💰 Pricing
Value-based pricing, the pocket-price waterfall, usage architecture, and the mechanics of a price increase that holds.
The 100-Day Commercial Value Creation Playbook
Exact steps to execute a risk-free pricing reset immediately post-acquisition.
The 90-Day Commercial Sprint: A Post-Acquisition Value Creation Framework for PE Operating Partners
A 90-day sprint framework outperforms 12-month commercial strategies because it generates real market feedback before the thesis is locked in.
The AI Discount Governance Agent: Codifying Policy Before You Automate It
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.
The AI Usage-Based Pricing Meter Designer: How Pricing Leaders Use Claude or GPT-5 to Design Meters in Weeks, Not Quarters
Using AI assistants to compress usage-based meter design from quarters to weeks without giving up the operator judgment that keeps meters honest.
The CEO's Guide to Contract Governance Across Revenue Architectures
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.
The CEO's Guide to Discount Governance
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.
Discount Leakage Across a PE Rollup: A Portfolio-Level Operating Guide
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.
The NRR Benchmark: Retention Math Across B2B, Marketplace, and Subscription Models
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.
The PE Operating Partner Pricing Playbook
A repeatable pricing value-creation playbook operating partners can run across any portfolio company, any hold period.
The CEO's Guide to Price Increase Communications
A communications framework that lets price increases land without triggering churn, negotiation spirals, or sales team dilution.
The CEO's Guide to the Price Waterfall
A pocket-price waterfall framework that turns invisible margin leakage into governed, recoverable revenue.
The CEO's Guide to Usage-Based Pricing
When usage-based pricing creates portfolio value, when it destroys it, and how to decide before committing.
The The PE Pricing Diagnostic: A 90-Day Checklist: Benchmarking Your Capability
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.
The The Pocket-Price Waterfall: A Channel-by-Channel Diagnostic for Finding the Margin You Already Earned: Benchmarking Your Capability
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.
Why Price Increases Fail: It's the Communication, Not the Math
Price increases fail because of communication strategy, not because the number was wrong, and the fix is operational, not financial.
The Private Equity Guide to Defending Your Price Increases in a Flat Economy
How to operationalize a price increase when market tailwinds vanish.
The CEO's Guide to Packaging Frameworks for Multi-Product Platforms
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.
The CEO's Guide to Usage-Based Pricing
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.
The CEO's Guide to Value-Based Pricing
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.
The CEO's Guide to Willingness-to-Pay Research Across Commercial Archetypes
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.