Skip Navigation
Episode #287
Casey Brown

The Art Of Pricing Irresistible Consulting Offers

Subscribe On
Summary

Unlocking your true pricing power is not just about charging more. It’s about creating irresistible consulting offers that reflect the excellence you provide, and ultimately, unlocking the full potential of your business. In this episode, Casey Brown, President and Founder of Boost Pricing, talks about the art of pricing irresistible consulting offers. She discusses how to help companies discover their true pricing power and how to get paid well for the excellence they provide. Casey discusses her brand’s pricing strategies, how pricing affects businesses, its benefits, and why it’s often overlooked. Drawing from her experience, she offers valuable insights and advice for all small businesses on how to compete in the challenging pricing market. Tune in now.

I am very excited to have Casey Brown joining us. Casey, welcome.

Thank you, Michael. I’m happy to be here.

For those who are not familiar with your work yet, they soon will be. You are the President and Founder of Boost Pricing. At Boost, you help companies to discover their true pricing power. We will talk about what that even means. The goal is to help people to get paid very well for the excellence that they provide. That’s I believe how you put it. If anyone in the world of consulting success spends any time in our community, they are a client, or they have been around our show or any content that we put out, they know that we love talking about pricing and pricing strategy.

You and I spoke before we do this. It’s such a powerful area that oftentimes people ignore, or there’s hesitation around adjusting pricing but you and I both know it can have such a positive and powerful impact on a consulting business or any business. I‘m excited about our conversation here. Before we get into all the nittygritty around pricing, and we will make this very valuable for everyone, I would love to go back a little bit in time because you started as an engineer or have an engineering background. You have a patent under your name for a lamp. What is the patent called?

I worked at GE Lighting. I worked on light bulb technology. Inside the light bulb design world, a light bulb is called a lamp. I have a light bulb patent for a high-intensity discharge light bulb.

Are you still collecting royalties from that?

I got a nice plaque and a little cash award but the dollars all accrue to General Electric.

I‘m sure they had that contract tightly in place. Talk to me about engineering for a minute and not having that background. Is there anything that you feel that your experience of being an engineer and doing engineering work helps your thought process or how you apply that in terms of pricing and the work that you do?

I ended up in engineering by accident. By that, I mean I was good at math and science, and I didn’t know what else to do. I started as an engineer. I love the technical and analytical aspects of it. I love spreadsheets. Excel is my jam but I have a pretty big personality. I talk a lot. I live out loud. That was a problem for the other engineers in my department. I ended up also by accident finding my way into Six Sigma at GE. I was one of the early black belts. I ended up doing rotation and pricing. That’s where I fell in love and found what I was going to do with the rest of my career, which is exactly what I have done.

It's really the confidence or the fear that guides our decision-making. Click To Tweet

To more succinctly tie what I’m describing in my story to your question, in the early part of my entrepreneurial journey, I was in pricing in Corporate America for a decade and a half or something like that but then when I started my company, my game plan was to bring these technical and analytical solutions that I learned around elasticity calculation, segmentation analysis, and detailed cost, mix, and price analysis to my client base, which was going to be a smaller medium-sized company.

Ironically, although I still love data and spreadsheets and their role in informing our decision-making, what I have found is quite the opposite, which is the biggest reason companies and individuals who sell their services like consultants are not making more money with pricing isn’t a better spreadsheet or a better understanding of the data. It’s the confidence or the fear that guides our decision-making.

In other words, you can have the most beautiful, most elaborate, and most accurate spreadsheet in the world but if you do not in your heart and mind believe you can or you should or that you are worth it, or you don’t know what the customer’s going to say and you march around that spreadsheet and discount anyway, then it’s the analogy I have been leaning on a little bit for this is it’s a little bit like giving the keys to your Ferrari to a toddler. It’s not important to have the very best mousetrap as much as it is to take whatever mousetrap you have, AKA whatever pricing strategy you have, and execute it with confidence and effectiveness.

