Where this usually shows up.
Pricing trouble doesn’t show up as a crisis. It shows up as a slow drift — the bid you submitted at last year’s number, the renewal you let pass without a conversation, the customer whose contract you’ve been afraid to reopen for two years. When owners come to us, it’s almost always one of these:
- You haven’t raised prices in three years and you know it.
- Your best customer is also your worst margin and you’re stuck.
- New quotes go out at last year’s numbers because nobody changed the template.
- You’re afraid one phone call from one customer will undo it.
If two of those sound like you, you’re in good company. Forty-eight percent of US small firms raised prices in response to financial pressure last year. The market is already moving. The question is whether you move with a plan or against the clock.
What “a price event” actually looks like.
Most “I should raise prices” conversations end with a quiet email going out to the whole book and one or two angry phone calls landing on Tuesday. That isn’t a price increase. That’s an announcement, and announcements produce cancellations.
A real pricing engagement is a sequence — cohort math first, anchor-customer calls second, a one-page letter third, follow-up conversations fourth, and the second invoice last. The work isn’t in deciding to raise the rate. The work is running the sequence cleanly enough that your best customers stay, your weakest customers self-select, and the new rate holds through the renewal after this one.
That’s the difference between an event and an announcement. We help you plan the event, write the letter, and prepare for the two customers who will actually call.
How we work on it.
Most pricing engagements run four to eight sessions over two to four months — shorter than the cashflow work, because the calendar is the constraint. Daniel Park leads this pillar. He spent fifteen years in specialty food distribution before coaching full time, mostly running sales operations and the renewal cycles that go with them, and now works with service businesses and distributors through their own price events.
A typical engagement looks like this:
- First two sessions. Pull your customer list and segment by margin and willingness-to-pay. Identify the anchor customers — the ones above twenty percent of revenue — and map the renewal calendar against the next ninety days.
- Middle stretch. Run the anchor calls before any letter goes out. Draft the one-page notice. Plan the cohort-by-cohort timing so the increases land in the right order.
- Closing sessions. Hold the line through the first invoice and prepare the rhythm for the second — which is the one that actually tells you whether the increase held.
The deliverable isn’t a pricing strategy document. It’s a calendar — a clear sequence with a start, a middle, and a second invoice.
A specialty food distributor in the Pacific Northwest came to us with one customer at twenty-eight percent of the book and pricing that hadn't moved in four years. The owner had been postponing the conversation for two years.
We mapped the cohorts, ran the anchor call before any letter went out, and structured a graduated escalator that held the anchor through two more renewal cycles. The rest of the book moved cleanly, and net margin lifted four points within twelve months.
"I had been afraid of one phone call for two years. Daniel had me prepare for it instead. The call went fine. The book moved. I should have done this in 2023." — Priscilla R., owner
Is this for you?
Most of our pricing work has been with service businesses, light manufacturers, and distributors — places where pricing is mostly a customer-by-customer conversation rather than a shelf tag. If you sell through retail or a marketplace where the price is set by the channel, the mechanics are different and we’ll say so on the call rather than pretend otherwise.
The work scales between five and fifty people. The mechanics — cohort math, notice cadence, the letter, the anchor protocol — stay the same. What changes is how many cohorts you’re managing and how many people on your team need to know the math behind the meeting. Tell us where you are and we’ll be specific about what’s relevant.
If you’ve already raised prices once this year and are thinking about doing it again, the right move is usually to wait. Pricing events held cleanly across two cycles in a row are how you build pricing power — not by stacking increases. We’d rather help you plan one well than help you run two badly.
On price: coaching isn’t free, and engagements vary by size and scope. We share specifics on the intro call, once we understand the shape of the work — usually within the first ten minutes.