The Real Cost of Trump’s Tariffs for Pricing Teams with Karan Sood

But it's getting some breaking news.

The President Donald Trump has announced sweeping tariffs on goods imported into the United States from all countries. April 2, President Trump in the US declared it liberation Day and applied tariffs globally.

Tariffs are always taxed to sort of incentivize behavior within the country or even externally.

How did you develop such a passion for pricing? How did that end up being your specialization?

Karen Sud, widely known as the Pricing Guy, is a leading voice in global pricing strategy. Over the past decade, he's managed pricing and revenue for over $6 billion across diverse industries. Through his work and popular newsletter, he's helping companies turn pricing into a true competitive edge. He's passionate about helping businesses move beyond guesswork and start using pricing as a powerful lever for growth, profit and performance.

It's so fascinating to me how one thing somebody does upset the entire Apple cart and everybody has to scramble.

There's going to be painful decisions you will have to make in this. If you are deeply impacted by what.

Are you advising companies to do and how should they start thinking about this?

Figure out how much are you really impacted? Because that's not an easy question to answer.

Any advice from your perspective or thoughts of how we as consumers should think about all this?

One last thing I would say is.

Welcome to Financial Modelers Corner, where we discuss the art and science of financial modeling with your host, Paul Barnhurst. Paul Financial Modeler's Corner is sponsored by Financial Modeling Institute. Hello everyone. Welcome to the special podcast episode. This episode is going to be released on all three shows, FP and A Tomorrow, Financial Modeler's Corner and Future Finance. Because we're discussing a topic that I believe is topical and very important for every finance professional. Today is something we're all dealing with. We're all scrambling to try to figure out, and that's tariffs. As Many people know, April 2, President Trump in the US declared it liberation Day and applied tariffs pretty much globally. Some of those have now been put on hold for 90 days. Some have even been increased. But we're just seeing a ton of volatility in the market and everybody trying to get a handle on that. So I've brought in a friend of mine, quite global pricing expert, who's been doing a lot of work around tariffs. Karen Sud. Karin, thanks for joining me.

Thanks for having me. Always a pleasure.

Yeah, really excited to have you. So I'll give a little bit about Karen's background and then we'll jump into things. So Karen is a global pricing expert who today works as the director of sales, operations and this is what he has to say about pricing in his own words from LinkedIn. I really like this. He goes, most companies make pricing an afterthought. Most companies are also never able to use pricing as the superpower it actually is. He's had the privilege of overseeing revenue management for over 6 billion in revenue across a diverse range of industries over the past decade. Through this experience, he's gained a deep understanding of the critical role that pricing plays in business success. He is passionate about sharing his expertise and insights to help organizations harness the power of pricing strategies to improve profitability and overall performance. So first question I want to ask you here. I know you love talking about pricing. I even noticed you called yourself the pricing guy on your LinkedIn profile. So we have the FP and a guy and the pricing guy. But how did you develop such a passion for pricing? How did that end up being your specialization? Because that's not an area most people specialize in.

No, I didn't even know something like this exists. You're not taught this in business school. I did my engineering and did my MBA after that here in Canada. And honestly it was not something and like we knew nothing. There was. Pricing was four pages in a, in a book in marketing and that was pretty much it. I didn't think I'll cross path with it again. But somehow I stumbled in my first job and it was a good job. Somehow, you know, I stumbled on this pricing role. I was going, we had to choose between three or four roles and I got assigned pricing in that team and I didn't know what to make of it. I'm like, okay, that's we'll start doing it. And then over time then you started to build the knowledge and you started to build connections and then you switched from one industry, from automotive to digital marketing and you do the different kind of pricing. And then I moved to CPG and did a little bit something different than electronics and SaaS in between, et cetera. Then I started to do all this all around thing, you know, this personality around pricing where like if someone had a pricing question, because I'd been around so many different models and so many different industries and I probably have seen almost everything you could throw at me from a pricing point of view, from exact pushback to buy in, to creating models, to creating pricing design and financial analysis and so on and so forth. So it just became a thing where I'm like, okay, it's something I was getting good at. And then it started to become this niche and then when I realized that there are people who want to listen to more about this and want to learn more of it. Then I started to be more vocal around this in the pricing community. And honestly, it's helped me grow my skills and I think it benefits everyone, but it's pretty much been. And once I realized that you can actually make hard dollars for companies doing this and being more creative with it, I think it benefits as well. So it's. Then you can measure your impact directly, like, hey, you did this, you created this strategy and it made sense. So much, so much money. So it's. Then it's easier to buy into this pricing vertical for me, at least internally. And, yeah, that's how I came into pricing and stayed almost so cool.

