S5E13 – How to get your SaaS pricing right With Patrick Meegan

• (00:35) – Show intro and background history
• (03:03) – How to price a B2B or B2C SaaS business
• (05:43) – Deeper into his pricing strategies
• (07:01) – The importance of the value perception for the consumers
• (12:04) – How to talk about costs with clients
• (13:15) – Commercial break (Leadfeeder)
• (13:55) – What is his advice on raising prices
• (17:05) – How to generate value and prioritization
• (18:33) – The importance of proximity to collaborative customers
• (19:59) – Deeper into his philosophy and business strategies
• (23:30) – Few tactical examples
• (26:37) – A key takeaway from the guest
• (29:36) – Guest contacts

Transcription

[00:00:00.000] – Show Intro

Introducing Payback Time, the podcast for entrepreneurs looking to build and scale their startups, gain access to actionable tips, proven strategies, and valuable data that can help you avoid mistakes, skyrocket sales, and optimize profits. Your business breakthrough may just be an episode away.

 

[00:00:17.760] – Guest Intro

Are you an entrepreneur trying to figure out pricing for your SaaS or e-commerce business? Getting pricing right can be the difference between a thriving business and a business that’s about to go out of business. This This episode is all about pricing strategy and how you can get it right. Please welcome Patrick Meegan.

 

[00:00:35.910] – Sean

Pat, welcome to the show.

 

[00:00:37.350] – Patrick

Thanks. Glad to be here.

 

[00:00:39.030] – Sean

Thanks for joining me. So before we kick things off, can you tell us something interesting about yourself that most people don’t know?

 

[00:00:44.960] – Patrick

Yes, I’m an avid rock climber. I grew up in Colorado, and hanging off an edge, holding on to the rock with the rope tied to me is my happy spot in the summertime. I remember watching, I think it was on either Hulu or Netflix, The Dawn Wall.

 

[00:01:00.570] – Sean

Did you see that? Yeah, that was inspirational.

 

[00:01:02.590] – Patrick

Not that extreme. I don’t go to that extreme, but yes, same sport.

 

[00:01:05.480] – Sean

Yes. I figured you as a rock climber, you could appreciate that documentary.

 

[00:01:09.330] – Patrick

Yeah, very cool stuff.

 

[00:01:10.550] – Sean

Yeah, very difficult. I think I tried a little bit once, and I’m like, No, I’m going to need to practice on it.

 

[00:01:18.610] – Patrick

Yeah, it’s a mental and physical game.

 

[00:01:20.480] – Sean

For sure. Mel, that’s cool. All right, well, let’s go ahead and dive into your background, if you can. Give us a little bit of your career backstory.

 

[00:01:28.700] – Patrick

Yeah, I started out I was back in 2006, at a company called Kimberly-Clarke, but that’s better known for its brands like Huggies, Kleenex, VivaPaper towels, Scott Tissue, and spent 12 years there. The early part of my career was in manufacturing facilities and cost analysis, and then later actually worked into the sales side of things where I was working on rolling out price changes. It was the sales rep sitting across from the buyer, very front lines, and then worked into sales strategy in brand management. And then spent a couple of years after that, went and taught at university in the marketing department, and then went into as an analytics VP at a CPG company called Melaluka, direct consumer, and helped with a lot of their pricing and research. And then from there, went into consulting. So I’ve done some solo consulting, and then joined up with Maple Street Advisors a few years ago. Now it’s owned by IGS, and I do pricing consulting.

 

[00:02:28.180] – Sean

Awesome backstory. Thanks for giving us to high level. So where you’re at now, you’re at Maple Street, is that correct?

 

[00:02:35.580] – Patrick

That’s right.

 

[00:02:36.160] – Sean

Yeah. And how long have you been there?

 

[00:02:37.700] – Patrick

About three years.

 

[00:02:38.810] – Sean

Three years? Got it. And your focus is on pricing. Now, do you focus more on B2B or B2C?