It’s funny when you mentioned that analogy or image of the toddler and a Ferrari. My mind right away went to, “The toddler can’t even reach the gas pedal.” I have talked a lot about this idea in pricing. I‘m very aligned with what you are talking about in terms of mindset. Its the internal work that is typically the biggest challenge for people. You can know what to do and how to set your fees, and you have all the information but at the end of the day, if your mindset of something is holding you back, you can’t reach that pedal. You are not going to push the gas. You are not even going to move forward. It doesn’t matter if you have the keys.

I love that. Let’s go back. You were at GE and then AkzoNobel. You were the pricing manager there. Some people may not even know what a pricing manager is and what they do but organizations, typically larger ones, have very specific rules and functions where people are focused on pricing. You talk a little bit about some of the segmentation, price elasticity, and all that but it would be helpful if you could paint a bit of a picture. What were you doing as a pricing manager? What does that department look like?

How I would describe what I did there is probably pretty different than what the sales team would describe. They used to have a joke. They called us the SPD or the Sales Prevention Department because we were inevitably at times in tension with the sales team. That also informs our focus specifically in arming the frontline sellers and pricers with better decision-making, execution, and confidence but it is very common that those that are directly selling to the customers, which in large organizations means the sales force, are out there taking the arrows on behalf of the whole company and hearing every day that so-and-so down the street can do it for less.

There starts to be a dip in the pricing confidence or a hit to that mindset as you described. It’s very common for sales teams to have a belief that we are too expensive or that our attempt to prop up prices too high is hurting our volume. There’s truth in that. I give the sales teams a lot of credit. They are the closest to the customer. They know the feedback but if you think of a pendulum analogy, the sales team tends to want to discount too much. The CFO tends to want to cut discounting to zero. They look at that income statement and see that we are not earning as much. They want to make the sales guys the bad guys. The true answer is a bit more nuanced. It’s somewhat in the middle.

I would describe my job as the pricing manager in Corporate America as trying to navigate the competing goals sometimes with the end result being the highest number of most profitable sales possible. It’s very common to get into this tug-of-war between volume and profit. I believe this and have seen a lot of examples of this. We can have high prices and high volume through a surgical application of good pricing strategies. It’s not an either/or choice. That level of nuance is the job of a pricing person inside a company.

CSP 284 | Pricing Consulting Offers

 

For a consultant who is working on building a pipeline of business and creating relationships with these larger organizations that have a pricing department or that function present. Is there anything that they need to know about that department or the people in charge of pricing? Back in the day when you were working at GE or AkzoNobel, and you were a pricing manager, do you have any direct influence or impact on a consultant that’s trying to win business inside that organization? If so, is there anything that a consultant or a boutique smaller consulting firm would need to keep in mind or should keep in mind if they see that an organization has that pricing function?

I do not believe there is anything specific about the pricing function per se that would differentiate it from other functional departments that have influence over a decision like that but I will pull up out of the question you didn’t ask because it gets relevant to what you are getting at. How do you influence and win a sale inside an organization with a stakeholder group that could include pricing folks as well as other folks? I will draw broadly a line between two pieces of stakeholders. One is procurement, professional buyers, and people whose job it is to negotiate down your fees, get more stuff for free, and make advantageous terms and conditions for the company.

The other stakeholder group is everybody else. In other words, they are people that might for some operational or functional reason benefit from hiring you as a consultant. Your best allies always are those operational folks. I will share quickly that when I was at AkzoNobel, and we were buying some pricing software, I cared very much about the bells and whistles, the features, the utility, the ease of use, the graphical interface, and all these features that were going to make this a useful tool for us but we were part of a large corporation. We had a procurement department. They came in and tried to hammer on the software vendor to get it for less.

I wouldn’t say I was an advocate for the vendor per se but in a certain regard, because the way that software would operate was so important to me, I was unwilling to sacrifice that. In a sense, I went to bet for the vendor with a procurement team. That’s not specific to pricing. You find the same thing in manufacturing, HR, IT, accounting, or anywhere you are trying to sell your services into where you are valuable, whether it’s managed HR services or whatever function of the business. Find the person or people who care very much that the output and the end result are good. Those folks can be your biggest advocates.

I‘m glad that you shared that very important point. Let’s fast forward a little bit now in your journey. In 2012, you started Boost Pricing, which is a company that you still run. What was going on? What made you decide to leave the corporate world and start your thing?

