The #1 Profit Killer In Your Business (And How To Fix It!) #150

Welcome everybody to the Homefront. This is Jeff Duden. Are you motivated to increase your company's profitability by 10 to 40%? What if I told you there was one simple lever that you could pull to make this happen that most companies miss? True or false? Nothing impacts profit more than pricing. What say you, Casey Brown?

Heck yes. True. Very true.

True. Casey Brown, welcome to the home front.

Thanks, I'm happy to be back.

Yeah. Awesome. Yeah. Back. That's right. We've been doing this long enough to now we're having people back. That's exciting.

Yeah.

So Casey Brown is a pricing geek and professional speaker. She's helped over a thousand companies generate over $1 billion in incremental profits. Her TED talk has been viewed nearly 4 million times. I think that's probably closer to 5 million now. So I'm not sure when this, this was printed. Casey's best selling book, Fearless Pricing, is the ultimate guide for business owners who want to command the prices they deserve. And is the founder of Boost Pricing. Welcome, Casey Brown.

Thanks.

So, Casey, I met you at a strategic coach meeting. I was fortunate enough to just plop right down next to you, turn to my left and say, my name's Jeff. Who are you? And I have to tell you, you have a humble, fun, but serious type demeanor in person. Until you get on a stage or until you get like you. You did something for our Homefront brands, owners only. And it was just, it was like, wow, hang on and just enjoy the ride.

Yeah, well, it's a topic that could be pretty boring and dry, but you know, I'm dedicating my professional life to this. I don't want to do anything boring and dry. And I also know as much as I'm a pricing geek, I'm also interest in like pedagogy and how adults learn. And we don't learn well by being sort of lectured to in bullet point format. Right. So stories, games, exercises, unexpected twists. And so that's what I've tried to kind of bring into how we share our message about pricing. So people can actually see it differently and then behave differently. And then you add in a healthy dose of my kind of energy and, you know, quirky personality and that, you know, it gets a little exciting.

It does, it does. You're an engineer by trade.

Yeah. You can tell by how introverted I am.

Yeah. How does a professional engineer in what discipline?

Chemical.

How does a professional chemical engineer become an entrepreneur? The creator of Boost Pricing, the author of one of the best selling books anywhere, especially in the business sector. Specifically on pricing called fuel fearless pricing, which by the way is incredible with the stories and the tools, the tactics and the analysis that's in there and, and then turn into an entrepreneur. How does, how does that happen to one?

Well, that's a great question. There's a few things there. So when I was a kid, I wanted to be an actor. I like to tell stories and make people laugh and keep people wrapped with attention. But I grew up on the, the underside of the poverty line and so a career in theater didn't look like a straight line out of poverty to me. And so I, I cast about for another option and I'm good at math and science and so thought well, engineering that'll probably, you know, pay the bills, allow me to keep a roof over my head and eat some food. So I, I majored in engineering and I, and I liked it a lot. There's a lot about engineering that really suited me because I like the, the data and the analytics and the problem solving. But I'm a pretty raging extrovert. You know, I love people, I love to interact, I love to talk, solve problems, but in a collaborative way, more so than just sitting in a lab or staring at an Excel spreadsheet. So engineering just did not fit me for very long. I started to kind of get the itch to get a little closer to the commercial side of the business and kind of in a winding path. Ended up through being an early black belt at ge, a Six Sigma black belt. I ended up landing this role in pricing and just kind of fell in love with it. Find it to be the most fascinating discipline in business personally, both because of it, the magnitude of its impact, which is enormous. As you kind of said in your intro there, there's no greater impact on profitability than pricing. But not just that. Also the kind of the psychology and emotion and mystery and weirdness of pricing in the real world when, when selling conversations unfold, it's like intersection of art and science and data and psychology. So the weirdness of it plus the impact of it just fascinated me and kind of fell in love. Did not really intend to be an entrepreneur. I was just a pricing manager in corporate America doing my thing, helping our sales teams inside the companies I worked in and then my, my older brother. So I'm from a, you know, first generation college graduates, first generation, you know, kind of like just very, very blue collar family from a family of construction workers, coal miners and truck drivers. So I didn't have any exposure to entrepreneurship growing up and. But my older brother Kind of made the leap first. And you know how entrepreneurs are. Like, they, it's like a cult. Like they want everybody to be an entrepreneur. Like, come on, Casey, you gotta try it. It's so great. And he just kind of got in my ear and then eventually got in my head and I, and I, you know, it took, it took a number of years, but eventually I was just like, you know, there's a lot of people out there running businesses and I'm as smart and hardworking as some of them. So, you know, I could probably pull this off. And, and, and then, you know, as they say, the rest is history. That was 15 years ago.

We have a business called Temporary Wall Systems, and it was founded originally by a union carpenter, blue collar wife, worked in a real estate office, never thought about entrepreneurship. And he was just, he, he got into some self help seminar. You know, there's a variety of flavors out there. And, you know, as the story goes, he was sitting in his driveway, he had his cracked phone, they were on the verge of bankruptcy. And he just, he kept getting this email and this text from, I forget which one it was. And he, and he clicked the button and he signed up and he spent like their last $2,500 to go to a seminar, and he just went deep in it. And that change of his thinking led him to see the opportunity that these temporary walls would be more sustainable. There should be a temporary solution instead of drywall, wood containment walls. So this guy who'd never even thought about building a business, you know, saw the riches in the niches, and now it's one of the fastest growing, most successful franchises in North America. I was fortunate enough to just walk into a room and we. Serendipity, right? Half a life is showing up. I walked into the room that day, some people said we should meet. And the next thing you know, we're partners in that business. So you're sitting there at ge, you're looking at pricing, that you're having a good time with it. When did you first realize that there could be a business built around this concept?