 

[00:02:45.210] – Patrick

Yeah. So it’s interesting. There’s parts of B2B where I spend a lot of time, but also given my background in the consumer arena, lots of experience there on the pricing side. So we’ll jump between the two, but I spend a lot of time on B2B. And we also have a number of people who have experience in those two sides, so I can bounce between.

 

[00:03:03.810] – Sean

So let’s start diving into that. And before we do, I’ll give context to the listener. If you’re building, and I always break the fourth wall here to talk to our audience, if you’re building a SaaS business, whether it’s B2B or B2C, Cee or even e-commerce, this will be really important to pay attention to get pricing right, because if you go down the road and you have to make pricing changes that can be a bit disruptive to your audience, I’m sure, Pat, you’ve got horror Some stories on that.

 

[00:03:32.430] – Patrick

Well, the way to do it wrong.

 

[00:03:33.610] – Sean

You want to make sure you do this right. So let’s go ahead and dive in. Where do you start with pricing? If you’re launching a new product, where do you start?

 

[00:03:43.080] – Patrick

Yeah, it’s a great question. So in fact, you mentioned technology, and I spend a lot of time in the tech. I’ve spent in the last handful of years tons of time in the tech space. But even going back to, I think some of the more mature markets consumer have figured out is if you focus on the buyer, you understand a lot about where the opportunities are and how to succeed. So that’s usually where I start. When you’re looking at a new product launch, I got tons of examples from entrepreneurs to large blue chips. But when you’re starting in to understand the buyer, what they value, what their willingness to pay ranges for the things they get at that offering, that starts to help you understand rather than creating a product and then figuring out the price tag, you’re figuring the two out together.

 

[00:04:24.460] – Sean

So with that strategy in mind, do you ask customers questions like, Hey, what do you see in the product? Where are you seeing the most value? And how much would you pay for this? Are you asking questions like that to give you a target to aim for with pricing? Yes.

 

[00:04:43.420] – Patrick

And so there’s different ways. There’s the direct ways you just mentioned, but there’s also some indirect ways. So for instance, if you didn’t buy this, what would you be using instead? And if so, what’s the price range you’re thinking about? Or what are those reference prices that they are using? Because a person often is trying to contextualize this purchase into what are their alternatives? You’re trying to figure those out so you understand that context. And if it’s different by different segments, that’s important, too. A business buyer versus a consumer for the same purchase may be very different. You want to understand some of that context to be able to get some pricing intelligence. But then also those direct questions. There’s a really deep toolkit that you can draw from in terms of types of questions, ways to position it, ways to give people… If If you’re going to ask them a question about a product, you can ask them a question about this product in light of product A, and B, and C, and you get different responses than if you just ask about the product itself. So asking in isolation versus competitive context.

 

[00:05:43.850] – Sean

We like to get a little tactical on this podcast, and I’ll give you an example of what I’ve done, and then have you correct me if it’s a little different than what you do. But what I’ve done is you ask customers, what are their products like our product or service are you using and how much are you paying for that? And do you find it to be in the high-end? Do you find it to be in the low-end? And collect the data there to give you a target to aim for on how much you can really come out of the gates charging. Is that a strategy you’ve done?

 

[00:06:14.890] – Patrick

Yeah, that’s not a bad approach. A lot of times what you can do is identify that baseline of value that they’re willing to pay for the product category. Then you can even drill down further and say, Okay, well, if that’s the case, then given this product versus the competitor competitive context, does this allow you to then move up into a higher, or do you expect it to pay a discount or a premium for this? If so, how much? And figure some of that out because then you’re trying to get to how much actual value they have. And then what are some of those levers you can use to get to a higher price point and drive to more premium prices for your offering, or whether you get some really hard intel that tells you, Hey, this doesn’t stack up that well, and you need to rethink your pricing strategy because you’re not going to get that much takeaway from being at this price point.