And, you know, I know we'll be weaving pricing into our discussion, but before we jump into things around pricing, I want to talk a little bit about tariffs because I've seen a lot of activity from you on LinkedIn. You've dug in pretty deep into what's going on here. You know, from the US on these, you know, worldwide tariffs. Some countries that we've seen as much as 100%. So maybe can you start by sharing your initial reaction to all this tariff talk we've been dealing with the last month or so? I think it's really kind of exploded since President Trump became president of the US Again, and that was part of his core policy. So what's kind of been. I know you're Canadian, and so you're not, you're not directly in the US but this has clearly impacted Canada. So give us kind of your perspective as you watched all this unfold.

You know. Yeah, you sort of have to go back and sort of go back to where it all started. Right. Like, tariffs are always and always taxed to sort of incentivize behavior within the country or even externally. So within the country, like President Trump or anyone in that position winded up changing behavior in his consumers that buy almost like buy local and not don't buy foreign. And that's the real incentive. And, you know, you can, you can position that, that as the protectionism or patriotism or whatever you want to position it as, but it sort of is for that behavior now, how you grow that behavior in a truly global environment now, where tariffs were not something we used to think about is, is key. And now, you know, you could say that you could be very surgical, that, you know, any strategy like this, you could be very surgical where you figure out, okay, what do I exactly need? And hard which country is exporting that item so that I can actually grow that domestically. For example, let's say auto. If some, if someone said, hey, I want to grow the domestic auto sector, so I'm going to restrict vehicles coming from Canada, for example, or Mexico, that would be a more surgical thing. And that was the first phase of these status, like very surgical, like lumber and auto and steel and aluminum, which very targeted, very targeted to certain countries, very targeted to certain, certain geos and industries. So it made sense that, okay, you're adding this now obviously the impact of that is going to be that prices are going to go up depending on how much tariffs are. Like there's an expectation that when the tariffs come into play, the prices are going to go up. There's not enough, sometimes there's not enough margin in the entire value chain to absorb a 25% increase in cost. Sometimes distributors are working with 4%, there's manufacturers working with 10%. And especially in commodities like, which are easily replaceable, you know, margins are really thin sometimes, so they get passed on to the consumer. But then from that very surgical phase, we quickly went into this phase where it was like a blanket across the board. Tariffs across so many countries based on a firm. So when it first came out, when you know, came out onto the, you know, is it the rose garden with a big, you know, with a big shirt?

Yeah, the big, big board that he had when he celebrated liberation. I was on vacation. All this happened.

Yeah. So I saw that. Then I went on the Department of Trade website and you saw the formula that was used. So at first when I looked at the formula, I'm like, hey, that makes sense. I guess there's a, there's a method to the madness in a way that how it was calculated. But then slowly and slowly you realize that some of a lot of vague assumptions were used in that, in that formula in a way that it assumed certain elasticity of goods for import. That assumed, for example, the elasticity of imports is 4. It basically means that a 10% tariff will decrease demand by 40% almost. But they also, in the same formula assumed that only a quarter of the tariff cost will be passed on to the consumers. So that that elasticity and that pass through sort of cancel each other. They say that okay, this cancels this, so there's no net impact. And then the formula is basically trade deficit divided by the import. So it basically is how much surplus do are you sending us versus our imports? And then just calculated a tariff based on that. So I mean, if you would, if someone was doing It Right. And if that formula held this weight, you would use the right assumption. They use the assumption that only a quarter of the tariff cost will be passed to the consumer, which in actuality is not correct. Most companies will pass on the hike, the entire cost to the consumers. In fact, the people who sort of wrote the research for it originally said that 90 to 95% of the cost will be passed to the consumers versus the expectations in US, which were like 25%. And that's the reason everyone is working overnight since the last week trying to figure out what is the tariff, how much it is, who do we pass it to, how much can we absorb, how much Runway we have. So I think there's. Everyone's trying to figure out the same thing right now.