It’s a fairly long and tortured story. The short version is I had gotten fed up with some aspects of large corporate environments that didn’t feel like it was the right fit for me anymore. I’m not sorry at all that I started my career there. I learned a ton. They invested a lot in my training. I made some great relationships there but I was ready to get into a smaller business environment.

My older brother had taken the entrepreneurial leap a couple of years before I did. You do, Michael, hang out with other entrepreneurs but you know how people are once they start a business, and it’s working for them. They want everybody to join them. It’s a weird little cult. They can’t shut up about it. That’s how my brother was. At first, the idea of starting my business seemed crazy and risky because I’m an engineer. I’m risk averse. I had a good solid and stable corporate job. Granted, I was frustrated and bored a little bit but I got paid every two weeks. I had two little girls. I was a single mom.

The idea looked untenably risky for a while but after a few years of this, it took root and started to grow, and then I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I finally came to the conclusion that I had to try it. If I failed, then I would get a job I hated, and I already had one of those. What difference does it make? I thought, “I might as well give it a shot.” I thought I had a better chance at success than failure so I took the risk.

Whatever function of the business, find the people who care very much that the output and end result is really good. Those folks can be your biggest advocates. Click To Tweet

Talk to me a little bit more about that. You decide to make the leap to go off and start your business, helping other organizations with pricing and their pricing strategy. Where did your first few clients come from once you started the business?

Like a lot of early entrepreneurs, I wouldn’t say this is a mistake because I sometimes feel like there’s no other choice. Once you are better established, you have the luxury of being able to say no to the work that you should say no to but in the early days, if you are willing to give me a check to give you some advice, I am willing to come up with some advice. It was a smattering of different people from my network. I also did a little bit of subcontracting for another consulting firm to keep the plate full.

Relatively quickly, I started speaking. I started traveling around the country speaking for Vistage, which is a CEO peer group. That was a big turning point in not only the volume of the folks that started working with us but also the quality and fit. I got smarter and choosier about what work I was great at, and that helped clients be happier. The word of mouth kicked in. The first couple of years were painful but I’m in year twelve in 2023. It worked eventually.

When you worked through subcontracting for this other consulting firm, is that something that you would recommend to others? What was that experience like for you?

It has its pros and cons. It served a very important purpose because when I first started my company, I didn’t have a volume of business coming in the door to sustain the business, my family, and my financial requirements. In that sense, it was instrumental in getting me where I am. On the other hand, there were frustrating elements of it. In much the same way that it could be sometimes frustrating to be an employee of a company, you are still an employee but without some of the benefits of being an employee. In a sense, I felt that eventually, this was a maturation of my business but I was building someone else’s brand and someone else’s wealth and not my own.

It served a purpose. It had its time and place. Even though I was very scared to do it, at a certain point, I said, “If I’m going to work on this format forever, then I might as well go back and get a job and some of the benefits that come along with that.” I made a cold turkey jump. I gave them some notice but then I planned that I would have no revenue for six months while I built the business, and I was ready for that. It happened faster. I said, “At the end of six months, if I’m not getting enough revenue to sustain this business and my family, then I will come out,” but it worked. It took some faith, courage, and confidence in my ability to generate that business.

We have quite a few people who reach out for help to build their consulting business. In some cases, they are coming from subcontractor types of relationships where they wake up one day and realize, “I‘m building somebody else’s business. I don’t own the client relationship.” Another big one is, “I‘m not getting paid what I’m worth. I‘m getting billed out at $300 an hour but I’m only getting paid the equivalent of $8 an hour or whatever it might be.”

I‘m wondering. For you as a pricing expert, was that an issue? If so, were you able to navigate that or do anything about it? At that time, did you accept it? I‘m guessing there’s probably a gap between what you were getting billed out or what your work was worth to the firm and then what you were being paid directly.