 

[00:07:00.970] – Sean

Right. I like to have a phone conversation about B2B and B2C. What I found is with B2C is you need to charge what people are willing to pay, but with B2B, you need to charge your worth. You can charge a little more, in other words. For example, we at Tykr, we’re B2C, subscription-based. And the question is, well, how much value are they getting out of this? Well, it could be all over the board for one person to the next. But then you’re going to ask ask the question, how much are people willing to pay? And then you look at other platforms like Netflix, like Duolingo, like Spotify, and you see a very similar price point, which puts you in that ballpark. Okay, so obviously they know something people aren’t going to churn out at that price point. I’ll just hit it right on the head, about 15 bucks a month. Whereas you start breaking into B2B, then your prices can be bigger. You can start leaning towards or in the direction of how much value or how much values it’s providing and how much pain is it removing. And then you can tweak from there.

 

[00:08:10.000] – Sean

So that’s my high-level description between B2C and B2B.

 

[00:08:15.280] – Patrick

Yeah, and I agree with it. So when you’re thinking about the difference between the two, you have someone who’s taking money straight from their own wallet versus the business buyer who is trying to generate a return on their investment or save money or something like that. So the context and the dollar impact is very different in those two settings. But at the same time, all consumers are not built equally, and they have different things they value. So there’s a role of packaging coming into this, too. So if you think about that $15 price point, there may be somebody who’s more price sensitive but is looking for more of a core offering versus a premium or ultra premium offering that can move some up into the $30, $40, $50 range depending on what your offering is. So spending time thinking about that beyond just what’s that one price point and thinking about how can I segment and deliver additional value, that makes a ton of sense on either side of the coin. For B2B, a lot of times when you’re looking at it, those use cases are important to understand. Okay, so in one case, say it’s an education buyer versus a business buyer.

 

[00:09:18.010] – Patrick

Talking to ROI to an education buyer doesn’t make a lot of sense unless you’re talking about something like an education ROI, where it’s some outcome you’re delivering versus the hard dollars that someone in, say, procurement is getting because they’re getting efficiencies based off of your product. So spending time understanding the differences in how people perceive the value of your product is one of the biggest unlocks for your pricing potential.

 

[00:09:40.900] – Sean

Now, let’s say you come out of the gates with a price and you realize you’re not getting the conversion rates, you’re not seeing the growth, and you start leaning in the direction of, Okay, maybe we have to do an overall. How do you approach that challenge?

 

[00:09:56.440] – Patrick

Yeah, very important question. So what you want What you want to do is you want to be scientific about it. The worst thing you can do is just say, Let’s just start dropping the price because you’re telling the market something when you’re making that price move, that potentially you’ve overpriced, when in reality, it may be a different driver. So you want to go into that scientific mode and figure out, okay, what’s happening here? Is it that the product isn’t resonating? Is it how we communicate the product that’s not resonating? Is it that we are in the wrong channels or that really we are overpriced, but we’re going to move price? So you break it into those buckets and you go back and do some evaluation. I think the most important thing to do early on is not just make a knee-jerk reaction because that’s where you really see the mistakes made because you start to get a lot of egg on your face. If you later find out pricing wasn’t the problem, but it was how you communicated the value, and then it’s harder for you to move back up. So you want to take your time and monitor some of these things and go into when you make these changes or launch a product, you want to be thinking about a step or two ahead saying, Okay, if this happens, what do I do?

 

[00:11:02.930] – Patrick

If this happens, what do I do? And then just making sure you’re getting some people or some others to help you think through it versus just making snap judgments.

 

[00:11:12.380] – Sean

And that’s good to think about what if we need to raise our prices or what if we need to lower our prices? What a decision tree looks like from there? I always found it’s easier to lower your prices. You’re like, Hey, you get the same value, but now we’re charging you less. We’ve seen that with, for example, OpenAI. They went through different updates. If you use the API, you get an email saying, Hey, we have lowered our fees a little bit on your end, yet you still get the same tools. It’s like, Hey, that’s a win. But then you flip that equation and you get that email saying, Hey, we’re going to be increasing our prices. What I found works well is selling the why, not just saying we’re increasing our prices, but why are we doing that? And that can be You can create less friction with your customer base, in my opinion. I actually, one SaaS platform, we used just one of those emails, but they did a very good job of selling the reason why. And that prevented me from responding with an email saying, why is this happening? Why am I getting charged more?

