S5E20 – How to optimize your pricing strategy with 4 proven steps with Per Sjofors

• (00:34) – Show intro and background history
• (07:44) – Deeper into his pricing journey background
• (14:57) – How to be more objective and avoid price testing
• (19:30) – A bit about price anchoring
• (22:14) – Commercial break (TYKR)
• (22:53) – Deeper into his business strategies
• (27:38) – How too many product options can ruin you strategy
• (28:48) – Guest hot tips
• (29:49) – A key takeaway from the guest
• (34:49) – Guest contacts and a bit about his book

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.

 

[00:00:18.230] – Guest Intro

My next guest has served as CEO for multiple companies and has helped close to a thousand companies land on the correct pricing. In this episode, we break down four key steps on how you can get pricing right. Please welcome Per Sjofors.

 

[00:00:34.470] – Sean

Per, welcome to the show.

 

[00:00:36.160] – Per

Sean, it’s a pleasure. I’m looking forward to this, and I hope we can give some good advice to the audience today.

 

[00:00:43.640] – Sean

I think we’re going to talk a lot about pricing today. But before we get into that, could you tell us something about yourself that most people don’t know?

 

[00:00:51.980] – Per

In terms of that, I have the unfortunate background of having a grandfather that was a ax murderer. And who did he murder? His father, right? And they were both priests. Oh, my.

 

[00:01:12.270] – Sean

Was this something that we’re talking about, I think of Jack the Ripper in well-known names, or is this something a little more not talked about as much?

 

[00:01:22.230] – Per

No, this is not talked about so much, of course. And it took me… I didn’t got to know this until I was 50 years old or so. Oh, my gosh. And it was the hidden secret in the family. But not many people have that background.

 

[00:01:40.560] – Sean

I will say this. That’s a first on this podcast for a unique- How about that? What’s all about that?

 

[00:01:47.260] – Per

All right. It has not affected us any other way.

 

[00:01:52.360] – Sean

Right. Well, we could dive into that in another podcast, but the theme of this podcast is on business, especially pricing. So before we get into what you’re working on today and really the psychology of pricing and all the details around it, why don’t you take a few minutes and tell us about your career background?

 

[00:02:09.720] – Per

Sure. I have an engineering background and an MBA. And I started my first company in Zurich in Switzerland, and we developed a distribution channel across Europe. I was then I then moved to the UK and ran a company out of London for a while before I came here to the Los Angeles area, where I headed up a division of a fairly large public tech company. And after that, I’ve had another four CEO jobs. So I’ve consistently been in that position and driving and building businesses. And many of these that I mentioned have gone from zero, very close to zero, to eight or nine figures in a couple of years. And in these companies, we did experiments with pricing only because I was interested in the topic. Some of those experiments worked really very well, like next quarter Revenues are up 25%, others were complete duds. And again, what I learned in business school about pricing was so academic and theoretical that it didn’t help us to understand why some experiments worked and Some didn’t. So when it was time for me to set out on my own, I decided to develop a process to make every pricing experiment a success.

 

[00:03:40.200] – Per

And that’s the process we still use. Obviously, it’s a bit more refined than when we started, but it’s all about understanding willingness to pay in a marketplace and especially understand how certain customer personas may support more profitable prices than others, how the product or service fit into the market affects how you can set prices, how your marketing affects how you can set prices, how your sales methods and channels affects how you can set prices, and of course, how you can set the actual price level in such a way that friction is minimized and sales volume and profits are maximized.

 

[00:04:28.690] – Sean

Got it. Now, to give the audience some context here, you’ve led some large corporations or been in a leadership or been in leadership positions, but you also served about a thousand. I was reading about you offline, about a thousand different companies or customers with pricing strategy. Is that correct?

 

[00:04:46.860] – Per

Yeah, we’re not at a thousand yet. We’re at the high hundreds. We’re getting close. And in many cases, that translates to 3,000, 4,000 different products or services. And the average benefit somebody gets from using the service of pricing based on willingness to pay is a doubling of sales growth and 25 to 40 % higher margins. There are outliers there. I have clients who are now 10 times the size they were, or 15 times the size, or five times the size. But in general terms, doubling our sales growth and 25 to 40% higher margins.