I would agree with you. Right. Everybody's trying to figure out, okay, what does it mean for my business? What's the Runway, what's the short term, the long term, how much can I absorb, how much can I pass on to the customer? Because it's going to be different for different products. Right? If we are importing pretty much a hundred percent of that product, you better believe it's going to be close to 100% price increase. But if we produce quite a bit inside, then the, the other ones are like, well, we can't pass as much on to the customer or they're not going to buy us anymore unless there's demand for it or if it's a luxury good. So, you know, as I think about this, I think almost every business is slightly different assumptions, even though with this tariff, they used the same assumptions across the board with all these commodities, which to me, and correct me if I'm wrong, from what you're saying, that that seems really flawed. Like there just seems some assumptions here that are really hard to support on a massive level and say this is going to happen. Right? Is that what I'm hearing from you?

And you're absolutely right that every industry is different, for example, and you also, like, every industry is different and you need to have the extra demand inside the country, for example, lumber, for example. If US does not have enough supply of lumber internally, then there's no amount of not tax. Like, if even if you, you know, put the tariffs on and you train people to buy domestically, what happens is, is there's just more people chasing less domestic goods again. And then what that does it. It raises the price of those domestic goods again because they're like, it becomes. They're more deodorant in a way. So that sort of has that knockoff inflationary impact on prices that is coming from tariffs and also just from organic demand for those same products internally. So everybody is different. And then, and you said, and also you pointed out like luxury goods and luxury goods are very, very tariff and inflation independent. You'll see that even during the pandemic some of the biggest runners and the best industries to be in was the top end luxury. And that's why even no, I can't remember his name. The richest guy in the world for a little bit of time was the French, you know, retailer of high end brands. I think it's Louis Vuitton, the owner of Louis Vuitton and all those brands. So it's because these are very inflation resistant. So for them a 10% really doesn't, if you want to buy a, you know, half a million dollar yacht like another 50k is not going to break the bank. But if you're going to be buying a $6,000 iPhone and if certainly that's got 85% tariff on it, that becomes meaningful from thousand to 1500 or 1600. And that's where the math starts to break out for a lot of consumers. For a lot of companies selling a lot of consumer is do I need this? Then for the sellers it's like hey, what percentage can the manufacturer absorb, what percentage the middleman absorbs and what percentage the actual retailer absorbs. And I think this is the math everyone is trying to figure out right now. So if you are in a finance team or in a pricing team, I think this is in my way my thinking at least you're super bowl in a way and you're trying to basically figure out with the sales team and your supply chain team and your finance teams as to hey, what is the breaking point? And I think the breaking point has been reached like a random marlin. For most industries no one has 104% margin on you can't have it technically. But also no one has that high of a margin on their products where tariff as high as 100% or 150 or 180% can be observed. So the model's already broken now and every company has likely already made a decision. Now the question is when are they going to start acting on it? Because the analysis is the same whether it's 100% tariff or 120% tariffs or 1:59, 54% tariffs. I think now as of an hour, two hours, two hours ago. So you know, it's, it's, I think the decisions are made Already feel like, yeah.

And agree with you. Right. I know us with China, the 104% that you mentioned on the goods there, that there has to be a price increase for goods coming from China, you know. Yes, I know they want to get some production back in the U.S. but that's not an overnight thing for most of the stuff we get from, from China, as an example in the US or, you know, take whatever countries it is. So what are you advising kind of companies to do to help manage these tariffs? I get what the US Is trying to accomplish. They're saying, hey, look, we want more domestic production, we want to protect our industries, we want to bring back some manufacturing. Long term, we'll see how that plays out. But in the short term, what are you advising, you know, kind of companies to do and how should they start thinking about this? Obviously they should have already been thinking about it. But if they haven't done much yet, what would you tell them?