CSP 284 | Pricing Consulting Offers

 

I commiserate with anyone who’s dealing with that frustration because it feels like you are giving the firm you are subcontracting to this giant chunk of the pie on your talent, experience, training, and expertise. However, I saw it for what it was then, and I haven’t changed my opinion of it now. I say that as somebody who now has a firm. We hire and use some subcontractors. They don’t have to acquire the client. They don’t have to do any of the billing and collections. They show up, work, and get paid for every hour they work, whereas when you have the selling effort and process, a lot of those never turn into any dollars.

The way I saw that then is the way I see it, which is that was a sharing of the pie because of the piece that they were doing for me that I couldn’t do for myself, which is getting enough clients. As soon as I was able to get enough clients, then I didn’t want to share the pie anymore. That’s a journey I have seen a lot of consultants go on. I never felt it was unfair. I didn’t resent the firm. They were the ones able to secure all that business. I learned from it in a lot of ways. I got to be better at pricing, business, and understanding and qualifying good clients and which clients I didn’t want to work with but it comes at a cost. It was fair to me.

That makes sense. It sounds like both subcontracting and then your network and speaking were the main drivers in the early days of building leads and the pipeline. Fast forward to now, and here we are years later. What’s working for you? What’s at the core of your company’s lead generation and pipeline building? How are you creating opportunities and conversations for new business?

It’s a combination of things. I’m finding it is evolving for a couple of reasons. There are always external factors that are at play. In other words, I am in the pricing game at a time when inflation is going bananas, and everybody is struggling to figure out how to manage the pricing. There are sometimes external factors that I didn’t do anything to create that created some tailwind for us but some of this is a maturity of the business. In the first five years, I got probably 3 or 4 clients based on a referral from another client.

The word-of-mouth idea took a long time to work in my business for some reason. I don’t know if I was doing a bad job of asking for referrals. I don’t know why. It took a long time but now after ten-plus years, a big chunk of our work comes from people that heard about me from someone else that worked with us or heard me from someone that saw us speak. Both the body of clients is large enough now that it’s almost like a flywheel that’s spinning on its own now, as well as the amount of speaking that I and then other members of my team have done to get the word out about how to be more profitable through better pricing execution.

It’s pretty common that we will have someone reach out through the website that says, “I saw Casey speak years ago. It has been in my head ever since. We are finally ready to engage. Can we have a conversation about what that looks like?” That’s a bigger part. I always hoped for that. It just took a little while to get it going but now, it seems like it’s a big part of BD for us.

The other is speaking still has a role to play. There are two different levels of that. Early on as I shared, I was going around doing talks for a 15 or 20-person Vistage group. We still have a resource on our team that does that speaking. He gets phenomenal scores and great feedback. I am doing far less speaking but trying to get on bigger stages. I’m keynoting some big conferences with 500, 1,000, or 1,500 people. I do fewer speaking events but from a scale perspective, reaching bigger audiences. Both of those levels or layers are generating business for us.

When you talk about these larger stages that you are getting on and delivering a keynote, are you being engaged by one client to give a talk to a bunch of their employees and team members? Are you speaking at a conference or some event where the people in the audience are made up of many different business owners? What’s the makeup of that?

An engagement can either lead to many more engagements or no more. But engagements are not in and of itself a business development investment. Click To Tweet

We do both. We internally look at those as very different. In other words, one of those is a business development opportunity. One is a delivered service. We charge for both of those. When I’m keynoting, I’m speaking of the latter. It’s a trade association of 350 CEOs together that all make high-technology industrial automation devices. It can be anything.

I do keynote speaking in large groups for business development, specifically to reach huge audiences for our message. Our other resource that does the speaking in the workshops, Doug, does smaller BD like a Vistage type of opportunity but then we also do training and workshops inside companies for their sales team or customer-facing commercial team. That is one of the services that we provide.

Do you view the pricing on those differently? If you are delivering a talk to a room that’s full of potential ideal clients for you, would you charge less, the same, or more compared to if you were delivering a talk to people that may not be your ideal clients but they have brought you in because they want to learn from you? How do you approach the pricing of those two things?

I’m going to restate those two chunks a little bit differently. One is this is an engagement that can lead to many more engagements, or this is an engagement that is likely to lead to no more or maybe one more but it is not in and of itself a business development investment. I have had a little bit of an evolution on this. Some of that is the business getting up to a level of success where I don’t necessarily want to be on the road as I used to be. I have a keynote fee that is much more substantial than strictly the strategy question that you asked would indicate because I’m still trading my time for money and getting on a plane.