 

[00:05:33.740] – Sean

Now, with your experience, is it primarily focused on B2B or B2C? Is it a blend of both?

 

[00:05:40.210] – Per

It’s a little bit more B2B than B2C, and it’s a little bit more services than products. But the process works for anything, because successful businesses are process-driven. Much of what companies do internally is to make sure that that process is followed and that it’s refined and so forth. And pricing, though, is one of the lost outposts where gut feel and guesses and stuff like that is used, because Because executives always say that pricing is very important, but then they don’t really know how to set prices. And let me give you an example, a SaaS company we actually didn’t work for, and we didn’t work for it because this particular reason. As I spoke to the CEO, and they were doing contract management as a service, and he said, I decided that the price should be $165 a month per user. And then he continued, But I don’t know if that was the right price. Maybe it should have been 99. Maybe it should have been 250. $165 just felt right.

 

[00:07:00.160] – Sean

Feeling.

 

[00:07:01.040] – Per

Feeling? Yeah, it’s just got feeling. And I can guarantee it’s the wrong price. I don’t know what the right price should be, but I know that I could find out, right? But this particular guy, he said, I remember another CEO that I spoke to who told me that my gut feel is better than your science.

 

[00:07:23.310] – Sean

Let’s see about that.

 

[00:07:24.940] – Per

Yeah. No, there’s got to be science and process. And And what we do is that we’re leaning on three Nobel Prize winners who all got the Nobel Prize for their work in behavioral economics, which is behavioral economics is all about how people make purchase decisions.

 

[00:07:44.730] – Sean

You gave a good example of somebody that did not work with you, but examples are great. My audience loves examples. Can you go into an example of somebody that maybe thought the price should have been this or that, and then you went through your process? I’d love to walk through process and then to figure out what price they arrived on and why. Can you take us through that journey?

 

[00:08:05.940] – Per

Yeah. So what we do in my company is pricing research. Now, this is market research on steroids. And we have a very specific process of understanding from a marketplace, and we do this with digital questionnaires, understand what a market is willing to pay for a product and how all of the above that I mentioned, how product to market fit, how marketing, how sales, and all that stuff affects what people are willing to pay. But to give you an example, this particular company, they sell a consumer product. And I don’t want to be more specific because then people can identify the company. Sure. They came to us and said, We tried to increase our prices seven years ago, and it backfired badly. So meaning that they increased their prices. They saw a tremendous drop in sales volume, and they had to backtrack. We found through the research that if they change how they position the company, there was definite room for price increases. So it took this company about one week to change its positioning and so forth and increase prices. And during that week, they went from a 200 to a $240 million company.

 

[00:09:29.750] – Sean

Wow.

 

[00:09:30.700] – Per

Yes. Okay. That is the power when you change how you market yourself and increase price at the same time. And it was very successful. That was two years ago. A month ago, we completed the second project for the same company. They are now a $300 million company.

 

[00:09:50.780] – Sean

You don’t have to mention the name or the product, but you can give us an idea of where the pricing started? Because when you give raw numbers, that gives our audience a framework of where to compare where they’re at. So what was the before price? What did you do? What did you discover? And then was the after price?

 

[00:10:09.810] – Per

Well, this particular, it’s a consumer product, and it is priced at low prices, and it’s priced on the local market. So they have different prices in different states, for example. But in general terms, the old price was about 150, 160 per unit of what they sell.

 

[00:10:31.070] – Sean

A dollar fifty?

 

[00:10:31.770] – Per

Yeah.

 

[00:10:32.450] – Sean

Yeah. Okay.

 

[00:10:33.470] – Per

A dollar fifty, a dollar fifty, something like that. And the research said that they can go up to about a dollar 80, 85, right? And now the next level that we just completed says that they can go up to two bucks. And in some areas, they can go up to two ten, two fifty in thereabouts. So if you look at, in some cases, then if we started at $1.60, and now in some places, they’re at $2.15, that’s a fairly substantial increase.

