This is a little bit of a touchy subject for me - I'm quite passionate about that term "reasonable". When you cut prices to appease a certain customer base, the only person it hurts is yourself. My short answer is - you can't unless you are cutting things that aren't providing you value or generating revenue.
Everyone is not your customer. I guarantee, regardless of where you live, there are people that are willing to pay WHAT IT TAKES to get to service performed at the price you have to charge to do it. That is unless you are trying to sell dog poop scooping or something that's more of a luxury service in a low income area. If that's the case, I'd say move or don't do that business. Cutting or not raising prices when you need to, is suicide.
Variable costs
Your labor costs X - you try to cut that, you just F over your coworkers. Do you have people that aren't producing and need to go? You could cut that. If you have good people that are providing value, I wouldn't cut them or their pay.
Materials - sure you may be able to source somewhere less expensive but you also need to account for your time getting those cheaper materials and what other costs are associated with it.
Fixed costs
Insurance - can't do anything about that.
Marketing - You don't really want to cut marketing so you can cut prices
Consumables - You can try to manage those better but is that really going to have a meaningful affect on price that would make you want to lower prices
Equipment/ vehicles- As long as you are using them to perform you job well, can't really do much with these. Do you have extra vehicles? You could cut that I guess
Officer salaries - are you taking too much salary? Maybe cut that if so but long term that's not a solution. Eventually you'll need to pay someone to do what you're doing unless you want to work in your business forever so I'd leave it in there unless your salary is way too high.
If all the above is WHAT IT TAKES to do something, why would you charge less? To have less hard conversations with customers? I get it, price resistance sucks. I have that conversation 3-4 times a day. But you have to get over. And BTW - I have the same price resistant conversations charging at $150/ hr, I did when I charged $50/ hr. Just with different people and now I make enough to sustain the business.