 

[00:12:19.000] – Patrick

It’s a great point, and I’m fully aligned with that approach. And the reason why is, at the end of the day, the reason why someone buys a podcast or buys access to a product or whatever, a SaaS a license or whatever the the item is or a B2B solution is they’re trying to get some form of value from it. And so going out and talking about your costs is not the way to reinforce the value you’re delivering. So if you think about, okay, what are we doing with our value in terms of how are we increasing our value over time to this customer group and why these changes in pricing, the price value relationship need to shift is how you should talk about it. And you’ll see a market difference in how people push back on you, say, when you talk about your costs and you’re saying, Hey, prices are going up, but when costs go down, then suddenly people start knocking on your door and saying, Hey, it’s time to bring that price down. But you’re missing the point is that, Hey, as our value increases, our price needs to go up with it.

 

[00:13:15.090] – Sean

Right. All right, folks, a quick breather here. You know I’m building my own business, Tykr, and I found that certain tools can be a game changer. That’s why I’m excited to talk about Leadfeater. Leadfeater is a tool that helps you cut through the data and turn those website visitors into solid leads. Leadfeater shows you what companies are visiting your site. You can track their behavior, and you can integrate that data within your CRM. The result, the secret weapon for your team and how to convert more traffic into sales. Head to leadfeater. Com to get a free demo and get a free extended premium trial. When you let the rep know you found out about Leadfeater through PaybackTime podcast. All right, back to the show. Now, what is your advice for raising prices and free frequency? And I’ll break this down between a SaaS product and e-commerce. I find that e-commerce can increase prices a little bit more because there’s more cost involved, like shipping and manufacturing. Facturing, all that good stuff. But SaaS, I’ve seen SaaS products hold prices for two, three years and then upgrade. What’s best practice from your point of view?

 

[00:14:24.280] – Patrick

Yeah, from an e-commerce perspective, you mentioned the macroeconomics can play a part in it, right? So you saw in the last few years, inflationary pressures made it so that it wasn’t that people necessarily increased their value perception, but for the product to even continue to exist, they had to take their prices up to maintain an acceptable margin. And often they lost the margin in the interim. Not to say that you shouldn’t be thinking about value there, but it’s additional overlay that doesn’t happen in the SaaS environment. So on the SaaS side, where there’s low marginal cost, this is where value becomes even more important. So if in the last three years, I mean, we see this all the time when we’re working with clients, is there has been a tremendous effort in the roadmap and improving the product and really moving up in the value delivery of that product over time, but none of that value is claimed via pricing. And so you want to be thinking about that roadmap. I like to think about it as the value or the product roadmap and then also a pricing roadmap to say, if I’m going to invest in this and make a lot more additional value for my buyers, then it should be able to claim some of that because it also allows you to create more of that value over time.

 

[00:15:33.460] – Sean

I love that. You’re creating your product roadmap, which we do, and we’re very excited about. But it’s also important to think about the pricing roadmap as you add more value. You need to be thinking about what the pricing looks like from there. What I found, and this is really specific to SaaS, this is not e-commerce, but to create different tiers so you can add more products and put features into certain tiers. And that That way, you’re not sending your customers that surprise email saying, Hey, we’re increasing our prices because of this. It’s this feature falls into this tier. No price changes there, but you get access to it if you upgrade to that level. I found that a little easier than giving those price bumps.

 

[00:16:16.200] – Patrick

Yeah. So there’s a lot of different ways to execute these changes. And one general comment I’d say is spend the time thinking about the scenarios. So for instance, in this case, it may make sense to have, Hey, we’re going to move you to this Count A, we’re going to move you to the new package. It’s going to be discounted for a while so you can get a taste of these new features. But after X period of time, then you’re going to go back or you can upgrade. So that can be really effective because then they’re getting a taste for what the additional capabilities are. In other cases, that approach where you’re going to provide them an opportunity to upgrade totally makes sense. But I think there’s a lot of different tactics that can be used. In some cases, there needs to be price increase that’s taken, and that just goes back to that value communication playbook that you want to leverage.