 

[00:11:05.930] – Sean

Oh, yeah, for sure. Anybody can do the math. If you apply the percentages there, let’s say we’ll just use a nice round number, 25 % increase, let’s say. Yeah, exactly. Wherever you’re at, you can have $100 product and take 25 % against it. Now, your process, it’s market research on steroids. I know you have a book. We’re going to promote that at the end, but can you give us a little look under the hood? What is the process? How do How do you arrive at that? Let’s say you discover that, Hey, did you know, based on a research, you can increase your prices by 25 %. How do you arrive there?

 

[00:11:39.510] – Per

Well, in traditional market research, there are a few different methods to measure willingness to pay. Those are not good enough. They are either two versions. One is called conjoint analysis, the other is called Gabel Granger. And they ask a respondent to one of these questionnaires, repeated questions. Are you willing to pay this much? Are you willing to pay that much? Would you buy? Would you not buy? And so forth. If you look at a respondent that has had the same, very similar question, eight times. They just start to soon out. Eight times is only halfway through. For that reason, it generates a tremendous amount of errors, high error rates. What we do, on the other hand, is that we have a whole series of questions where we ask respondents on how they perceive value, and they have to fill in the value. So we don’t I sent them with a choice. They had to fill in what are the value I see with this product? What is the value that I can’t afford? What is the value that may be too low? It’s a process. And then when that is taken to statistical analysis, it allows us to predict sales volume and revenue and profit at precise price points.

 

[00:13:12.690] – Per

And that takes the guesswork out of it. Like I said, there’s too much guesswork going on when it comes to pricing. I talk to a lot of companies and so forth, as I’m sure you understand. And many of them say, Oh, we do price testing. Now, here’s the problem with price testing. Let’s say that you try six different price points. That’s easy. And this is what we did. I said that in my Before I got into what I do now, we also did price testing. Sometimes it worked, many times it didn’t. The problem is that everything is all correlated. Like with this company I just mentioned, they changed how they positioned themselves, and only then could they increase their prices. Let’s say that you have six different price points. You want to try three different marketing channels. You want to try six different marketing messages. You want to focus on six different product features or service features. You want to look at three different sales channels, three different sales methodologies, and six different or three different monetisation strategies, and stratification of your pricing in six different ways. And you end up with, say, 36,000 combinations.

 

[00:14:43.290] – Per

That’s not possible to do for a company. But the research we do gives you all those answers. So in six weeks, you get all these answers.

 

[00:14:57.890] – Sean

So in about six weeks, I was going to ask you about a timeline there to arrive on the price point. You’re doing extensive research to help your customer not run through these price testing strategies. And I’ve even been there myself. You test at this price to this market, another price to this. You’re right, there’s so many permutations. It’s like you could be doing this for years and still shooting in the dark.

 

[00:15:23.720] – Per

Which is what you alluded to in the beginning of the conversation. If you look at this, when companies do all this price testing and so forth, it’s the company versus the market. All right? We do is the market into the company.

 

[00:15:39.190] – Sean

Yes. Smart.

 

[00:15:41.370] – Per

So it’s the other way around. And let the market tell the company what the price should be, what the products should be or services should be, what the marketing should be and so forth.

 

[00:15:54.600] – Sean

I’m sorry to interrupt you there. I like what you said earlier is, and we did this, too, with one of our product lines is, don’t give people pricing options like A, B, C, D, whatever. Ask them how much they’re willing to pay. Yes, that’s a big deal. That can help you get there a little easier Because I’ve seen… It’s interesting, you’ll see the edge cases of somebody saying a dollar on the low end for something that should be $100 or more. And it’s like, well, obviously, they’re just a bottom for you. They’re looking for cheap junk. And then you get the other side of the equation where they’re super excited and they give a price point that’s like, Appreciate it. You’d pay 10 times the amount that we’re looking at, but that’s probably not going to get us the volume we need to have a sustainable business.