Well, me and most people who have ever worked in corporate America can see some flaws with that world, you know. So it started with, rather than running to, it was a little bit more running from, like, I was just fed up. I was fed up with some other bureaucracy, fed up with feeling like I was pouring my talents and time and effort and, and smarts into a business where if I did a really, really, really good job, some shareholder on the other side of the world was going to get a hundred, you know, extra hundredth of a penny on their share price. Like, it just felt kind, it started to feel kind of futile. So that, that, that pain just got greater and greater and greater. And then I started to, to think about the idea that, you know, I'd been, had the good fortune of being very well trained. I mean, the good thing about corporate America, they tend to pour a lot of money into their people and, and some really exceptional professional development. And I learned a lot about pricing and how to do it well. And I thought that, you know, sort of small and medium sized business, you kind of go to the middle market where maybe some of the tools and resources are not as available there as they are in some bigger corporations and maybe I could bring some of that wisdom to the middle market. And, and I wasn't sure, to be honest with you, when you said, how did you know? How did you know? Or you know, when did you think this could be a business? I thought it could be, but I was not at all sure. And as a, as a, both an engineer and a former poor kid, I was kind of risk averse. I was a little bit afraid of, of leaping out into the, into the open. But I kind of, I finally just sort of got really specific because I was, you know, single mom, relatively newly divorced, you know, two little girls at home, no, no family safety net. Like if everything goes wrong, it's, it's still on me. And, and for some reason that looked like the perfect time in the middle of the Great Recession, by the way, to like leap out into the world and, and, and start this new thing. And I think it was really getting clear about the true worst case scenario. Like if the worst happened, let's say this is a huge disaster. Nobody wants to buy it, nobody wants to pay me for it. Like, I'll burn through my savings, maybe go into a little bit of debt, like, and then I'll just go get another job. Like, I have a good brain, I'm smart, I've got marketable skills, like, it'll be okay. So if the, if the worst that happens from trying this entrepreneurial leap is I end up with a crappy job on the back half of it, no problem. I already have one of those. Like I have lost nothing by trying. So that was sort of a helpful, you know, playing that worst case scenario kind of game in my head was helpful to give me the starch in the back and the confidence to kind of leap out and try it. And you know, I'd be lying If I said it was, you know, this, it was a straight line up and to the right the whole way through. There were some dark days in there like most entrepreneurs. But I'm really, really, really happy I did it. And it's completely clear to me, 15 years in, I'm unemployable. So, like, I could never get a job again.

So what's a boost? Pricing from the very beginning. And did you start it by yourself?

I started it by myself. It was a different name. We have rebranded. So we were called Precision Pricing when I first launched the company and I was a solopreneur and I was just kind of peddling my knowledge in the middle market. Why we eventually changed to boost is kind of relates to an evolution in our offerings. So when I was in corporate America doing this stuff, I was, it was a very analytical and strategic exercise. So think things like segmentation analysis and elasticity calculations and Excel models, like a lot of numbers. And when I brought that out to the middle market, I realized and, and I really do not want this to sound like, like I'm taking a shot, because I am not. But it was like trying to teach high school physics to a second grader. It was just the wrong, totally not what the market needed. It was not where they are. It was, it was giving them, you know, some highly precision tool that they could not use. They didn't have the fundamentals in place or they didn't have the team in place, or they didn't have the organizational bandwidth. So this idea of precision pricing, which was our initial name, was really rooted in that approach to helping companies make more money with pricing. And very early on we, you know, and it was a little at a time, but now we are pretty exclusively focused not on the, you know, that analytical stuff, which is sort of the price setting. We're much more focused on price getting. In other words, how do you, once you know what you're going to charge for your stuff, go out to a customer and stand in front of them and confidently communicate that price and defend it in the face of pushback for the value that you deliver? How do you take the punches from the customer? You know, rope a dope style, stay in the ring and, and then leave that ring at the end of the, of the fight, so to speak, with the most deals in hand at the highest prices possible. So rather than it being this very analytical academic exercise, it's much more about the practicality of negotiating and defending pricing in the arena. A, a way I, you know, analogy I use is the Pricing war isn't won or lost by the generals drawn up maps in the war room. It's one in hand to hand combat by the folks in the trenches. And so we turned our focus to being much more wrapped around sales teams and sellers and helping them have the confidence to communicate and defend price. And then precision pricing no longer fit and we changed to boost pricing. And it's really about that idea of confidence.

Yeah, small middle market businesses, they don't have boards, sometimes they lack data. They certainly don't have the hours and hours of professional development training that the Fortune 1, hundreds and Fortune 5, hundreds have. So you just got to go right back down to like give a price and don't let your lip quiver when you give it. And here's, here's all the rationale, here's power, here's fear, here's how they're lying to you. And, and, and, and then, by the way, you know, you get, you close 95% of your business, so you're probably leaving 100% of your profits on the table.

Yeah, for sure. Yeah. There's a lot of wisdom packed in your comment there. I'll just jump on the last one. I was on a different podcast earlier today and I said I made the point that it's important to lose some business over price. Losses are an important part of an effective price strategy. If you aren't losing business overpriced, you are way underpriced. Now, do you Want to lose 99% of your deals? No. But you don't want to win 99% either. That, that, that win rate can be an important barometer to help us understand and kind of map out our pricing power.

You make a point that everybody believes that they're the most expensive in town. Why is that?

Because customers tell us that. Like, we get very asymmetrical feedback from the market. Like, customers don't say, you know, if you tell them the price of X is going to be $15,000, they don't say, really? Because I have 20 in my budget. They don't say that. Even if it's true, even if they are ready to pay you more. They never tell you that. The only thing they ever tell you is when you were, you said 15 and their budget was 10. Or they lie when their budget's 20 and say it's 10. I mean, even when we are too expensive, we get that feedback and even when we are not, we don't get that feedback. So we get this very asymmetrical feedback that is very skewed to. We're too expensive, we're too expensive, we're too expensive, we're too expensive. And we just start to believe it. It's like, I don't know, like Patty Hearst syndrome or something. We just, we start to, like, get inculcated into the. The idea of these limitations based in asymmetrical feedback. And then we see it as fact, we take it as truth.

Where does the power lie inside of this relationship? Buyers are liars is, you know, that's a standard sales thing. And as a seller, if we're not confident, we. We tend to give all the power away to the buyer. And. But. But that's not really the case.