There's a general understanding, right? Like a lot of times, the general understanding is that, hey, businesses are efficient. If they knew there's a way to save money in their supply chain or in their product costs or in their sourcing, they would have done it by now. But that doesn't really happen a lot of times. We know that the business could be run a little bit more efficiently or the cost could be a bit lower. We don't do it for several reasons. Because why change something that's not broken if your business is generating money, is generating margin, is generating shareholder value. A lot of times people don't want to change it. They don't want to optimize their product or their costs or their supplier or their location. There's no incentive, for example, for Apple to go from manufacturing in China to manufacturing in US when you're selling millions and millions of iPhones already or changing the base from China to some other country in East Asia because it's working well. And why change something that's working well? A situation like this is sort of like that catalyst. So I think my advice, first of all, for most teams, finance and pricing and people in adjacent sort of skills and you know, and department says that I think now is the time to assess everything. What cost impacts are you going to have? Because I think there's a lot of lack of clarity. And I think right now you have to make sure that your models are flexible versus being agile. A lot of people are like, hey, I want to get the best pricing model and the best price change, et cetera, out the door now. But guess what? Whatever you try to push out the door yesterday, start working as a 5pm yesterday and now it's gonna work 11am today. So take pause, figure out what, how much are you really impact? Because that's not an easy question to answer. There's a lot of ambiguity when they say tariffs are 145%. They don't tell you the exact specifics of which country, which geo or what product is excluded or what not excluded and how it's calculated. Is it calculated on the, on the absolute value of the product or is it based on some parts that are, some parts are getting tied. So there's just a lot of nuance that the first and foremost is to work with your legal team, to work with your supply chain team and work with your finance team to basically figure out what exactly is that dollar impact. Then you got to go into the mode of figuring out, okay, how much of this costs and for how long can I absorb what is. If this is a trade war, how much ammunition do I have right now? And that's basically how much money have you been made so far, how much you're going to make do these products? Is what is the alternative to doing this? Or is the alternative to doing this is that not selling at all or raising pricing and going to almost nothing? I think there's that trade off people need to start weighing in now. And that trade off only comes when you're really working cross functionally to figure out and not working in isolation, going in isolation, this becomes very easy. Finance could just say, hey, you know what, there's just so much loss, you're not going to do it. But if you go back and look at it strategically and say, hey, is that the right decision to make today because you have accounts you want to fulfill, sales channels you want to keep. Sure. Make sure the sales conversations are customers you have contractual obligations sector to or you want to use it as a marketing ploy for yourself. There's just too many things there that is not a binary decision as of yet because it's changing constantly. What's true today and what maybe a decision to turn down and turn off your tasks today might change into something tomorrow and then you have a totally different, might have a totally different strategy. So I think pause, work cross collaboratively and then figure out what the pricing strategy for you is going to be for this. Are you going to absorb costs, pass on costs? Is it a hybrid approach and what is the timing of that thing? Because people say, oh, raise prices. But guess what? Most contractual Agreements anywhere in North America will have clauses for 60 days, 90 days, 120 days and even like almost 12 months of contractual obligations or volume obligation that hey, this volume is being bought at this price and nothing else. No, nothing else. And it's very hard to pass on those ones. So you need to gather all that information as well and then just getting alignment from stakeholders, FP and a guy here.

And as you know, I am very passionate about financial modeling and the Financial Modeling Institute's mission. I have been a huge fan of the FMI for years and I was super excited when they decided to sponsor the Financial Modelers Corner. I recently completed the Advanced Financial Modeler certification and loved the entire experience. It was top notch from start to to finish. I am a better modeler today for having completed the certification. I strongly believe every modeler needs to demonstrate they are a qualified financial modeler. And one of the best ways to do that is through the FMI's program. Earning the accreditation will demonstrate to your current and future employers that you are serious about financial modeling. What are you waiting for? For visit www.fminstitute.com podcast and use code podcast to save 15% when you enroll in an accreditation today. So what I'm hearing, and I think this makes sense is the, the first thing you got to do is one, make this a cross functional exercise. There's no one department that should be doing this. There's going to be legal involved, there's going to be finance, there's going to be supply chain sells. And start by, okay, what's the cost impact to my, my cost of goods sold, which areas does this apply and how much? And you know, trying to get into that nitty gritty and making some good assumptions. Next I'm hearing you're going to need a really flexible model. You're going to need to think about how you build a model in such a way that you can quickly adjust things and see different scenarios and ranges because this is all unfolding real time. You know what, what was in place two days ago isn't what is in place today and we'll see what tomorrow is. Because every country's managing this different, we have different leaders. This is a global thing. It's not like, hey, we put them in place and we're done. And so if I'm hearing it to start with those kind of, you know, those things are cross functionally. Get everybody together, dig through and understand this, have a flexible model, understand your Runway, how much inventory do you have, what do all your contracts look like? How much cash do we have on hand? What can we borrow? And so really it's kind of almost a health assessment from a company standpoint, a deep assessment on your supply chain and your crop, your cost cross functionally before you then start to get to the strategic of how do we manage this?