 

[00:16:40.500] – Per

Yeah, correct. But there’s something very important here, and that is If we talk about how do you present your prices. Almost every company in one form or another have a good, better, best strategy. The mistake so many companies do, and you look at the typical SaaS company’s pricing page online, and it is left to right, good, better, best. It should be the opposite. It should start with a high price because there is something called price anchoring. And price anchoring means that the first price that you see, right, is set an anchor in our heads. So it means that the next price appears more affordable. Which drives a higher sales volume. And this, I mean, for example, just to give you an example, a friend of mine, this goes for everything. A friend of mine runs a restaurant, Thai restaurant here in the LA area. And he said, I need to increase my prices. Do you have any tips? And I said, Do this on your menu, because the menu is a price list, on your menu, on the top left corner, because we read from top to bottom, from left to right, put something God-awful expensive.

 

[00:18:09.070] – Per

I said, If you don’t have anything God-awful expensive, put a family meal there. A bundle, a family meal with three courses for every person and wine and whatever you have it. It’s going to be a very expensive meal, and very few people will ever buy it. It’s not there to sell. It’s there to the rest of the menu to appear more affordable. This was for his lunch menu, and his lunch prices was round about 12.50, which is for a Thai restaurants, it’s pretty expensive already. And what he did was that he put some obscure fish there at the top left corner, not the pomphret that most Thai places have, but some other fish. But he increased his menu prices from 12.50 to 14.95. And when I followed up with John, he said, I increase our prices and our sales are up with 20 %.

 

[00:19:09.110] – Sean

Wow. For a restaurant, that’s incredible.

 

[00:19:12.670] – Per

Wow. Yeah. And he had also tried increased prices before we put that anchor in there, right? And it didn’t work. People were complaining and he saw loss in sales volume and stuff like that. So just a simple Same thing, right?

 

[00:19:31.080] – Sean

I’ve heard this talked about a little bit. You probably read the books from Dan Arieli.

 

[00:19:35.740] – Per

Yes.

 

[00:19:36.360] – Sean

Yes. He talks about that a little bit, too, about put your anchor first. And there have been tests. He gives a few good case studies, you probably have plenty. But this is an example. This restaurant is like, put that high price first, that’s your anchor, and then the prices drop off a little bit, and that’s where the conversion happens.

 

[00:19:55.840] – Per

Look at the pricing of Mailchimp.

 

[00:19:58.670] – Sean

Yes.

 

[00:19:59.880] – Per

They start with a bundle that is $299 a month. The next step down is $14.95..

 

[00:20:07.730] – Sean

Yeah, there you go. That’s a good SaaS example right there.

 

[00:20:13.750] – Per

That’s right. Although I’ll tell you this, the best example of price anchoring I’ve seen is when Apple came out with a watch and they had the regular watch at $349, but then they also had a $17,000 $1,000 version. And every journalist who covered this talked about the odosity for Apple to have to sell the same electronics either at 349 or at $17,000. But the difference was that the more expensive version had a case made of pure gold. I don’t think they sold many of those.

 

[00:20:53.700] – Sean

But where you’re going is the PR play.

 

[00:20:58.000] – Per

Yeah, exactly. And all of these people that were potential buyers of the watch saw these 17,349, and that 349 became more and more and more affordable, right?

 

[00:21:13.570] – Sean

Yeah, I actually see multiple benefits. It makes it more affordable, number one, and two, the PR played that audacious, right? You could have gone to 700, but nobody’s going to talk about that.

 

[00:21:27.480] – Per

No, that’s right.

 

[00:21:28.270] – Sean

Right, right. But you drive Drive that other anchor up to, you said 17,000?

 

[00:21:33.540] – Per

17,000.

 

[00:21:34.720] – Sean

17,000. Yeah, that’s going to catch attention, and that’s going to spread like wildfire. That smart audience. I break the fourth wall and I’ll talk to the audience. I’m going to do a recap of some of these hot tips. That right there, use that.

 

[00:21:47.540] – Per

Yeah. That’s good. And it used to be, if you remember, it used to be that McDonald’s had a big sign under the golden M saying that something like 90 billion sold, right? Same reason, right? You go into there and you have a 90 billion, big number, right? And here’s my Big Mac at whatever, two bucks that it was at the time, right?