No, I, I sometimes. I'm a big fan of analogies and metaphors. I think it's back to that kind of how adults learn. So I think of pricing a little bit like a game of poker. Right. Everybody's trying to guess at the strength of their hand relative to their opponent's hand. You know, there's a lot of bluffing, by the way. Buyers are trying to hide how much they're willing to pay. Sellers are trying to hide how little they're willing to accept. And so in. In many arenas, maybe even most, the buyer is sort of the better poker player, not because they have a stronger hand, but because they're better bluffers and because both sides buy into the illusion that they have the better hand. So I actually believe that the power dynamic between buyers and sellers is much more balanced than we tend to consider when we're a seller. And here's my case for that. Do you solve a real problem for your customers? Do you provide your products and services with excellence? Do you wrap excellence around those products and services? They're gonna buy this stuff from someone. Why not from you? They need what you sell. They benefit from what you sell. They want what you sell. And so the idea that all the power is with the customer because they're the one with the wallet or handing out checks or POS is false. We have to stand in confidence rooted in our knowledge that we have a strong hand to play. We're sitting on pocket aces in the form of our exceptional products and services where, you know, we. Not sitting there staring at twos and threes. Sure. The other guy has a full house.

Yeah. Just by virtue of the fact that they're in conversation with you. Is a buying signal. What are, what are, what are some of the other buying signals that would give somebody selling confidence not to just, you know, negotiate against themselves and drop their price?

Sure. So, I mean, there's. There's two big categories. There's more than this, but these are two of the big ones. Like, let's just start at the beginning. There's. There's different ways this can go. The first thing you do is I say, this is 15,000, and you say, great, no problem. And you write me a check, and away we go. Right? I call this, and I talk about this in the book. An auto yes, an automatic yes. In other words, I told you the number, you said yes to it. We moved on. Now, sellers do not mine as much confidence as they could or should from this. That is a. That's the biggest buying signal there is. Right. But it's also a version of the customer saying, your price is fair or too low. Like, when I ask in keynotes, I'll ask audiences, like, what kind of feedback do your customers give you? Do they tell your prices are fair or too low? Or do they say they're too high? And everybody's always like, too high, too high, because that's what we're present to. But then I say, have you ever had a customer just accept the price you proposed without a negotiation? And they all say, yes. And I said, that's data, that your prices are fair or too low. We just don't pay any attention to that data. It sells straight on past our confidence meters. We hand that off to the operational side of the business for fulfillment, and we go back to selling to the whiners, complainers, and squeaky wheels. So the negative kind of takes over our space. There's something from psychology called the negativity bias, where we retain negative events with greater frequency and intensity than positive events. So you can sell 10 deals that go perfectly perfect. 10 auto yeses. Yep, yep, yep, yep, yep. We get to the 11th deal, and somebody beats us up on price, and we're like, our prices are too high or we lose the deal. Our prices are too high. So we've got to pay more attention to the auto yeses. That is a huge buying signal. And in fact, it can be an indicator that our prices are too low. By the way, little sidebar you may be getting, you know, you know, your win rate, so to speak, might be reasonable and in the middle somewhere. But are there any products, any services, any customers, any opportunities where your win rate is too high? In other words, you may not get a million auto yeses, but we always get auto yeses when they're in a big rush and there's an, you know, emergency tax audit on the way. Like whatever. Circumstantially there are places that we can mine for data inside that auto. Yes. Pile to see where we might be able to increase price. That's a big one. So we say here's the number, you say yes. Okay, let's imagine you don't say yes. I tell you the number, you push back, you argue with me to your point. And I talk about this a lot in the book too. Push back. Price objections are a buying signal. You, Jeff, and every customer in the world are a human being. And you are interested in your agenda. You do not want to waste your time. If you had no interest in buying from me, why would you bother beating me up on price? You wouldn't do it, right? Yeah, right. Like if, if somebody else is a better fit for you and you want their products and services at their price, you don't call me and negotiate with me. It's a waste of your time. So the very presence of price negotiation is actually an indicator that the seller has pricing power. Not unlimited, but some. And we shouldn't just rush in and give that away through discounts. So that's a huge buying signal. So, so either they say yes out of the gate or they negotiate and they say yes. And those are the two big categories of buying signals. And then sometimes they say no. And for a variety of reasons. By the way, every time they say no, it's not because of price. All the time we think it is, they may even tell us it is. But it isn't always about price. So those are the two big categories of buying signals we get.

Is there a fine line between negotiating and lying? I mean, I, I, I'll just tell you, like, yeah, I have a hard time lying. I'm, I'm a horrible, I, I, I don't, I just, I don't know, whatever.

It is probably why I like you.

So thank you, I appreciate that. Is that a lie?

No.

So the, like, you know, I, even in a negotiation when I find I, I have a hard time telling an untruth just for the purpose of negotiation. But is, is it, is it, even.

If it is in your self interest, is it acceptable?

I mean it probably happens every day, oh, I've got another price right up the street and it's this, is that, where does that fall?

Well, let me tell you my where, what, what my belief is about this in terms of like what I think is right. And then let me tell you what happens. And those are not exactly the same thing. So I'm with you. And I think If I, you know, most of our clients, like I said, I'm kind of out of the corporate scene. So we're not, you know, Boost does not help, you know, GE and Honeywell and Coca Cola. We work with small and medium sized businesses, founder led companies which are pretty universally led by people with pretty high integrity. The kind of companies that are attracted to our work. Right. And so this is, it's not uncommon what you just described. And sometimes I do not want anybody listening to this podcast to confuse any of my advice with see what you can get away with or try to trick your customer or try to manipulate them or get them to do something counter to their own interest. I am not advocating anything low integrity. I'm not advocating lying. I also don't lie. I, I'm just not, I'm not cut out for it. Don't do anything that does not feel natural and authentic to you and your core values because if you do, it will come off weird and salesy and strange and the customers will go running for the hills. I always say dogs and prospects can smell fear. Like when we get weird, we put weird in the conversation. It goes to hell, right? So do not do that. Do not do anything that is not authentic to you. That said, it is, you know, you, you, you kind of drew the distinction between truth and lie. Between truth and lie is another category which is don't tell everything you know. Lack of full disclosure, right? So say you go buy a car this weekend. You go to three different lots. They get, you get three different prices. The one that's already the cheapest is the one you want to go to because they're closest to your house and they have a really good service department or something. You don't go to those guys and say, hey, I want to buy from you. You, you're already the cheapest of all the places I went. But will you give me a good deal? You know, there's a little piece of that you just don't say, right? Is that a lie? Some people could say lie by omission, whatever. I would say curating information. In other words, disclosing some things and not disclosing other. That happens in almost every negotiation on the planet. So full 100% transparent disclosure of every piece of information almost never happens. I don't tell you every detail of my budget. I don't tell you every detail of my, of my financial situation. I don't tell you every detail of who else I'm talking to. I tell you some, but I don't tell you Everything. I don't think that's immoral. And it is certainly not uncommon. In fact, it's, it's, it's ubiquitous. Some people in the buying world, some procurement folks outright lie. Some of them have been to training programs that have taught them to do it, taught them to engage in, you know, what I would consider borderline unethical or all the way unethical tactics. I don't really say that to scare anybody, but just like, let's get our eyes open, you know, like, let's know that we are at best getting curated information from our customers and at worst, maybe on the less ethical, less fair, and they might not be being very honest and might, you know, might reference a quote that was lower that they never got or reference a quote that they got that was lower. But it's actually not at all the same thing. Customers, some customers will lie. That will happen. I do not support it. I do not endorse it.

