Why your pricing isn’t just a number — it’s your business model, your operations, and your customer promise rolled into one.
Pricing is funny. It’s the one number everyone sees, the one decision everyone wants to weigh in on, and somehow, the one thing that gets blamed for everything that’s not working.
Margins are down? Must be the price.
Deals not closing? Let’s tweak the price.
Customers complaining? Maybe they just don’t like the price.
But here’s the thing — pricing almost never lives on its own. It’s just the part that’s easiest to point at. It’s visible. It’s measurable. It looks like a lever. And so it takes the fall.
Most companies make pricing decisions without calling them that.
You decide who your customer is.
You design your offer.
You pick your channel.
You build a process.
You set a promise.
And then, somewhere near the end, someone says — “So what should we charge?”
Like it’s a tag you can just slap on.
But pricing doesn’t sit on the surface like that. It’s soaked into everything. It shows you where your story doesn’t match your setup. It exposes misalignment — between who you want to be and how you’re actually built.
So if your pricing feels off, chances are it’s not the price that’s broken. It’s something deeper in the system that’s showing up through the price.
That’s why I’ve written this — not because pricing is the problem, but because it’s often the first place the real issues start to show. And once you know how to read those signals, you’ll stop wasting time fixing the wrong things.
Pricing Is a Mirror — And It Reflects More Than You Think
Price is where everything upstream shows up. It’s not a separate decision. It’s what happens when all the other decisions finally meet reality.
You can’t set a price without making a bunch of assumptions first — about who your customer is, what they care about, how much it costs to serve them, how your team delivers value, and what your operation can handle. And most of the time, those assumptions are fuzzy, outdated, or inconsistent across departments.
Pricing just brings the contradictions to the surface.
You think you’re serving premium customers — but your cost structure says you’re a volume player.
You want to charge for speed — but your fulfilment flow can’t deliver.
You’ve built a pricing model for high-touch service — but your team is set up for low-touch transactions.
Price reveals the gap between how you talk about your business and how it actually runs.
This is what I’ve seen again and again when working on pricing transformations. People think they’re tweaking numbers. What they’re actually doing is uncovering misalignment — across teams, systems, even beliefs. Pricing forces questions that most businesses haven’t answered clearly. Or worse: everyone answered them differently, but no one realised until it hit the customer.
So no — pricing isn’t a layer you add at the end. It’s the mirror you hold up to see if the story you’re telling makes sense when someone has to pay for it.
The Real Problem Isn’t the Price — It’s the Contradictions Behind It
I’ve lost count of how many pricing meetings I’ve sat in where it quickly becomes clear… this isn’t really about price. Not in the way people think.
What’s actually playing out is a quiet tug of war between teams that are all working from different assumptions.
Sales wants more flexibility — to “just get the deal over the line.”
Finance wants discipline — to protect the margin.
Marketing is chasing positioning — the kind that justifies a higher price point.
Operations, meanwhile, is under pressure to deliver without the lead time, the headcount, or the clarity they need.
And when the numbers don’t add up, they all point to price — as if that’s where the problem started.
But price is just where the contradictions become visible. It’s where the gaps between teams, strategies, and systems finally show. Not because anyone made a mistake, but because the business has drifted — slowly, over time — into a place where the story no longer matches the setup.
This is the moment where things tend to get defensive. Sales feels boxed in. Finance tightens its grip. Marketing reminds everyone what the brand stands for. And ops is too busy firefighting to push back. It’s messy. Everyone has a point. And no one’s really wrong — they’re just not aligned.
That’s what makes pricing such a useful pressure point. It doesn’t lie. It forces you to confront the real trade-offs, the ones most organisations quietly avoid. Not because they’re dramatic, but because they’re uncomfortable.
If you want to understand what your business is actually built to do — and where it’s been stretched too thin — look at where your pricing conversations break down. That’s where the real work starts — not with the number, but with the contradictions it surfaces. And once you start seeing those, you can’t unsee them. Which, honestly, is the point.
Want to Transform the Business? Start With Price
It’s easy to treat pricing like a tactical clean-up job — a few updates to the pricing sheet, maybe a new discount policy, some tweaks to the proposal template. That’s usually how it starts.
But here’s what happens next: as soon as you try to fix the price, you realise you need to fix everything else.
Because to set a price that actually works — one that holds up in front of the customer, protects your margin, and still feels fair to your team — you have to get real about who you serve, how you serve them, what that costs you, and what your offer is actually worth.
You have to decide where you create value — and where you don’t.
You have to clean up exceptions, edge cases, and unspoken rules.
You have to align teams that have quietly been working from different maps.
That’s not pricing. That’s change.
And not the kind you can run as a side project. This is the kind that cuts across departments, forces trade-offs into the open, and requires a different kind of ownership. Which is exactly why so many pricing initiatives stall. They get framed as commercial adjustments — when really, they’re invitations to rethink the business.
I’ve seen pricing act as the sharpest diagnostic tool a company has. Not because it gives you answers, but because it refuses to let you look away from the hard questions.
So if you want to start a transformation — a real one, not the PowerPoint kind — start with price. Not because it’s the most important thing, but because it shows you what’s really going on.
Don’t just fix the price.
Follow it back to what’s broken.
That’s what I’ve done, time and again — not because pricing is the only lever that matters, but because it’s the one that tends to reveal everything else.