You don’t have a pricing problem
Pricing is the one part of business that feels completely random to almost every entrepreneur I talk to. You glance at a couple of competitors, maybe you ask ChatGPT what you’re supposed to charge, you land on a number based on nothing, and then you toss it out on a sales call and pray something sticks. I did this for years, and honestly still feel the pull of it.
I sat down with my business coach, Peter Giordano III — who I’ve mentioned on this show roughly a hundred times, and who’s the first person I call every time I’m ready to move my business up a level — to finally demystify this whole pricing fiasco.
When you listen to this conversation, you’re going to walk away with something that’s way bigger than any pricing formula. It’s this: you don’t actually have a pricing problem. The reason a price feels like a shot in the dark is that you’re missing information, and once you see exactly which information, the number stops being a mystery you have to invent and, instead, becomes something you can actually reason your way to.
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There’s no right price hiding somewhere
The first thing to let go of is the fantasy that a right price even exists. There isn’t some magical correct number out there, just waiting for you to discover it.
As Peter puts it, you could take the exact same person, clone them, and the two of them could land on completely different prices, both of them fine, because there are too many variables in play: your goals, the outcome you create, the person you’re talking to, the timing. There’s plenty of wrong pricing out there, but there’s rarely one single right answer.
This matters more than it sounds, because so much pricing anxiety is the exhausting hunt for that one number, as if it’s hidden behind the right competitor’s website or the right ChatGPT prompt. It isn’t hidden anywhere, because it doesn’t exist. What you’re actually looking for is two specific facts to go collect, and the rest of this is about what those two facts are and why nobody teaches you to gather them.
Why the market can’t give you the answer
The obvious place everyone looks first is the market: what is everyone else charging? Peter’s take on that is refreshingly blunt: screw the market (at least a little bit). At the scale most of us operate, the person deciding whether to hire you usually isn’t lining you up against three competitors in a spreadsheet.
“You’re more likely to compete against your potential client’s status quo than against somebody else.“
This potential client’s status quo is doing nothing, or just taking care of it themselves. That’s your real competition, not the other provider down the road, which means their prices tell you almost nothing about yours.
I see the flip side of this constantly — someone comes to me for a website waving three wildly different quotes, completely lost about where to start. Your budget is real and it matters, but choosing on who’s cheapest is how you end up in hot water (which was very much on my mind when we recorded this because my boiler was broken and I’d just taken a cold shower. But I digress). We all know hiring the cheapest option rarely ends well.
An important thing to keep in mind? Half the people setting those market prices don’t understand their own numbers well enough to know why they charge what they charge. They’re guessing just as much as you’ve been until now. So comparing yourself to their guess doesn’t get you any closer to your answer.
“Charge your worth” is the same dead end
Okay, so you’ve been thoroughly convinced to look at places other than the market for help with pricing. And maybe you reach for the other piece of advice floating around: charge your worth. It sounds empowering, but it means almost nothing, because your worth isn’t a fixed thing sitting inside you. It’s relative.
The person you’re hoping to bring on as a client decides what you’re worth to them, and that may change dramatically with the situation. The same exact service that creates a $10M outcome for one client might create a $1M outcome for another. Different value will (and should) carry a different price.
Notice what’s happened, though. Both dead ends — the market and your worth — fail for the same reason. They’re both attempts to find the number by looking in the wrong place. The market sends you looking outward at your competitors; “charge your worth” sends you looking inward at some fixed sense of your value. And neither is where the answer actually lives. The answer lives in two specific pieces of information, and this is the most important piece I want you to take away from this conversation.
The two things you’re actually missing
So here’s what will actually help you land on a price that makes sense:
- First is what it truly costs you to deliver — your real internal economics. Your time, your capacity, your admin, the actual number of hours a project will eat start to finish.
- Second is what the outcome is genuinely worth to the specific person in front of you — not to the market in the abstract, but to this client, in their situation, right now.
That’s it. Every pricing method Peter uses is really just a tool for going and getting those two facts.
Watch how it reframes undercharging, which is rampant, especially among the women I work with. We tend to treat undercharging as a confidence flaw — you just don’t believe in yourself enough. Peter frames it much more usefully. Undercharging is an information gap. You don’t fully understand your own internal economics, so you don’t know what you actually need to charge to make the business work, and you don’t fully understand what the outcome is worth to your buyer, so you default to guessing low. Fix the information gap and the confidence tends to follow, rather than the other way around.
There’s a specific confidence piece Peter names that I love, though, and it lives right alongside the information:
“You have to give yourself the permission to get a no.”
We walk into every sales conversation desperate for a yes, and that desperation is what makes us cave on price. Deciding in advance that you’re willing to collect some no’s is what lets you hold a number that reflects those two facts instead of a number that reflects your fear.
How to figure out your costs to deliver
The internal side, what it costs you to deliver, starts with the thing almost none of us can do: estimate our own time.