We're going to get to some examples of the impact of pricing. And you did an exercise with us. It is just so powerful. And if your company makes a 10% profit and you raise pricing by 1%, you just increased your profitability by 10%. And then in the book, there's different charts and there's the. You give these tools away by the. One of the greatest things about Fearless Pricing, Casey's book is that it gives all of these tools that you can download. You scan a QR code and you get the tools and you can plug your own numbers into these things. So you give a lot of value away for the price of the book. Although I was kind of surprised that I, with you, that I only had to pay, you know, what I had to pay for this book. I thought, I thought it would be more expensive. I thought you'd price it up a little bit. But.

You know what's funny about that? I worked with a hybrid publisher to put this book out and they, they gave a suggested price and it was lower. And I was like, I'm not selling it for that. And they're like, well. And they, you know, they're experts in their field. They know what works. They know what. And I was just like, look, it is a matter of professional integrity to me that if, if, if the, if books of a certain caliber, a certain length, a certain gravitas and the business space are priced at this, then I'm going to be price, not going to be cheaper to sell books like I. It's just an ASM at everything I teach. So look, well, you never know, Jeff. The next, you know, next week it might be up.

There you go. But why is pricing such a power? I mean, I mean, why is it such a problem for companies? You. You. It's a problem. In our company. We. We have over 200 franchise owners. We're looking across the. The. We have good benchmarking across not only our franchise owners, but across the industry and across competitors. And sure enough, the people that are struggling are afraid to price appropriately. Why is that?

Well, it was right there in the sentence you said the word afraid. So fear is the dominant emotion that accompanies pricing decision making and price negotiations. You know, if you line up 100, I think I might even have said this when I was talking to your owners group, so forgive the repetition here, but if you line up 100 people who sell stuff, who sell and serve customers, and you say, what do you love about selling and serving your customers? I'd bet you my house zero of them would tell you, I love when I get to tell them the price tag. Right. That is not the fun part. It's not the part we're most confident in. It's not why we do what we do. You know, it's more for building relationships and solving problems and helping the customer out, getting to be the hero, getting to, you know, there's a lot of other things that are a heck of a lot more fun and a lot more rooted in a place of confidence. For us as sellers, pricing is the. Is the, generally, from a skill perspective and a confidence perspective, one of the weaker areas of our game. Even if you're very well trained, very skilled, very knowledgeable, very successful, as a relative skill, it's usually a weak point. And so we're operating from fear. Very often we want to just hurry up and get done with the pricing part so we can get to doing the work we love and we're good at, right? And so we avoid it, we fear it, we dread it. And also, and you know, this applies certainly in the franchise space, but really every business, you're a business owner, you want that customer to say yes to you, that revenue and that sales volume matters a lot. They're high stakes, right? And so the fear of losing the deal, rooted in the belief that the customer has more power than us, which is rooted in the asymmetrical feedback we get from customers cause us to operate from fear. And when fear is in charge, that's the amygdala, right? That's a fight or flight response. We get panicky. We do not act in A reasonable, nuanced, profitable way, we just react. And it's like, pull the panic lever. And the easiest lever to pull is this.

Talk to us about the psychology of discounting. You see it in retail all the time. I actually think my senior thesis was on plausible versus implausible reference pricing and the impact that it had on buying behavior. Because you see things, you go online and it's like, you know, 85% discount. Okay. Do you believe that that thing was actually $10,000 and now you can get it for 1499? And some people do, right? I mean, there's some places you go where everything is 50% off. Yeah. So it's like, okay, well, what's the real price? Now when I see that, I'm like, well, then I certainly don't want to buy any of the items that are not 50% off because those are the reference prices. And they're intending for you to buy more of these things. But in a sales environment, you know, when is discounting appropriately used or is it ever appropriately used?

Well, I'm gonna put a pin in that question for one second just to circle back to this idea of the sort of psychology of pricing and the numbers and the reference prices and everything. There's a lot of research and a number of books written about things like that, like X percent off or even some of the. Like, should it end in 99? Or like, just all kinds of those sort of things we've heard over the years or seen over the years. I will just offer a. A caution point. Most of that research and those books really are rooted in a B2C retail space. So you're going and buying a pack of gum from 7 11, or you're going and buying a jacket from Nordstrom. Like, that is the space in which most of that research has arisen. So if you are in a B2B environment or a B2C but in a more negotiated fashion, not a retail. Not a pluck it off the shelf kind of situation, the research is a lot more murky and a lot more limited. So I say that because sometimes people have these sort of rules of thumb in their head that they've heard because of some of this stuff that has leaked into the business world from the retail world. I don't find that those kind of, sort of little tricks are nearly as the results from those tricks are not as predictable as they are in the retail space. So don't, don't, you know, don't charge down that path blindly. A second point about that Quickly, you mentioned this idea, like these places where everything's on sale. Like, I feel this way about Kohl's, right? You go to Kohl's, everything's on sale at Kohl's. You get up and you check out at the front. And it's like your receipt tells you you saved 287 at Kohl's today. And you're like, how about a tank top and a candle? Like that. It just. It doesn't feel authentic. It feels like a game. It feels like you're trying. You think I'm stupid. Like, I. Especially in a B2B sale or a B2C sale, which is negotiated. I think I would encourage people to be very cautious about engaging in games like that. You know, another one is the whole market up to market down. You know, games can really hurt trust and I think it can hurt your brand. So engage with extreme caution. I talk about that a little bit in the book, too. So then let me turn to the question you asked at the end, which is, when are discounts appropriate? Are they ever appropriate? How do we. How do we go about discounting? You and I have both been in the business world long enough to know that it is commercially and competitively unrealistic to say that we should never, ever discount, even if we've got the best stuff in the market. You can have the very best stuff in the market if you just say, hey, I'm good. I'm good at what I do. I have tons of confidence in it. I never discount. For most businesses. That's an. That is not that that level of commitment to never ever discounting is actually misplaced. I think there are times based on the commercial or competitive factors that are present for a lot of businesses that it does require a look at it. So my message is not never discount, but my message is don't discount too quickly, too deeply, too broadly, or from a place of fear. Do it in a dispassionate way with your eyes open, understanding exactly which customers or which products and services to what degree have to be discounted to win this deal and no more. And really, really, really, like, put a bright shining spotlight on your decision making around this and interrogate it and pull it apart and ask yourself, do I have to do a discount if I do need it? Be that big? Do I have to go all the way down to 5% off or can I do 2% off? Do I have to do it across the board on every product or service they're buying, or do I only need to do it here and Leave the rest of this alone. Like, just inspect our thinking, interrogate our thought process and really make sure we're making a prudent choice.

