💰 Pricing
Value-based pricing, the pocket-price waterfall, usage architecture, and the mechanics of a price increase that holds.
100 Days to 10-12x EBITDA: The PE Pricing Sprint That Holds
Exact steps to execute a risk-free pricing reset immediately post-acquisition.
Why Your $200K Strategy Deck Loses to a 90-Day Sprint
A 90-day sprint framework outperforms 12-month commercial strategies because it generates real market feedback before the thesis is locked in.
Why Your Discount Policy Lives in a VP's Head and a 2019 Deck
Most discount leakage is not a willpower failure. It is a policy that was never written down, then asked to scale. This paper walks through what to codify before an AI agent touches a single deal, using a composite industrial-IoT case to show the sequence.
Designing a Usage-Based Meter in 3 Weeks Instead of 3 Quarters
Using AI assistants to compress usage-based meter design from quarters to weeks without giving up the operator judgment that keeps meters honest.
When One MSA Serves Three Revenue Types, You Lose the Renewal
Contract governance is where pricing strategy either holds or quietly unravels. Hybrid-revenue companies: B2B2B platforms, freight, marketplaces, hardware+services, distribution: are where that unraveling happens fastest. This guide is the operator's playbook for rebuilding contract discipline when one template cannot serve three revenue types.
36% of POs Carry Off-Cycle Discount Asks. That's a System.
Discount governance is not a deal desk. It is a codified system of bands, gates, and rhythms that makes price a signal a channel can trust. The work is diagnosing where margin actually bleeds, building discount bands before enforcing them, installing approval lanes that do not collapse under quarter-end pressure, and running a weekly and quarterly cadence that keeps the policy honest.
640bps and $19.4M EBITDA: How One PE Rollup Stopped the Bleed
How a four-company commercial-services rollup diagnosed heterogeneous discount leakage, built portco-specific guardrails instead of a single playbook, and converted recovered margin into an LP-ready EBITDA narrative. A portfolio-level operating guide, not a single-company pricing essay.
118% NRR Hides 71% GMV Retention: The Marketplace Math
How to define, measure, and benchmark retention correctly when your commercial archetype is not pure B2B SaaS, and what to stop doing when a borrowed benchmark tells the wrong story.
8 Portcos, 6 Operating Partners: The Pricing System That Scales
A repeatable pricing value-creation playbook operating partners can run across any portfolio company, any hold period.
A 7% Price Increase = $2.8M ARR. Or 4 Points Lost to Bad Comms.
A communications framework that lets price increases land without triggering churn, negotiation spirals, or sales team dilution.
The $25M Margin Hidden Between List Price and Your Bank Account
A pocket-price waterfall framework that turns invisible margin leakage into governed, recoverable revenue.
Usage-Based Pricing: The $40M Multiple Swing on a $50M ARR Exit
When usage-based pricing creates portfolio value, when it destroys it, and how to decide before committing.
8 Portcos, $300K Each? The 90-Day Pricing Triage That Beats It
A 90-day diagnostic checklist operating partners can run on any portfolio company to surface pricing value creation opportunities before committing to a full engagement.
36% List-to-Pocket Leak in One Channel. Blended Hid It.
The pocket-price waterfall is the single most diagnostic exercise a multi-channel operator can run. It exposes the gap between list and realized margin at the line-item level. And it almost always reveals that the cleanest channel on the P&L is hiding the messiest discounting behavior underneath.
8% Approved, 2% Realized: Where Your Price Increase Actually Went
Price increases fail because of communication strategy, not because the number was wrong, and the fix is operational, not financial.
10% Mandate, 4-6% Realized, 8-15% Churn: The Blanket Increase Trap
How to operationalize a price increase when market tailwinds vanish.
From 14 SKUs to 4 Editions: 11 Days to 3 on the Quote Desk
Packaging is the commercial artifact that decides whether three buyers can buy the same product without three different sales cycles. This guide shows how a multi-sided platform organised 14 SKUs and 28 add-ons into a four-edition, three-module, two-meter framework. The method works when one stack serves banks, platforms, and merchants at the same time.
Per-Truck + 2.4% Take Rate: The Hybrid That Beat Pure UBP
Usage-based pricing is an architectural choice, not a pricing tactic. It fits some archetypes and actively harms others. This guide is the diagnostic that tells you whether UBP fits your business, how to pick the meter that tracks customer-realized value, how to design a hybrid that protects predictability for both sides, and how to roll it out with rollback gates named in advance.
Value Based Pricing: The Discipline That Anchors WTP, Not Cost
Value-based pricing treats price as a function of customer-realized value, not internal cost. This guide translates that principle into three discovery methods and a price architecture for each commercial archetype. It closes with a 30-60-90 sprint an operator can run without a consultant in the room.
$148K of WTP Research Into $1.2M of First-Year Lift
Willingness-to-pay research is often treated as a single methodology, but the operators who extract real revenue from it run multi-instrument programs matched to the channel they are measuring. This guide walks through the four-channel WTP program Antler & Forge Beverage built across DTC, specialty retail, restaurant wholesale, and duty-free. It shows how instrument choice, triangulation, and pricing discipline convert $148K of research spend into $1.2M of first-year lift.