There's this notion of these are like whatever we discuss are all, I don't want to say the short term, but there's all short term and medium term changes. And the long term changes coming out of this are going to be totally different where you're probably rethinking everything and what countries you sell to, what countries you partner with, what country where your suppliers are, where you manufacture. Like there's going to be a more nuance to it than on the long term and which will go into like bigger considerations. Like for example, Apple is saying they're going to have a 500, they're going to invest 500 billion into it, into US facilities for phones and servers and so on, so forth. That's a long term play. Will that have any impact now? No, but you know, things like this will spin out of it and that's the kind of broader strategies and broader, bigger play that will come out of it.

Yeah, I'm hearing there's the short term, the immediate, what do we do in the next 30 days, 60 days, 90 days, there's the midterm. What does this look like? Six months, a year, maybe two years. And there's that longer term, what's the strategy for five years? I think a great example, you may have seen this Jaguar Land Rover, you know, they, they immediately said look, we're not shipping anything to the U.S. they paused all shipping to the U.S. said hey, we have some inventory there. We're going to take time and figure out what our strategy is. So short term they said we're not going to deal with it. Whether that's 30 days, 60 days, we'll see. You know, Ford took the approach and said we're going to give everybody employee pricing as a way to try to move inventory. And so it's really interesting to watch because we're starting to see reactions from companies that short term and the long term, like you mentioned, some of them are saying, hey, we're working to find ways to bring more stuff into the US or you know, to basically, you know, some markets are saying look, we're just going to ignore the US goods altogether. I know some countries have had protests where they're saying we're not going to buy US goods anymore. So you have the company response, you have the government response in this and you have the consumer response.

Yeah. Is this going to be all this? There's, there's a lot of pride and nationalism and patriotism that comes into play when it's, when it's in the country that play. You see that in Canada for obviously as well, a lot. So that will come into play. And how do you use that to your advantage is on you. Like, you know, companies like Ford are using it to their advantage in us because they're, you know, the timing is right and. Yeah, and Jaguar is making the right move. And I think that's the calculated move. Right. Like someone figured out and said, hey, it's not beneficial for us to sell and import vehicles in the short term. We'll sell the Runway. The Runway that they had for how many months or weeks? We'll do that and you know, and we'll go from there in four, four to six weeks.

Yeah. And I'm sure they'll look at it and say, okay, these are cars that are, you know, because they have some luxury stuff, they're very price insensitive. We'll continue to send those and just pass it on. These other ones, maybe you'll see some discontinued. It's just, it's so fascinating to me. You know, one thing somebody does can kind of just upset the entire apple cart and everybody has to scramble. I'm trying to think of a comparison in my lifetime to this Covid in a different way. We all had a scramble, but this is in many ways it was a known event, but kind of black swan in the sense of nobody really understands the full impact are what this is going to be like for everybody who have ideas. But it feels like there's a lot of uncertainty.

True. I think the only one that probably remotely mimics that to an extent is the financial meltdown from 2008, for example. That's like where people like didn't know. Like they knew, okay, so markets are responding this way or oh, the bigger banks are going bankrupt. But they didn't realize the scope of the amount of impact it has on the housing market and the job market in years to come and people's pensions and so on, so forth. So I think that's probably the only other comparison I can think of in terms of the scale of how it's impacting people. And it will continue to do so. And you see, you know, you see it in the stock market again today. So it's. Yeah, yeah.