Salesperson comes back to the shop. I got this huge job, but I had to discount at 10%. Well, you know that you're an 11% company, so you just gave away 95% of your profit. And you know that you're basically going to be doing that job for free. And then on the other hand, when I go home and my wife has negotiated the discount or she says I got them that, like, I'm going to hear about that eight times. Like, well, you know, I got this, but I got that off. Right? And that's. And then, you know, did you really get that off or was that the duck on the pond? When we were doing pricing for insurance companies and this was a game, right? It would be like, there's things that we knew that Nationwide or State Farm or that they were sensitive to items that they wouldn't pay, but the adjuster would get paid or incentivized based on how much they would reduce estimates. So if I'm going to Nationwide Insurance and we're pricing and I know that they don't pay this, like, pack out charge per room, I'll put it in there. Then they'll. Adjuster will call and say, well, Jeff, you know, I've got to take this out. And I'd be like, yeah, they'd take it out. So they'd reduce it back down to it. It's nothing we needed anyway. He's done his job. We've done our job. Okay, and that's insurance fraud. And the statute of limitations is up.

Well, I think you're speaking to something important here. And this is a asterisk I offer to my advice not to play pricing games, which is don't play them unless you must. Unless you must. In other words, understanding the, the nature of, like in the, in your story, for example, how are people rewarded, bonus, compensated, promoted, that you're selling to, like, they care about X, not Y, well, okay, then let's not ignore that knowledge to our peril. Let's, let's reflect that. And sometimes, especially when you're selling to people who are, who, who may through, you know, through good intentions, but nonetheless be compensated in a way that sort of pervert their decision making. Don't be, you know, don't be foolish about passing up the opportunities to capitalize on that. At the end of the day, I don't feel as I hear your story or other people who have maybe engaged in similar things. I don't think there's anything to feel guilty about there at all. Because they will beat the heck out of you on the core stuff, right? They will, they will, they would love to see you do it for nothing. And they will beat you up and beat you up and beat you up. And sometimes it's our, it's necessary for us to kind of make ourselves whole by picking it up around the fringes in some of those other areas. And so at the end of the day, if you feel confidently that you have not asked the customer to pay more than your value is worth, then I don't care too much how you get there by putting these pieces together.

When does price gouging come into play? We see it in disaster situations like that. Things go up 300% overnight, right? Is there ever a situation that's not an emergency where people have taken advantage of price gouging? It would be something that you wouldn't recommend.

Well, let me answer a question you didn't ask first and then, and then land the plane with what you did ask, which is, it's, it's very. There are times when we're doing training programs or I'm in a, you know, keynote and someone comes and asks me, like, what, what profit is too much profit? You know, what margin percent is too high? You know, there are, and this is super different by industry, right? There are industries where they would, they would faint if they ever charged a 30% gross margin. Others were 70 or 80 or 90% gross. Margins are, you know, very, very common. My belief is there is no such thing as too much profit as long as the value is aligned with the price in a way that is rooted in morally and commercially appropriate decision making. And so you see this go wrong where, like the EpiPen story or Pharma Bro, or people charging $50 for a case of water after natural disaster. So like there are people that, that just because you can doesn't mean you should. But, but I would say, you know, for your listeners, for the people that read my book or that are in my audience, I don't worry about that end of the spectrum because they are morally and commercially appropriate people. I worry about the opposite. I worry that they're doing so many things, going to extraordinary lengths for customers to solve problems for them and they are going under rewarded because they have some phantom ceiling on their, on their price. Like I can never charge more than a 40 HP. Whatever. I, I don't even know if this story is true. That I'm about to tell you, but I heard about it and it's a useful analogy which is that there was apparently some experiment done once upon a time where some scientists put fleas in a jar and put the lid on the, on the jar and the fleas were jumping up and hitting the lid. Hitting the lid. After some period of time, I don't remember the elapsed period of time they take the lid off. The fleas were not jumping up all the way up to where the lid had been. Now the fleas were capable physio physically of jumping out of the jar, but they didn't jump out of the jar because they had been trained by that ceiling. Now ceiling is not there, but because they have trained their minds to believe a limit exists, they no longer tried. So as, as it relates to this thing about, about pricing, like we have limits of our own creation. Oh you know, 20% great. 30% phenomenal, 40% ripping somebody off like says who? If you, if you have value that corresponds to a price, that 60% margin and the customer's delighted with their side of the bargain, then that's not too, there's no such thing as too much profit there. Really.

Can you share a few anecdotes about the impact of small price increases on profitability?

Sure, yeah. And I've got at the end of every chapter in the book there's a client story. So you know, some of the most present for me are some of those stories because I just spent this week in the studio recording the audiobook version and so I read all the stories. Yeah, there, there's. Geez.

I mean what I was looking for is, and we hadn't really covered it with specificity, but what, what made an impact on our owners was kind of the numbers. You know, if you're a 5% profit company and you raise 1%, that's a 20 increase in your bottom line. You know what, what kind of, you know what are, what are some of the common.