In the old days, I used to get on 20 or 30 planes a month, and now I want to get on 10 planes a year for work. I use price as a metering or a throttling device to keep my keynote speaking. I’m also qualifying for the keynote opportunities in other ways. That’s where I am now. That’s less a question of pricing strategy and more of Casey Brown living her life and not wanting to be away from her kids and her family.

From a strict pricing perspective or a strategic perspective, especially as I look back a few years to when this was a more necessary business development effort in terms of the fit to our target audience, the size and the quality of the audience would be a big factor in my willingness to do that at a lesser fee. The one caveat or the one thing I would have your audiences think about though if they are translating that to their world and saying, “I can get X, which is not great but at least it gives me access,” that is true if it’s necessary but it’s often not necessary to discount to get speaking engagements.

There is a role to play of price communicating the quality of you as a speaker. In other words, you pay somebody $25,000 to do a keynote versus you pay somebody $500. Your assumption is that the $25,000 keynoter at a level of professionalism, quality, engagement, and effectiveness is much higher. We can communicate the value with the pricing. In speaking, because it’s very subjective, it’s difficult to objectively quantify the value of a speaker. It’s a creative pursuit to a certain degree.

Sending the message that I am a high-quality and highly desirable speaker is important when you set your fees. While I would be willing to do certain events for less because of the audience, I never jumped to that ever. It’s too common that people do. There are some ways around that. You can say things like, “My standard fee is X for a keynote but I wouldn’t want the fee to be the reason we don’t work together. What does your budget allow?”

CSP 284 | Pricing Consulting Offers

 

You can signal a little flexibility but not jump straight to the groveling phase, including, “I will speak for free.” I have done it. I’m not looking down my nose at it but it’s too often and for too long that people accept less than their worth in a speaking environment because it’s a BD. I have gotten some exceedingly wonderful fees speaking in front of a thousand of my very best clients.

You talked about the number of referrals or business that comes in as a result of referrals. The example you mentioned is somebody that may have seen you speak years ago and then decides to reach out now. How much of that do you think is supported and amplified through the content that you publish?

You have a blog and send out a newsletter and things like that but do you believe that the referrals or the business that is coming in that is from a referral or somebody who saw you speaking a while back has been carried over through other activities like being active on social channels or sending you a newsletter or a blog? How do you view the role of content?

I’m about to share a very vulnerably embarrassing truth, which is that outside of the stuff I have done with and for clients and audiences, I have produced almost no content, blog, or social media for the better part of the past decade. It’s little. One could argue that I have done it the hard way. Instead of writing from my desk, I have hopped on more planes than I needed to build this brand.

I was a little bit late to the marketing game or the social media game. I would write blogs but I dreaded writing them, so I wouldn’t write them. One LinkedIn post a year was probably fairly common for me. It’s infrequent but I started in January 2023 a specific intentional strategy. Part of it is about helping to build the brand and the company but also, as I get more established in this game at this point, I have a lot to share. I want to get the message out, not just to people that will pay us but also to people that can benefit from it.

2023 is a very intentional strategy around writing a lot more newsletter posts, making a lot more videos, and sharing a lot more content in social media environments with the idea that some of those folks are going to give us a call. A bunch more of them are struggling to be paid what they are worth for the excellence they provide. That’s unjust and it fires me up. I want to get this content out to the world.

Here you are many years into the business. Knowing what you know now, if you were talking to somebody who is 5 or 6 years into building their business and was doing similar things to you, meaning not that active on social channels and not publishing a lot of articles or putting a lot of content. Would you do things differently knowing what you know now?

Since I have only been doing it for a couple of months, it’s a little hard for me to say how valuable this will be in terms of some of that BD work. There are some people who have found us and who wouldn’t have otherwise, or people that said, “I saw your email pop up in my inbox, and it reminded me. I have been thinking about calling you for the past six months.”

