Bill BrownFounder of ServiceTitan Hacks community (9k+ pros) | INC 5000 Contractor | Helping contractors win with AI & Automation

The Science of Pricing: From Struggle to Success #shorts

15 Mar 2026 · 1 min

Watch on YouTube

1:21

In this YouTube short, the speaker (referred to as Joe) recounts his financial hardships as a service provider who believed that offering the lowest price would win jobs and help clients save money. He realizes that lowering price also lowers quality and his own compensation. A mentor named Dave, a former pharmaceutical sales manager with Harvard experience, sits with him for three hours and introduces the "science of pricing," explaining that pricing is a studied discipline backed by billions of dollars of research. Dave provides written materials and together they create an option sheet, marking Joe's shift from a low‑bid mindset to a more strategic, value‑based pricing approach.

Chapters

I was suffering financially. I was putting my heart and soul, just like I do with Service MVP, in doing stuff for people to get started with it. Then I never really did get around to getting paid for my work, you know, properly. I didn't know how to price the services. I thought low bidder got the job was my philosophy or sales philosophy at the time. Our family grew up trying to save money on everything. So I thought naturally I was doing a good service to try to save people money by lowering the cost of the job. What I didn't— it was sitting right in front of me that when you lower the cost, you also lower the quality of the job and the service that you provide too. So I didn't, I didn't realize that until my, my— and they said, Joe, let me show you how to do the science of pricing. And then Dave sat down at the kitchen table and we sat there for like 3 hours as he explained it to me. He was a pharmaceutical sales manager at a big pharmaceutical company that sells medications to doctors and, you know, whole health plans to doctors and stuff like that. And he showed me, he goes, "Yeah, there's a science. I went to Harvard University," he told me, and he showed me that. And he actually gave me some written material on it too. And first time I even recognized there was, like, people study this stuff. He goes, "Joe, billions of dollars are put into this, studies of this stuff." He goes, "So why don't you just try it?" And so he sat there and we made an option sheet together.