Talk a little to that, those financials. Yeah, yeah, no, no worries. Yeah. I mean it just, it's, it's very common. Let's we think about and talk about and I'm talking about business owners and leaders, sales leaders, frontline sellers. We think and talk about price in terms of as a percentage of revenue. So let's say you have a ten thousand dollar job and it goes to ten thousand one hundred and that's 1%. It's like rounding year. Right. Or you charge a hundred dollars per hour and you go to 101 rounding error, you go like, as it pertains to the top line, these numbers sound like no big deal, it's just 1 or 2%. But you know, let's just use the company with 5% bottom line. Let me just talk this through. I call this the world's simplest P L By the way, for every dollar that your customers give you 95 cents, go back out to pay both the direct cost and overhead costs of running your business and serving your customers. It's everything from labor, rent trucks, utility, lights, you know, raw materials, whatever. And we've got five pennies at the end of the day, which is a lot of hard work for five pennies. But that's the reality for a lot of people listening to this podcast or, or 2 or 20. But you know, we have however many pennies left over, right? Let's imagine it's this company with 5% at the bottom line. The idea of a 1% price increase is, ah, it just goes to a dollar one. But it doesn't cost any more for us to produce those products or services. So it's still 95 cents of cost, which means 5 cents. That penny drops from the top line all the way to the bottom. Our 5 cents turned into 6 cents which is a 20% change to profitability. Our profitability just went up by 20% for something that we routinely think of as rounding error. The difference to your customer of paying you $10,000 and $10,100 is like invisible. They don't care. It doesn't matter at all. But you just made 20% more profitability on the bottom line. Even a half a percent is double digit for that company. And so one of the things we seek to do on our training from the stage as a keynote in the book is just make people really, really present to that the magnitude of that 1% on their bottom.

Any business that has commission salespeople, they're typically going to be commissioned on the top line of whatever they sell. So oh, I had to throw in shipping to get the deal. I had to discount at 5%. I had to match this, I had to match this. They don't care about the impact of those concessions that they make, but they're massive. These little incremental price changes or discounts that you give make a difference on whether you made 100,000 at the end of the year or 300,000 at the end of the year. And that's, you know, and it's, and the funny thing is small businesses, new entrepreneurs, this is never talked about Everything else is talked about sales, there's sale, there's more flavors of sales training out there. Sales books, sales, webinars, sales this, sales that. And then there's, you know, software. And then, you know, as you get into, you just don't see much about pricing. No matter. I don't think I've, I don't think I've met anybody else that is a pricing expert.

Yeah, it baffles me because of, I mean, I see it so clearly, like this is the thing that most businesses need to do more than just about anything else they're already working on. Just get a little bit better at pricing and money will rain from the sky. And so I'm a little confused by it. In some ways, it's an advantage for me because I'm in a category one, you know, that's kind of nice. I'm not dealing with competition. But anytime you're in a category one, you have to create the category, you have to create the demand. Like, nobody is out there googling, you know, who's a pricing training firm that can help me and my team get better at this. Right. Like nobody's looking for it. In marketing speak, they say they are not problem aware or solution aware. Which is why I am very grateful to be on this podcast and other people that host me on podcasts and give me a chance to kind of bring my passion for this topic to their platform and their, and their, their reach to their listeners and readers. Because it isn't something people are talking about enough, in my opinion. And I think and have seen over, you know, 15 years, countless examples of companies whose bottom lines were transformed with very straightforward, practical changes to pricing. Not massive, not go raise all your prices by 20%, raise your prices on some of your stuff to some of your customers by two and a half percent. Now all of a sudden we're talking about six and seven figure impacts to bottom lines through those kind of changes.

It's dramatic for companies and owners out there listening. What's the process look like when they engage boost?

Sure. Well, it depends. All of our programs have the same purpose, which is to pull back the curtain on customer tactics and motivations around getting your stuff for less and then arming you as a seller or a sales team with the methods, messaging tools and confidence to win more deals at higher prices. Right. But there are.

Do you, do you work with the C suite or do you work generally with the sales team?

The center of the bullseye of our training programs is the sales team and sales leadership. It's Kind of back to that, you know, generals drawn up maps versus the hand to hand combat. Right? It's the people whose job it is to carry that number out to the customer and then communicate and defend it and take the punches. It's those folks that have the biggest opportunity to show shift the performance of a company because they're the last mile. Like I see companies sometimes when they, when they suspect they have a, some kind of pricing challenge, they want to look at their strategy, they want to like fix the structure. Well, we got to do this. But it's like you can spend a lot of time and money perfecting your strategy. If you put it in the hands of your sales team and you do not have their hearts and minds, they're going to discount, you know, march right around that strategy and discount anyway. So the, the purpose, like the, the intended target for our programs is the, is the selling team and their leadership. Obviously our engagements tend to start at the C suite because they see the value in it and they want to invest in helping their people get better at this. But the actual participants tend to be like the center of that bullseye is the sales team themselves. And we have a few different offerings. The two most popular, we have a half day workshop. We can come and kind of teach your people this stuff. It's very effective, it's very contained. It is not my favorite one because it suffers from what I call workshop euphoria, which is like, oh, you know, that was great. They were really entertaining and knowledgeable and I took a ton of notes. But then you go back to your office and you have 500 emails sitting there and you don't crack the notebook for a month and then three months and then six months. And it's harder to make as sticky of change with that program as we do with our other program. Still works, still very powerful. But our best program is a program called the Boost Advantage program which is 10 weeks, same kind of content, still very contained in terms of time and money that are required to invest in it. But it just allows the content to breathe and interspersing it with practice and some other kind of structural elements we've built in to make it really, really sticky change.

I consider you to be a highly evolved entrepreneur. I'd love to peel that back a little bit. Some of the conversations we've had just around how you manage your time, how you manage your email, how you've managed to put people around you. You also invest 600 hours a year in children's causes. I'm not sure what the purpose is behind that. But I'd love to hear that you speak. You're a speaker at some of the biggest conferences in the country, the EOS conference. So you're, you're right out there in the big stage, just crushing it. It's all online. You can go to YouTube and see all this. And you're also an author, but I get the sense that you really practice what you preach in terms of efficiencies and getting your full value. You get your full value out of every interaction that you do. How did you go from an employee to a single mom with two kids starting a company by yourself to where you are today? Who, who, who's helped you? What have you done, and what, what experience can you share with other people who would like to follow that same path?