It's very difficult to objectively quantify the value of a speaker. It's a creative pursuit to a certain degree. Click To Tweet

It’s triggering some top-of-mindedness for sure but I would also caution. I don’t mean to be pessimistic about the role of marketing. It’s important but I also think when you are a very small business, whether it’s a solopreneur or a handful of resources, there are a lot of competing elements for your time and your dollars.

If I were to go back and give five-years-ago-me some advice, it would be to establish a regular cadence but I wouldn’t be spending the time on it that I’m spending now. A mechanism of cultivating and then giving back to your audience or the people that give you permission to say, “I want to hear from you,” would have been time well spent to have done some of that but my belief has always been to throw yourself into the work, and the business will come. That has largely been true. Maybe I have done it the hard way but especially very early on, people are busy with strategies to acquire a business, and they are not getting their hands dirty enough. Sometimes that’s the best way to get people to go with you.

It sounds like part of the success that you had in those early days came from finding ways to get in front of your ideal clients, whether that was at an event speaking in Vistage or whatever it was. That’s where oftentimes people struggle. They spend so much time thinking about content, planning, or preparing but they are not getting in front of a client.

Whether you are getting in front of somebody through your content if you are able to do that, you are committed to it, and you do a good job of it, that could potentially work but speaking can work too as you have shown. There are many ways to accomplish this. The main thing is that you are getting in front of the people to whom you want to add value to.

I want to also ask you. It was around during COVID in 2021. You joined forces with another firm to help sales organizations. From what I can see, that lasted for a year and a half or so. I‘m wondering if you could share any experiences from that in terms of what worked and what didn’t work if you are able to give us some insight. Oftentimes, people are looking for different ways to grow. They have opportunities to collaborate with different companies, whether that is a client of theirs or somebody else. Is there anything you share about what that experience was like and why you have shifted away from it or back to focusing on pricing?

I hope you will indulge me first in going back and saying one more thing about our prior topic if that’s okay because I feel compelled to do it. I love your connecting the dots between things like content marketing on LinkedIn and my speaking. Those are in essence the same thing in a way of investing time and effort, getting in front of the people you want to get in front of, and sharing knowledge for free or for a low price with the idea that they will say, “That person is an expert. I want to work with them.”

In that sense, I was doing content marketing very heavily all along but in a face-to-face way rather than putting it out on social media but there was another thing you said that I thought was important. It’s the never-ending loop of perseverating in trying to create content and get good at saying it the right way. When you said that, all the neurons in my brain lit up because I remember very specifically that in 2012 when I was booked to give a talk, it was going to be my first workshop event.

I had 6 months, 4 months, and then 2 months to work on it. I am not proud to admit this but it was three days before, and I hadn’t started. In a caffeine-fueled and insane, “Don’t ever repeat this again,” cycle, I pumped out a half-day workshop, design, content slides, and what I was going to say in three days and delivered it three days later. It’s not on film, thankfully, but I’m sure I would cringe at some of the things I didn’t say. The value of that was the advice I had gotten to book a talk. A mentor of mine said, “Burn the boats.” If you truly want to get out of subcontracting for someone else, you have to put a stake in the sand and say, “As of this date, I’m doing this.”

CSP 284 | Pricing Consulting Offers

 

He was a Vistage chair. He said, “I will book you for my groups if you want to.” I said, “Sure.” This was at Christmas time. I had six whole months to figure this out. If I had waited until I was ready, I would still not have made it. Ten years later, I wouldn’t have done a single talk, and I have done hundreds. Sometimes commit even when you don’t know how you are going to get it figured out. Trust that you know more than the audience. Stay this far ahead of them. Get out there and start doing, not perfecting forever because you will never get out of the lab.

That’s great advice. Anyone in the consulting success community has heard me talk about imperfect action and how that’s such a core part of how we operate. Good things happen when you take action, not when you think about them. That’s what I’m hearing you say as well. I appreciate that.

Back to the merger and then the unmerger, its lifespan was closer to three years because it started as a joint venture between our firms. That was very successful and fun. We started fully operating together about a year into that. We were merged for barely under two years. Like every other twist and turn in my professional career, I wouldn’t take it back because of what I learned from it. There were things I loved about it, and then there were reasons we ended up unwinding it.