 

[00:17:05.590] – Sean

Let’s talk about, and I was doing a little homework on you offline, about value creation puzzle and prioritization. Can you talk about that a little bit?

 

[00:17:15.500] – Patrick

Yeah. So in terms of you think about a business at the end of the day exists to generate value for a buyer. And so what do you think about, going back to what I said earlier, if you’re generating a new product, you can’t separate the product and its value from its pricing, because like you said, product-market fit is what you’re after. It’s really product-market-price fit, if you think about it, right? Because product-market, people are going to accept things at all kinds of prices. If you have no price, people are going to accept all kinds of products. But if you add price in there, then suddenly the decision becomes far more poignant, and they’ve got to rationalize whether it’s worth it or not. And so there’s a whole school of thought around this of having the pricing logic built out and studied out early on in the process of launching a product, partly because here’s the worst case that you’ll see, and I’ve seen it a lot of times in SaaS and other organizations, but more so in SaaS, because they have a development arm that’s just part of their organ. They’ll say, Hey, let’s build this thing.

 

[00:18:15.820] – Patrick

But then it gets to the point where they need to take it to market, and the buyers aren’t really that excited about it, aren’t willing to pay more for it. But you just invested a whole lot of dev capability, and you can’t monetize it. So you want to couple that monetization with your product development as well.

 

[00:18:33.400] – Sean

Let’s say you want to get ahead of that. I found with product development is to design it with customers. You bring them into the creation of the product process. And I even start asking them, what value you see in this? So that way you don’t get too far down the road and create something. You don’t invest too much money for something that one, people don’t want, and two, it’s way out of the ballpark of what people are willing to pay. Do you take that approach with your consulting firm? You design with customers, you hold their hand through the process? Absolutely.

 

[00:19:09.940] – Patrick

Yeah. And we’ve seen some SaaS companies do some clever things that have worked really well in this space. So for instance, one would run, it would do that step that you just mentioned, and they go a step further and then try to sell it at a few different prices to actual customers who were part of that test group. And that would give them a lot of good intelligence about how much they actually value versus what was stated.

 

[00:19:31.380] – Sean

I like that. So for an example, it would be, let’s say you went through the process with a few different customers, and then you had a few different buckets or categories and prices within, and you’d pitch the different prices and see what the conversion rates are.

 

[00:19:45.060] – Patrick

Is that the approach? And then if they find they got to push it down, what’s that range where it’s getting accepted? That’s smart. It works really well.

 

[00:19:53.380] – Sean

That’s really clever. Listeners, write that one down. I may steal that one myself. Cool. Have you ever walked into a client situation where they’re way out of the ballpark? I use the phrase tone deaf to pricing. And I’ll give you two fun examples here. There’s a local business I know that it’s in the health and wellness space, and they drastically raise their prices. We’re not talking by 10, 15 %. We’re talking about a B2C play that’s raising by 100 %. And customers are just kicking back. And my response is like, they are tone deaf to the market. They’re not charging what the customer is willing to pay. So that’s one example. Example two is another B2C play that does financial planning for families, not just husband and wife, but the entire family, and charging an upfront fee of 15 grand. And I was, same thing. They are tone deaf to the market because who in their right mind is financial advisor approaches you and says, Yeah, to get started with me, it’s 15 grand. It’s like, You’re And I asked them, How many conversions have you made? And the response, it was crickets. You’re not, right?

 

[00:21:07.330] – Sean

Tone deaf pricing.

 

[00:21:08.960] – Patrick

Yeah. So the one caveat, I’d say, is unless they have an ultra premium strategy for their pricing, Which could make sense if they’re going after fairly wealthy, low. They’re looking for a smaller segment that they’re going to go chase, and there’s a reason why it’s positioned that way. But if they’re looking for the average person, it’s in the middle class that they’re trying to do planning with, that does sound like they’re missing the mark on that. Something I would share. An example came to mind is a growing SaaS company had a segment with their enterprise offering, they weren’t selling much of it. They were really frustrated And when they did, they had to take the pricing way down. We went in and did the study, and it’s like, well, yeah, if you look at the perception of the products that are really garnering that million dollar price point, they have far more developed code. They got a track track record you don’t have and all these things. So it’s like, yes, there’s a place for you to play, but it’s at one third of the price you’re looking at. And suddenly it took off once they made that move.