Yeah, well, I wish I could tell you I had some plan the whole way through, but the truth is I've kind of. And sometimes it felt like I was sort of feeling my way around in the dark, but I've been blessed with a. A tremendous amount of support and advice and just have one of the, you know, if I could, if I could encourage folks who are either early on in their entrepreneurship journey or maybe haven't quite taken the leap yet. One of the best things I did, and it was more or less by luck at the beginning, was to be very intentional about joining organizations where I could spend time in an intimate way with other entrepreneurs. And, you know, I'll mention Vistage, but there's other organizations like that, like EO, YPO, WPO. I joined Vistage and was part of a Vistage cohort of folks, about 12 to 15 of us, depending on the. And I was in that for seven years with the same people every month, talking about my business, my challenges, including personal. That peer group, especially as a solopreneur, was absolutely essential for me. And I am 100% certain I would no longer be an entrepreneur if I hadn't have been part of that group at that time. First couple years were quite bumpy, as they often are, and, and there was, you know, there was a period of time early on where I, I had a lot of confidence that what I had to share with the world was helpful and useful, but there wasn't a lot of data to support that belief. Like there wasn't enough client, there weren't enough clients, there wasn't enough revenue. There was a million hours being worked. And that group, really, both in terms of moral support, but also in terms of, you know, making connections, making introductions, offering useful Advice was huge for me and I've since leaned into other entrepreneurial communities like EOS Entrepreneur Operating System, which is rooted in Gino Wickman's brilliant work, strategic coach Dan Sullivan, where you and I met. So I continue to look for spaces I can get in. Not just like, like not networking cocktail hours, right? Like not just light, superficial chatter, but places where there can be a real intimacy of exchange of ideas and a real sharing of struggles and advice. That's been huge, huge, huge. Not just for me as an entrepreneur and the results that that's produced in the business, but like most entrepreneurs, it's a blurry line between my personal life and my professional life. It's hard to sometimes tell the difference of Casey the, the pricing, you know, Person vs Casey the, the person. Like the lines are a little bit blurry. And so I think that kind of support is hugely helpful.

As your company continues to be successful, your message gets out. What's the next evolution for you in your career? You're already speaking on some of the biggest entrepreneurial stages. Is this your first book, Fearless Pride?

It is the first book, yeah.

Okay, awesome, you've got your book out. What's next in your career?

Well, we'll see. But here's some ideas I have about it. I've learned over time. Like very few of the things I planned turned out exactly how I planned, but a lot of times they turned out better. So I'm open to what, what comes my way. But here's what I'm thinking is really like the, you know, the early stage of the business as I shared was, you know, me as a solopreneur doing a lot of strategic stuff and then realizing, no, we need to deal with the behavioral and psychological and fear driven, self limiting beliefs of sales teams and then started to tune to that, built a team around that have continued to build sort of a body of thought leadership in that space. So sort of chapter one, chapter two, I think chapter three is really trying to find a way to dedicate more of my time to this, to this content piece. Because having delivered engagements with and to hundreds of companies and then now supported our team and delivering it to hundreds more more. It's just like all this stuff goes into my brain and I would like to find a way to spend enough time getting some of it back out in useful ways. And I think things like just like just being on a podcast and getting asked questions and then sharing something, some that might be the thing that somebody listening needs to unlock something for them. So to me the, the Next chapter is really about leaning into the idea of thought leadership as a way to scale and as a way to get the, this content that I believe in so powerfully to more people. Not just one audience at a time or one reader at a time or one or one company at a time that hires us, but to just get it out. This is my mission. You know, I, I believe very much that if you're excellent at what you do, you ought to be paid like you're excellent. And small and medium sized businesses are the lifeblood of this. Not just the economy in this country, but around the world. Like it's us. We are the ones employing everyone, putting food on everyone's table, paying everybody's daughter's college tuition. Like, if I can help entrepreneurs and founder led companies be better at this and be rewarded appropriately for their value, I'll consider my life very well spent.

Yeah, the universe doesn't conspire to make us wealthy, successful or happy. But part of our job as entrepreneurs and leaders is to create calm the swirl for people and to do that. And I just did a two hour training with eight or ten new top rail fence franchisees this morning and part of that is just to, you know, one of Vern Harnish's, one of his greatest recommendations is buying 2 to 4 hours every week and turn everything off and just let the universe organize in your head. Because if you're so busy and you're, and you're just, you're grinding and you're delivering and you're fulfilling and you're selling, you're not really giving yourself a chance to let everything that you've learned organize in a way that you can repackage it, that can be useful to other people. And what the groups like you mentioned do and also creating content does is it forces you, the groups force you to feed your curiosity. Because now all of a sudden you're in a room with a bunch of entrepreneurs that are building great businesses and they've got ideas and you're like, well, how does that apply to me? How does that apply to my industry? You make connections like this where we can collaborate. So now you've got collaborations that can get created inside of that. And then I think the last thing is that in building your content you really have to think about what you're going to put out there. And content, by the way, bad content doesn't travel.

It's worse than no content. Bad content is worse than that.

It just lies for flat. I mean the algorithms of these platforms, specifically YouTube, if if I don't have a good hook and it's not. It's not a good episode, and it's not. Well, it doesn't even have to be well produced. It just has to be interesting and right. You get. We get immediate feedback like, oh, that didn't land. And we get this many views, or that landed. And we're getting this many views and this many engage this kind of engagement. So, you know, really, you have to be good. So all of this, like, I don't know, a business owner who shouldn't be participating in groups, thinking carefully and deeply and thoughtfully about their business and, you know, trying to repackage that, even if it's just their customers and their employees and their other stakeholders are impacted by that because, you know, lack of clarity, like what looks like hesitation, what looks like lack of effort or even indifference is oftentimes a lack of clarity. And it's our job as leaders to speak a bold future into existence and to by every measure possible, describe what it is, why we do what we do, and where we're going. So I think, as you're. We have to be out front. We have to be out front of this stuff. And quite frankly, it's maybe, if you look at it the right way, it's a reward for 15 or 20 years or 25 years of grinding away and building a business that we get to actually repackage it and let other people come behind us and benefit from it.

