is often left until the end of the year. However, this decision can harm wineries. Accountants may neglect collecting important information under the pressure of a deadline. This can easily impact a winery, as it loses the potential to prioritize marketing its most valuable wines.
Price Changes Keep Your Winery Thriving
In order to maintain profit margins and preserve positive consumer opinion, plan for price changes. Even if you do not increase your prices quarterly, it’s crucial to collect and analyze pricing and costing data on an ongoing basis. If you haven’t done so already, construct a dedicated team to address pricing. Opening this line of communication and trusting in the expertise of sales, winemaking, and accounting is the key to maintain and improving gross profits.
Zane Stevens is the Director of Protea Financial. Protea provides services to take over the burdens and responsibilities of finding, managing, and training an accountant or bookkeeper for businesses and free up proprietors’ time, so they can focus on building their businesses.