 

[00:22:09.130] – Patrick

But often the indicators are there. It’s that they’re not listening. And it doesn’t mean that just because you have low conversion, it’s necessarily the price, like I said earlier. But that listening is a critical part of developing your pricing strategy.

 

[00:22:25.630] – Sean

It is. You hit the keyword there listening. And there’s There’s people out there on one side of the equation that are like, well, I want to charge what I’m worth, and I don’t want to be the cheapest in the market. And that’s great. But at the flip side of that, other end of the spectrum, you don’t want to outprice yourself out of the market. It sounds like exactly what that customer was doing on your end is, yeah, they were charging a premium, but they’re way out of the ballpark of what people were willing to pay. So you got to hone in, hit the bullseye. You don’t have to hit the center, but let’s try to get pretty close.

 

[00:22:58.670] – Patrick

Yeah. And there’s There’s always room. I think sometimes people think you have to be at the target, the aspiration in the beginning. There’s an argument to be made, and I’ve seen it work many times, where you start to establish yourself in the market, and you can move up and up and up because you have more cash sway that you didn’t have before, and you have more reputational sway that can help increase your pricing power. But to be overly aspirational without the positioning to back it up and without the credibility in the market to back it up, often that falls flat. Yeah.

 

[00:23:31.190] – Sean

Can you get tactical for us in this example here? I know there’s listeners right now. They probably have a business that they’ve established their product, they’ve established pricing, but they’re just not converting as well as they like. And a part of the thought process is maybe I need to change their pricing. What should be their next steps at that point?

 

[00:23:50.650] – Patrick

I would be honing in on looking at your ideal customer profile and seeing if there is actually a gap between what it is that you think how good where you are in the market actually versus how they perceive you. There may be, that’s often one of the issues, is that you’re overvaluing it versus what they see. So setting up some conversations, asking some hard questions about if you’re looking at alternatives, how do we stack up and how are we delivering versus expectations, and anything you’d change if you had a magic wand. Just opening that door and allowing them to just rift on your questions will yield a ton of insight. And if it isn’t pricing, it’s something else. It’s likely to come out in the course of that conversation.

 

[00:24:33.230] – Sean

Right. And do you prefer to do these over the phone or on a Zoom or even in person?

 

[00:24:39.400] – Patrick

Yeah. I think Zoom works great anymore. I’ve seen tons of that, and I’ve done a lot of them, too. In person used to be a huge thing, but it’s expensive. If it’s geographically condensed product, if it’s a service in a certain area, that may be totally viable, which actually could be the top option for it. But for the most part, if you’re selling nationally, Zoom calls, post-COVID, people respond to those really well and generate good insight.

 

[00:25:07.160] – Sean

Yeah, much more efficient. And then you’re asking them those questions like, what other products are you using? How much are you paying? What value are you seeing? I like the magic wand comment. If you had a magic wand, what would you add? I like to ask a version of that question. What is the number one feature that you’re looking for? What is the number one pain point you’re looking you need to solve? And what feature would do that for you? And a version of that gives you a bullseye to aim for. And then you can take it from there and figure out your pricing if you compare to other products.

 

[00:25:44.280] – Patrick

Yeah. And then other ways to flip that question around, things like, okay, you propose a product, and if you didn’t have this product, what would you do instead? Or what couldn’t you live without? And if you get crickets after questions like that, then there’s something that’s not striking home.