Yeah, there's so much that you said there that I love. There's one thing that's just kind of really at the forefront of my brain right now, which is the. This idea of leaving space to connect dots, to organize your thinking. And I know I will speak for myself. That is, I think, my number one, one challenge. You know, I've got a couple teenagers in high school. I've got a business, we're building a house. I do a lot of speaking, I do a lot of. And. And the schedule is always packed. And leaving unscheduled time to just let. Let my curiosity wander, let connections find their way in my brain between disparate ideas is something that has been a challenge for me. And I think that is another sort of. If we look at sort of chapter three for me with the business, which is we'd be less about running a company and more about, like, leaving space for that kind of. Of thing to happen. Have you ever heard of Patrick Lencioni's Working Genius? It's one of his most recent books. And there's an assessment that goes with it. And, and you kind of identify these different kinds of genius. And it's an acronym, it's W, I, D, J, G, E, T. It's wonder, invention, discernment, galvanize, enablement and tenacity. And my two types of genius according to that, that assessment are discernment and invention. And I think discernment, to me, the way I think about that is like connecting dots. Like, I understand pricing is important and I know people need to hear that, but if I just stand up in front of them and read them a bunch of, you know, arcane, textual, like, they're not going to listen. So how do I connect these dots? How do I make the, how do I think about a different way to talk about this idea so that it turns light bulbs on in people's head? And, and that is an area of strength for me. But it is a strength that goes dark if it doesn't have any air to breathe. Right. It doesn't have any room to kind of blossom and grow. And so I say this as much for myself as for anyone else that like, do not let the tyranny of the urgent prevent you from keeping space for what's really important.

Yes. I had a mentor and he shared with me, he said, when things are going really well, you can train your guys, your gaze farther out on the horizon, horizon. Like you can look into the future, you can be a little bit more thoughtful, but when things get choppy and you need to go deep, you need to bring your focus right in front of your face, just like right here. So as, as business builders and leaders, it's important that we vacillate between that long range view and then we get right back down into the details and we go deep and we make sure that things are going the way they're supposed to be. Even if we have a team, I mean it's, it's, you know, we, the team should always know that we, we reserve the right to ask, you know.

Get into the details, questions about, well.

Why, why, why, why, why, you know, and so I know that there's probably hundreds of thousands of people out there that are in the Amazon cart right now buying fearless prices or dozen or so. But.

Yeah, right, a few.

So tell us a little bit about if you want to share about the process or why you wrote the book. But if somebody goes and gets this, what can they expect out of fearless pricing?

Sure. Why I wrote the book. I already sort of alluded to this a little bit. Is it, is this is important work for Me, this is the, this is the purpose of my life professionally. And I have given myself over to this mission. And that mission is best served if I find a way to get this message out to more people. And the democratization of Access is not just about like, you know, if you, if you're hiring our firm or you're hiring me to do a keynote, you know, the number of digits in the price tag are a lot different than the price tag of that book. And so there are folks that, you know, maybe aren't ready to hire us for a full on training program, but that would buy a $20 paperback and benefit from it. So to me, this is about access to the information for the people that really need it. That's the why. And then, you know, I'm also, you know, as a speaker there's certain stages that are closed to you unless you're a published author. So there's some, you know, kind of sort of personal reasons that's, you know, agenda, you know, that, that helps me with some of the things I'm trying to do. The process of writing it, it was about 50% written in my head for about a decade and I wanted to write it. I wanted to write it, I wanted to write it. I knew what it was going to be about, I knew what it was going to contain, but was just, you know, kind of running and gunning and couldn't slow down and put it, put it together. The actual process of writing the book took about a year and a half. It was, you know, a reflection of a lot of the work that we had done that I'd done from Stages than we've done with clients. And so a lot of the content was kind of there. We just had to put it together and make it, you know, what I hope is a good book and an easy book to read. I also really wanted it to be very practical. And you mentioned the tools and the downloadable tools. I think the tools are very appealing to people because it's tangible. Like I can go put my numbers in this tool and, and I am for that. But the tool isn't the answer. Like the tool is not going to make you any more money on its own. In absence of the belief that your product or service is valuable and that you deserve to be paid well for it, a tool will not get you anywhere. So the real purpose of the book is to inspire and to build confidence. There's absolutely content in there that's rooted in, you know, skills or tactics or tools or frameworks because people love those things. And they're, they're helpful. But, but the, the true sort of reason the book exists. And that's why it's called fearless pricing. It's not profitable pricing or better pricing or high margin pricing. It's fearless pricing because what we really have to sort of fix or the biggest obstacle to better pricing is our own mindset, our own self limiting beliefs, our fears, our emotions, our habits, our attitudes. And so just want people to feel some, like they have some power, you know, and they can stand in their value.

Incredible book. I read it all the way to the end and at the end here I did find something. Where is it? Here in the acknowledgments. Oh yeah. Which I thought was very nice. Jeff, thank you for being my rock, my greatest champion and my constant source of balance. I can't really thank you enough for that, Casey.

So for the benefit of the listeners, my partner is named Jeff also, I think.

Yeah, kids. Okay, well then that would, that would be me, right?

Yeah, we do. No, I think men of a certain age, there's a 50, 50 chance they're named Jeff. There's a lot of Jeffs in your age bracket. Our age bracket.

So, yeah, fair enough, fair enough.

Although I, I have, I'm full of gratitude for you too.

Well, I appreciate that. Likewise, it's always a pleasure. So Casey, where can people get in touch with you?

Sure. So anybody that wants the book, Amazon or anywhere books are sold, you can just, you know, Kasey Brown, Fearless pricing. It will come right up. I put out a lot of free content. This is again back to the democratization of access for, for helping businesses that need this help. I put out a lot of video content in particular on LinkedIn. You can find me, Casey Brown, Boost on LinkedIn. We, I write a blog and that's@boostpricing.com so I, I'm a big fan of like have resources available to people at every price point. Some people want free and I want to help them. Some people want to spend, you know, $20 on a paperback or $30 on a hardcover. Great. I want to help them. And then for folks that want and need more help than that, we certainly have some programs for it.

Fantastic. Last question. If there was one sentence from your journey that you could offer to somebody to make an impact in their life, what would that be?

You're worth it.

Perfectly said, perfectly said. Casey Brown, thanks for being on.

Thanks Jeff.

Absolutely. This is Jeff Duden with Casey Brown. Price high and prosper and we have been on the home front. Thanks for listening.