I apologize for interrupting to provide a bit of context for people who may not understand what’s going on. This was partnering, collaborating, and then merging with another company. Your focus has always been on pricing strategies. This is a company that was focused more on sales. Is that how you would describe it?

Sales training, sales execution, and sales transformation. The reasons it made sense to us to merge. One is that we had both been originally solopreneurs for a long time but then we both did have small teams by the time we merged. There’s a certain loneliness in entrepreneurship. With the idea of being lonely at the top, the idea of collaborating was exciting but from a synergistic perspective, pricing and sales are hands in glove. The companies that we helped in our target market were the same companies.

You heard me talk about this a little bit at the beginning. My focus in pricing is less on numbers and strategy and more on mindset, belief, psychology, and execution. She had a very similar take on other aspects of selling that are limited by mindset. There was a lot of natural overlap in that way. Fast forward to the middle of the business, it was working in the sense that clients that had historically been mine were now doing sales training, hiring, and transformation, and vice versa.

Now, we are doing pricing work with some of her historical clients. With our brand new clients, we were smuggling it together and offering both services at once. It was very effective with the clients. What didn’t work well and what eventually unwound it is that we added a bunch of costs. We hired some people. We wanted to scale up our systems, our processes, and the number of people that would take to execute at this certain level we wanted to execute. It added a lot of overhead costs.

There weren’t very many at all cost synergies or economies of scale of being one company. There were a few administrative things and a couple of software packages but largely, it was incrementally significantly more expensive for us to run that business. That put a big burden on the selling side of the business. We had to constantly be sold to feed the overhead machine.

When you're a very small business, there are a lot of competing elements for your time and for your dollars. Click To Tweet

At a certain point, it got a little bit less fun. I love to sell but it’s not all I want to do. For the reasons I described earlier, I have a lot of desire to share this message with entrepreneurs around the world. I like to get my hands dirty with clients. I have this company to run and a team to run. Being on the hamster wheel of selling all the time to feed the overhead wasn’t worth it.

We took a little while to face that because we were still trying to make it work for a while but eventually, we were both having more fun and making more money before we overcomplicated our lives. Rather than struggle along with that for X more years, I’m a big believer in this in sales and everything else. Fail fast. If you are going to find out something doesn’t work, don’t be embarrassed to say it doesn’t work and pivot quickly because now, we are already unwound, operating as two separate companies back to making money and back to simple and nimble operations. In my case, it’s at least a heck of a lot more fun.

Was there any discussion before of the idea, “Let’s merge and refer business to each other?” Did you ever consider going that path? I‘m wondering. If so, why not do that? Why did you decide to merge? What was going on?

We talked about that for years and barely ever did that. There are a gazillion consultants out there. I know a bunch of them, and a bunch of them know me. I have in some cases somewhat more formal referral relationships with consultants but of the work that comes to us by referral or recommendation of someone else, less than 5% is from another consultant. I have great relationships with other consultants, including with my former partner.

Pre-merger, we kept saying, “We got to find a way to collaborate more and get some of our clients working together.” I’m not certain why that doesn’t work better. I say that even now with some of those referral partner relationships I have. Everybody is very busy growing, managing, and developing their business. It’s nobody else’s job but mine to manage my business. With intention but without any oomph behind it, we didn’t accomplish it.

I appreciate you sharing that experience because it provides some perspective or at least some points for people to consider who might be looking at something similar or to know in advance. Thank you again for sharing that. Before we wrap up, I have a couple of other quick rapidfire questions for you. We have scratched the surface of pricing. There’s no way that’s going to happen in one episode. We will make sure that people can learn more about you and everything that you have going on at your company as a resource for them.

Before you do that though, I’m wondering. You have a small team. You are working with clients. You have your kids. You are traveling less than you were before but are there 1 or 2 things that you do on a daily basis that you find are critical to showing up as your best self and being able to perform at high levels with focus, concentration, and productivity?

The most important is sleep. I have got to get good sleep. I went all of my 20s and most of my 30s barely getting 3, 4, or 5 hours sometimes.

