Bill Gallagher walks through a client who underpriced their product and burned cash because leaders feared losing customers if they raised rates. The fix: bring pricing decisions into quarterly planning, pick a few shared priorities, and use dashboards to keep everyone accountable.
Do you find yourself putting off action, maybe being indecisive and you're not sure.
Why or what's going to get you to shift things? Have you known for a little while that there's something that you should take care of, but you just aren't in action around it? Well, I had a client recently who was dealing with this and the issue there is that they were just burning through investor cash and at the same time, and the investors are willing to fund some things, but the company was underpricing their services relative to the competition, so they were burning cash they didn't need to.
And of course that meant they couldn't spend it on the critical development where.
They really needed it.
Now, the reason for this is they.
Were afraid of how much worse things could get if they had a massive defection to the base.
Right?
So they were reluctant to raise the.
Prices up to a competitive level and therefore erode the base and make the.
Cash position even worse.
Now, fear is real and you're always.
Going to be afraid of something, you're.
Always going to be uncomfortable. But what we notice is when we create our goals and priorities as a team and elevate the conversation so the team knows why they're doing stuff together and they hold it, we committing to.
Priorities at a team level and then.
We'Re keeping the visibility alive so that we as the leaders have less room.
To do that kind of funny business of procrastinating, holding off action without making.
Up a lot of stories about it.
That's what they did in this case.
Once they finally explained to the team.
What what was needed and why, the.
Team, with their own fears about it.
Was able to support the decision.
And there wasn't room anymore for the leader to delay that kind of move. Now they were able to raise the.
Rates and finally get themselves into a cash positive position.
So the key here is to talk.
About the things that you're dealing with at a leadership team level. At a minimum, in the quarterly planning.
Session, surface all the things with a.
Real open and honest discussion and then.
Commit to a few priorities that'll really.
Move the business forward.
And then to use the meeting habits.
The dashboards, to keep the visibility to the priorities and the progress to the whole team so the team holds itself.
Accountable together and really accomplishes something.
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