And, and how do you think companies come out of this as a winner from a pricing perspective. What's, what's your view on kind of the smart way to pass these prices on? Because there's a lot of different ways to message it, to choose how much to price. I mean, if you were advising a company and you could pick an industry, kind of walk me through how you would think about the actual, you know, doing those price increases in a way that, you know, put you in the best position kind of moving forward.

Yeah, I think it comes down to figuring out what your pricing power is in generally. And I think if I putting a framework, I would say, hey, what's the pricing power and who's your competitor or the level of competition you see in this industry. So if you are in a unique industry that's making something unique, and it may be iPhones or whatever, you know that you have really good pricing power. For example, Apple and Samsung and these guys have really big good pricing power and they're in a very unique situation. There's only like a handful of manufacturers. So guess what? For them it's going to be an easy decision when it comes to tariff as to, hey, we're going to pass the tariff cost to the consumer to the point that it can bear. Now what it can bear is something if you are a pricing and a finance team, there's probably, there's enough research out there or you can do more. You can do research on your own product, you know, which we sometimes pricing and finance teams don't do enough of. It's like, what is the, what is the elasticity of this product? In a way, I think you will need to test that to really figure out what the next price points are going to be. And so there's that. And then so the pricing power is a big element of it. Like if you have pricing power, you have some control over your pricing of what you want to do. And if you have no pricing power, if you're easily replaceable, then I think you got to figure out in the next little while what the differentiator is going to be for people to choose you in these times. So for example, if you are just so like a more generic car manufacturer, let's say if you are Kia or Hyundai, not that they are generic or they're really good cars, but for example, they will have alternative for those where people can go, okay, you know what, I can just buy the alternative because that's pretty darn good. Ford is pretty darn good or Chevy is pretty darn good. So I think in those they really have to figure out what the mechanism they're going to layer on top of this to basically entice people to buy. Is that a long, maybe it's something to do with a service plan or is something to do with where you bundle something on top of it. You gotta incentivize in certain industries, you'll have to incentivize the customer to purchase because that's the only differentiator you have versus the competitor. So I think if I would take a really long hard look at what your pricing power is. And if you have pricing power, you gotta pass on the increases as much as you can. And it's almost like, you know, if you're building a model, it's like, hey, what the price needs to be. If I was to just pass on the entire tariff to your consumer, if it's like 50%, 60% of the cost, what is the price point based on that? What is the price point based upon what I can do because of contractual limitation. And third is what can I get away with? And somewhere between those three options is your new magical number where you will probably price higher, sell less. I think we have to work with the reality that you will be selling less for a little bit in between. So you gotta get your watches ready in terms of like how much you had to to be able to afford it. And then you also gotta look at what your, what changes you're gonna make. Are you gonna cut out if you are like a retail product, are you gonna cut out your promotions? Are you gonna cut out your marketing spend? Are you gonna cut out headcount? Like there's gonna be painful decisions you will have to make in this to be able to get out of this if you are deeply impacted by it. And I think those things will need to start happen starting now.

Got it? No. Makes a lot of sense. A lot of this goes back to Econ101, so to speak, in the sense of elasticity and understanding your pricing power. And a lot of it is so much about understanding how much ability do I have to pass these costs on? If you have zero ability, then it's, is there anything I can do to differentiate and what can I take out of the supply chain if I could pass on 100% with no problem, there's not a huge incentive to be a lot more efficient. You probably should be just because that's good business, but there's not necessarily an incentive here. So I, I, I, I really like how you're making it very clear that, look, every business is Different. There's some similar things you have to do. There's exercises you need to go through. But there's no magic silver bullet here.

No, no. And one last thing I would say is also be transparent with the consumer at this point. I mean, you know, there's two schools of thoughts here. One is that, hey, that, hey, change the price of the product and let it drip in the market and consumers will respond accordingly if they see the price point is right or not. And there's another school of thought that says, hey, price of the product is what it is because what you're really paying higher for is this tariff or levy this import levy, then put that as an additional line item so people understand the difference between what was the price of the product and what I am being asked to pay for, you know, for the import or for various reasons. And then they make a decision. I am more in the second camp because I feel like you need to give people the transparency in most places that here's the cost that you're. You're absorbing. We are absorbing, or you are paying for this. And then you can, you know, it's better than no transparency at all. Because then it's a bit of like people. Because people know that if prices go up, they rarely come down. And if you bake it into the price of the product, that transparency is lost versus when it's just. And it's very common in B2B. In, like, in. In like raw material manufacturing and earth metals and all these places where they just add a line item for the tariff which can be taken out, added back in, or increase or decrease as they want without changing the price of the product per sale.