Commit, even when you don't know how you're going to get it figured out. Trust that you know more than the audience and stay this far ahead of them. Click To Tweet

What was going on? Were you out partying, or what?

Especially once I started the business in the very early years, I was working 80 or 100 hours a week with babies at home. They were still not sleeping through the night. If I look back at the math, I was probably earning about minimum wage in the first couple of years I had this business. Finally, I figured out how to do this a little more profitably. Number one is sleep.

Some of this is age. The older I get, the more valuable and important that is to my cognitive function. All the research supports it. It’s essential for our health, for turning short-term memory into long-term memory, and all those things. If I get good sleep, I am better. I also am pretty consistent with the meditation practice that I have been doing. I was on and off about it for a long time but I have been very consistent with that. That is helpful for the right mindset for anything that comes my way during the day.

Is there any specific type of meditation? You mentioned a specific practice.

I have studied different ones. I have studied Vipassana and transcendental meditation. I work with a mindfulness coach. It’s brandless. It’s somewhat vanilla but rooted in a lot of the same traditions, stillness, and being very present in the present moment.

For someone who’s going, “Thats fantastic that you are doing meditation, taking care of yourself, and sleeping but how do you fit all that in when you are running a business, you are busy, and you have kids?” For you, is there a certain time of day that you tend to do meditation? How do you make sure that you get it?

It’s the first thing. I’m not sitting for an hour a day. There are people that do that. I aspire to that when I’m retired or something but sometimes it’s 10 or 15 minutes. If I have got a thing starting at 7:00 in the morning with having to run my daughter to school, then I’m setting the alarm to get up at 6:30 and give myself fifteen minutes. I pour a cup of coffee, and off I go.

I do have one piece of professional advice that allows everything to fit in. Some of this is the privilege of having been in business for more than ten years. It’s easy to understand this advice and hard to do it early on but the more specific I have gotten about what I’m good at, and the more specific I have gotten about who I’m best able to help, it makes it easier for the right people to find you.

If you're going to find out something doesn't work, don't be embarrassed to say it doesn't work and pivot quickly. Click To Tweet

It’s easier to charge more for that work to those fewer clients. Consultants are famously trading our time for money. Whether you are doing an hourly rate, a fixed fee, or any other way, you are pouring your time in and getting money out. The more specific and the more crystal clear and narrow that you are about where you are best, then you can make great money and not work a gazillion hours.

At least, that has been my experience. I talk about this specific pricing execution with sales teams. That’s the blue part of my flame. When we stay in the blue part of our flame, we make a lot of money, we don’t work insane hours, and we delight our clients. As soon as we stray outside that, then one or more of those things starts to fall apart.

That’s well said. Before we wrap up, one question I love asking is this. Is there a book that you have read or listened to? It can be fiction or nonfiction. Is there anything that you have enjoyed that you think others might enjoy as well?

I have got my stack of books behind me. It was a reread. It’s Chris Voss’s Never Split the Difference. From a pricing strategy perspective, I would describe or advise slightly differently than that book does in some detail but it’s a great book for examining self-limiting beliefs that might crop in the way of negotiation. I’m always looking at that stuff because the mindset is so critical in predicting our success. That’s the one I would say.

That has come up before. That’s a great book. Thanks for mentioning that. Finally, before we wrap up here, I want to make sure everybody can learn more about you and what you have going on at Boost Pricing. Is it BoostPricing.com? Is that the home where we should send people?

That’s right. You can find me on LinkedIn. My handle is @CaseyBrownBoost. As I shared, I’m very active there. You can find me there posting every day of the week. We have got newsletters on the website but you can also reach out and contact us if you have a question on the website.

Casey, thank you again so much for coming on.

Thank you.

 

Important Links

 

About Casey Brown

CSP 284 | Pricing Consulting OffersCasey Brown is the President of Boost Pricing, a firm that helps companies discover their true pricing power and be paid well for the excellence they provide. For over two decades, she has formulated and executed pricing strategies, pioneered innovative pricing content, and coached and trained teams to drive culture change and dramatic, sustainable results.

 

Love the show? Subscribe, rate, review, and share! https://www.consultingsuccess.com/podcast

 

Leave a Comment, Join the Conversation!