 

[00:25:58.110] – Sean

Right. So Awesome. Let’s take a quick commercial break. Have you ever lost money in the stock market? Maybe you heard or saw a comment on YouTube, TikTok, Reddit, or another social platform, or maybe you just received bad advice from a friend. Yeah, I think we’ve all been there. Most people lose money in the stock market because they make decisions based on emotions. What if you could remove emotions from investing? And what if there was an easy button for investing? Introducing Tykr, a platform that helps you confidently manage your own investments. Get started today with a free trial. Simply visit tykr. Com. That’s T-Y-K-R. Com. Again, Tykr. Com. All right, back to the show. All right, before we transition to the rapid fire round, is there one key takeaway you can give our audience?

 

[00:26:44.950] – Patrick

Yeah, it is to… I mentioned to be being a scientist about the whole process. Your pricing is fundamental to your business. It’s usually a number of whatever you sold times your price. And so often people spend way more time on that part how much they sold in quantity versus how they priced it. If you spend more time thinking about your pricing and deliberating about your pricing, just doing the analysis, it’s going to yield an enormous amount of revenue and profit just because it’s probably not getting enough attention now.

 

[00:27:17.070] – Sean

Right on. Good point. All right, let’s transition to the rapid fire round. This is the part of the episode where we get to find out who Pat really is. If you can, try to answer each question in about 15 seconds or less. You ready? Yeah. All right. What is your favorite podcast?

 

[00:27:33.170] – Patrick

The Impact Pricing podcast. It’s run by a guy named Mark Stiving. And obviously, since I’m on pricing, he gets a lot of interesting people on there and tons of good commentary to consider for business leaders.

 

[00:27:45.610] – Sean

Love it. I’m going to check it out. All right. What is a recent book you read and would recommend?

 

[00:27:51.180] – Patrick

Yeah, it’s just sitting on my desk, actually. It’s called Obviously Awesome by April Dunford. It’s about positioning. And since I’m in pricing, it’s hard or impossible to separate your positioning from your pricing. And I thought I’d go deep there. I found a lot of value in it.

 

[00:28:06.000] – Sean

That’s another good tip. All right, this is a fun one. What is your favorite movie?

 

[00:28:10.200] – Patrick

The Princess Bride. It’s a classic.

 

[00:28:12.180] – Sean

Yeah, very classic. Nice. All It’s a little more serious here. What is the worst advice you ever received?

 

[00:28:20.220] – Patrick

I had someone tell me early on in my college career to just get a degree in anything, and it won’t really make a difference. That very helpful, but I think the principle was off. And the principle is that if you spend time to become expert in some area, be it a product or a service or whatever it is that you do, whatever area you’re in, become the expert. Don’t just be a generalist.

 

[00:28:44.500] – Sean

Right. All right, flip that equation. What is the best advice you ever received?

 

[00:28:49.200] – Patrick

The best advice I ever received was from one of my bosses years ago who was constantly focused on what are the steps to level up to the next level of expertise or capability or whatever. And he just always was talking to me about, if you want to get to this certain stage, what are those steps you need to make in those areas you need to improve to get there? So always having that plan to just continue to grow.

 

[00:29:13.480] – Sean

Awesome. All right. And last question here is a time machine question. If you could go back in time to give you younger self advice, what age would you visit and what would you say?

 

[00:29:22.700] – Patrick

I think I’ll go back to 2006 when I was just starting my career and just tell myself, you’re better at what you’re doing than you think you are. You Just have some confidence and just give it your best and things are going to work out well if you’re just tenacious. Nice.

 

[00:29:37.150] – Sean

All right. And where can people reach you?

 

[00:29:39.650] – Patrick

You can find us at maplestreet. Com, or you can find me on LinkedIn.

 

[00:29:45.230] – Sean

Awesome. Well, thank you so much for your time, Pat. This is great.

 

[00:29:48.100] – Patrick

Great. Thank you, Sean.

 

[00:29:49.600] – Sean

Hey, I’d like to say thanks for checking out this podcast. I know there’s a lot of other podcasts you could be listening to, so thanks for spending some time with me. And if you have a moment, could you please head over to Apple Podcasts and leave a five-star review? The more reviews we get, the higher this podcast will rank. All right, stay tuned for the next episode. We’ll see you.