Well, it's like, I mean, you look at cars as an example, and there's almost always a destination fee, right? So you can see, okay, here's their MSRP suggested price. Here's the destiny. You can add a line that says here's kind of the tariff or whatever you want to call it. So I tend to agree with you. I do appreciate the transparency. I think that's best for the consumer and it can win you a lot of loyalty. Unfortunately, sometimes people like the lack of transparency because as you said, when prices go up, they rarely come down. I would expect when these tariffs go away, it's not like we're going to see a decrease in inflation for the amount of the tariffs. Some percentage of that is just going to remain in the price. And so I'd love to get your thoughts. Do you think talking more big picture. And I Realize none of us have the answers. But do you think this is going to lead to a global recession? How should we as individuals kind of think about this and prepare ourselves? We've talked a lot about financing companies, but any advice, you know, kind of just from your perspective or thoughts of how we as consumers should think about all this.

If anyone had had a crystal ball to tell where this will lead, I think that would be a very good thing to have. But the thing is, I think, I think there's a lot of unknown trade wars do end. Is the end in sight? I'm not sure at this point. This has become a little bit of a signal and anchoring and show off strength because 150% tariff is, it's more of a signal. It's not a number. No one's going to make money out of it because exports are just going to drop by the same amount in a way. So it's more about signal. And I think there's still a lack of clarity around where this will end. But I think if as a consumer, I mean, you're already seeing the frenzy out there, people know if you're going to need an import product right now, the time to buy it, if you are in a position that's basically where you can afford it and it's something that people are taking into account. And that's why the electronic sales for iPhones, et cetera, are booming right now. Because iPhones become the new toilet paper from COVID that people are like, okay, this is going to go up in price. So they've already, there's all sorts of analysis online on oh, here's how much the price will increase by, because of tariffs, etc. And people are just banking on and jumping on an opportunity. So I don't know that's, that's the only thing I'm, I'm seeing. But yeah, so, so I know outside of that there's no way to tell when this ends and what are the strategies you can employ for yourself. I think you just have to make a best decision for yourself based on the circumstances are where the prices are, where you're importing, what the alternative is going to be and just make a decision accordingly. Like in doing Covid, a lot of private label brands benefited because people are like, hey, prices are too high for some of these items that are branded. I'm just gonna go private label. I mean, and then private label benefited from that. So it's just another way how people make decisions around pricing and spend, etc.

You know, I'm hearing is really being. Being educated, really kind of, you know, and making. Trying to make smart decisions the best you can. But as you said, if anyone had a crystal ball, please let me know, because I can make a lot of money in the market with you. We can. We can go in together, right?

100%.

All right, well, we have just a couple minutes left. I want to ask you just a couple questions to get to know you a little bit more personally. This is kind of a fun section we've had. We've talked quite a bit about tariffs and pricing, and so first one, I'm going to ask if you could have any superpower have a little fun here. What superpower would you pick?

Travel, like, port myself from one country to another country and, like, do something like, you know, see the world would probably be a good one.

So basically, like, being able to teleport, so to speak. Like, I could just go to Turkey in a blink of an eye.

Yeah. Teleport. Yeah. Teleport. Yeah. I can just teleport myself. Yeah. So that would be a nice superpower. Rolling back years would be nice. Like, you know, the. As you get older, you get nostalgic about the things you've done and not done, and, like, you know, that would be nice. But, yeah, and those two will probably be the super. I would love to have.

I like it. If you could have any job in the world for one week. It could be a specific industry or person's job. What would you pick?

Oh, that's a tough one. Yeah, that's. That's actually a really tough one. Like, I. I feel like I want to work in, like, if I. Someone said, hey, you can work in again. Goes back to, like, many, many years ago, I interviewed for FedEx, and one of the perks of being a FedEx was that you could be a standing. You have standing reservation. You just had to show up at the airport. I'm like, that'd be a nice perk in the industry to work in. So maybe that is the kind of role you want to be in for some period and say, hey, here's. This is how it feels to be like, you just hop on a plane and go somewhere.