Peter says for the smallest businesses, time is the factor, and I’m the poster child for getting it wrong. Every time he asks how long something takes me, my honest answer is still, “I don’t know.” His fix is low-pressure and it works: just give a proxy, a ballpark, and say it out loud. People are shockingly good at estimating once they actually pay attention, and the simple act of naming a number creates awareness. You catch yourself thinking “that took way longer than I thought,” and suddenly you can make real decisions.
His favorite way to force this into the light is a spreadsheet and a deceptively simple question: can you make a million dollars with these services, at this pricing, with these admin costs and this much sales time? He picks a million because it’s fun and round and out of reach for most solo businesses, and then he walks you through the actual math — how many clients that takes, how much time each one eats, what’s left when you’re done. He calls it using a spreadsheet to make the future wiggle. He doesn’t tell you you’re undercharging. He lets you watch your own numbers tell you that.
This is where he taught me to stop staring only at revenue. Most of us fixate on the money coming in and skip the rest of the story. Peter asks which you actually care about: revenue, margin, or profit. They’re different, and the honest answer often changes by the end of the conversation. Revenue matters for scaling, while profit is money in your pocket. But it’s the margin in the middle — what’s left after the cost to deliver — that gives you the most freedom, because that’s the room that lets you choose whether to pay yourself or reinvest. Knowing your own margin is a huge chunk of that first fact.
How to figure out the outcome you offer
The external side, what the outcome is worth to your buyer, is where Peter’s single most useful idea comes in, and it’s the one thing he most wants you to remember. Forget B2B versus B2C, which just muddies everything. Instead, ask whether the person is spending from a wallet or a budget.
A solo owner or a small team, even though they’re technically a business, is spending from their wallet. It feels like their own money, because it basically is. A large organization is spending from a budget — money already set aside as a line item that doesn’t feel like theirs at all. Those two buyers experience the exact same price in completely different ways, which means the value of what you offer has to be framed completely differently depending on which one is sitting across from you. Getting the second fact comes down to understanding whose money it feels like to this person in front of you, and what the result is truly worth to them.
This is also why you get to build it your way
Once you see pricing as information rather than a magic number, a lot of the rigid rules fall away, including the loud one that says you must productize your services or you’re leaving money on the table. Peter doesn’t buy that as a law. Productizing is great if you want volume and you’re happy repeating the same outcome. Full customization works if you start from the outcome and build the scope to fit. And there’s a middle path he calls tailored — bumpers on the bowling alley, a little of each. All three are legitimate, and the right one is whichever fits how you actually like to work.
This matters enormously for the creative entrepreneurs I work with, who often recoil at being stuffed into a box and being told productizing is the only way. It isn’t. When you know your two facts, you can price any of these models honestly, so the model gets to fit you and your goals rather than the reverse.
What this makes possible: raising your prices
All of this pays off the day you need to charge more. The fear is completely fair, and Peter splits it in two.
For new clients, there’s nothing to fear, because they’ve never bought from you before — your new number is just your number. The real nerves are about existing clients, especially on retainer, and there his advice is simply to be a human about it: give plenty of notice, have a real conversation, and figure out terms together. Two to three months of notice is kind; six starts to feel like a long time.
One thing he’s firm on: don’t blame the increase on your rising costs. That’s a you problem, not a them problem. You’re charging more because you’re better and harder to replace than you were before, so frame it as the good news it is. I pushed back a little here, because my instinct is you often don’t need to explain it at all — when you can confidently say, “my prices are going up as of January first, wanted to give you a heads up,” with no justification, you avoid inviting the client to negotiate whether you’re really worth it. Think about Netflix. You get the email that the price is going up, and almost nobody cancels, because what are you going to do, stop watching? Peter’s move to skip the whole awkward thing: build it into your agreement up front, so a price conversation at renewal is just expected.
The same truth lies beneath every piece of this conversation — the market, your worth, undercharging, the spreadsheet, wallets and budgets, raising your rates. Your pricing issues really come down to missing information about your own business and about the person you’re serving. Go get those two things, and pricing stops being the scariest part of your business and turns into one of the most reasonable and straightforward.
Work with Peter
If pricing has always felt like a number you made up and crossed your fingers on, Peter is the person to talk to. He’ll go down every rabbit hole with you until the whole thing finally makes sense, and he really loves doing it. The best way to reach him is a DM on LinkedIn. He also writes an excellent weekly Substack on pricing, operations, and business strategy — he’s published it every single week for over 175 weeks running — so if you want a feel for how he thinks before you reach out, start there.
RESOURCES & LINKS MENTIONED
- Connect with Peter: send him a DM on LinkedIn
- Subscribe to Peter’s weekly Substack on pricing, operations, and business strategy. Let him know you found him through this episode.
- Curious about working with me? Book a free 15-minute vibe check
- Not sure how your own voice wants to show up? Take the free Content Marketing Power Type Quiz to find the approach your brain is already built for