I think someone has a travel bug.

Yeah. I'm gonna probably think about that a little bit more as I go walk away from here as to say, hey, is there something that I would probably would have loved to do? I'm sure there was.

Right, last question. What's kind of your favorite hobby or passion? What do you like to do in Your spare time other than read, you know, economic tariff, things that are put out?

Yeah, I mean honestly I read a lot but yeah, I would default to like. I just, I, I'm a ferocious reader so I'm just into reading lease letters or I'll read books and I don't read, I don't listen to a lot of stuff. I don't watch a lot of tv. It just doesn't allow, the schedule doesn't allow. But I just spend love spending time with my family. I love spending time with my daughter. That's probably the other thing that I do a lot of.

So family and reading.

Family and reading, yeah.

Any book you'd recommend to our audience? Is there a book out there that you think we should be reading?

Yeah, I mean there's tons of books. One book I think everyone should read is the Robert Cialdini's the Art of Persuasion. I think it's a book that everyone should read. Like everyone. It tells you how to basically tell a lot about human behavior, how you convince people to do stuff for you, how you basically you model the kind of behavior in people. Like you know, how do you incentivize people to, towards you, et cetera. They just is an all around good book for anyone to read regardless of any industry. You know, the Art of Persuasion is a must read book. Talks about different tactics on how to, you know, gain authority and how to gain confidence and how to gain etc. Just it's an all around good book for people to read.

Great. I've heard a lot of great things about that and I know the Art of Persuasion is so important so that's a great one to mention. Kind of last question. If someone wants to learn more about you or get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to do that?

Obviously you know I am very active on LinkedIn so that you can just find me on LinkedIn. I have a newsletter as well that they can subscribe to. It's called Pricing Tribe. I talk about all things pricing, discounting careers and pricing which is very adjacent to almost pseudo finance in a way that you know, pricing and finance are very closely related. So you know, you can find me on LinkedIn, you can find my newsletter and yeah, like I would love to chat with anyone and everyone.

I appreciate that, appreciate sharing that. Thank you so much for carving out some time. I know you're very busy. Been in high demand these days with all this going on. I appreciate it Karen, for joining me and for being on the show and being a friend and I'm excited to share this next week, you know, as this goes out and hopefully we'll have a better idea of where things are going. But buckle up and let's see what happens here. But make sure you're taking the time to prepare yourself. Any last words before we let you go?

Stay calm. Spirit is not going to be easy for anyone. For finance folks or pricing folks or anyone else who is in the weeds figuring out what the impact of this is going to be. Stay calm. Don't make decisions too soon. Information is constantly changing and strategies are constantly changing. Hold your ground and try to be a cross collaborator. Be that person like in finance or in pricing that sort of brings everyone together towards the common goal. And I think this is a moment to shine for a lot of people.

Perfect. I really like that. Stay calm. It's an opportunity to shine and we'll all get through this. You know, this is just like everything else. We get through it. Just work your way through it.

Yeah.

Well, thank you so much for joining me and you have a great rest of your day.

Thanks for having me. It's always a pleasure, Paul.

Thanks. Financial Modelers Corner was brought to you by the Financial Modeling Institute. This year I completed the Advanced Financial Modeler certification and it made me a better financial modeler. What are you waiting for? Visit fmi@www.fminstitute.com podcast and use code podcast to save 15% when you enroll in one of the accreditations today.

Want to shine for a lot of people?

Perfect. I really like that. Stay calm. It's an opportunity to shine and we'll all get through this. You know, this is just like everything else. We get through it. Just work your way through it.

Yeah.

Well, thank you so much for joining me and you have a great rest of your day.

Thanks for having me. It's always a pleasure, Paul.

Thanks. Financial Modelers Corner was brought to you by the Financial Modeling Institute. This year I completed the Advanced Financial Modeler certification and it made me a better financial modeler. What are you waiting for? Visit fmi@www.fminstitute.com podcast and use code podcast to save 15% when you enroll in one of the accreditations today.