 

[00:22:14.070] – Sean

So 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. I’ll simply visit tykr. Com. That’s T-Y-K-R. Com. Again, tykr. Com. All right, back to the show. Here’s a fun one, and this was actually inspired from Dan, Dan Rielli. Let’s see, you’ve got three three different columns on a pricing page. I think this example was with the New York Times. It was column one. I think he did the anchor. He talked about column one was the paper version and web version for… It was like 10 bucks. And then I think it was the paper version on its own, 10 bucks, internet version, 10 bucks. So you can go individually for paper or web for 10 bucks, or you bundle them together for the same price.

 

[00:23:30.900] – Sean

And that bundle just converted like crazy because a simple pricing psychology. Do you have an example? Or have you done stuff like that before?

 

[00:23:39.050] – Per

Yes. Well, yes and no. Dan Ariely, by the way, he is the one who hasn’t got the Nobel Prize yet for his work. The other three guys is Hernán Singer, Dan, Daniel Kahneman, and Dick Thaler.

 

[00:24:03.470] – Sean

Okay.

 

[00:24:04.180] – Per

And Kahneman died about a month ago, unfortunately. They all talk about this. If you look at the New York Times examples, it’s a way of driving people to a particular bundle, right? I don’t think there was decision psychology here, right? Behavioral decision psychology, I don’t think it was really pricing. We We’ve done some work for coaching companies, for example, and come up with similar price list if you want. And one company that sticks into mind, they sell a service to gyms, and they have 10 different services, and it came, you could buy each service separately. You could buy a bundle of three, a bundle of six, or a bundle of all 10. And individually, these services were… These bundles were… The one buying one was overpriced, so they had to drop the price there. Buying a bundle of three or buying a bundle of five was underpriced, so they should increase price for those bundles. And then also the bundle of 10 was overpriced, so that also needs to come down, right? So then you have the interrelationship between these prices that makes a difference. And this company that told me that after they made those price changes, they went from zero growth to 5 % growth a month.

 

[00:25:34.370] – Per

So it was a combination of up and down. And there’s something else that is very important, actually, and that is something called the paradox of choice. And if you give your clients too many choices, they decide not to decide. Exactly. And that has to do with something that, again, has been established by Conor Man, I think, that we can We keep five things in our head at the same time, not more, to make a decision. If there’s more than five things in our head, we can’t make a decision. We can’t evaluate them all. And because of that, we don’t make a decision at all. And this was first established, I think, by some Chicago University, where they put tables with jam out in a grocery store. And they had six different kinds of jam. I don’t remember the exact number. Six different kinds of jam. And something like a quarter of those who went up to that table actually bought a jar of a jar of jam. Then the next day, they put 30 different types of jam out there. And only about 3% bought something. There were too many choices. So they said, I can’t make a decision, so let’s not buy anything.

 

[00:27:00.510] – Per

And car manufacturers have seen the same thing where they have an upsell bundle of something. And if that upsell bundle have 12, 15 different features in it, few people buy it. If it has five features, people buy it. It makes a difference of… Again, sales volume-wise makes a difference of, again, 20, 30% in sales volume just by reducing the number of… I mean, you can have all the features, all the upsell features, but in your… All the upsell features. But as you present it, you want to focus on the five ones that makes the most difference.

 

[00:27:38.940] – Sean

That’s a good benchmark to aim for. You’re thinking, or based on your experience, five or less pricing options for a product.

 

[00:27:47.720] – Per

Absolutely. That’s the product. Absolutely. That’s great.

 

[00:27:51.160] – Sean

We played with pricing a little bit with Tykr for a few years, and we did find product-market fit. It took about two, two and a half years, but We found the sweet spot, three easy pricing tiers. We’re not doing it the high to low. We are going low to high. Our industry, it tends to do that, so we didn’t want to get too outside the box, but it worked. And we thought about having more than that. But it’s like, no, you give people too many choices, they’re not going to make a choice. They’re just going to-No, exactly. Close browser, move on to the next thing.

 

[00:28:28.580] – Per

Well, what you want is that you want You want to have the high version so expensive and so inclusive that people don’t buy it. And you want to have the low version so limited that they don’t buy it. So you drive to the middle one because that’s the idea.

 

[00:28:48.010] – Sean

I love it. All right. I want to summarize some of the hot tips. I know there are a lot here. I want to summarize four big ones you talked about today, and then I’ll have you give us one more key takeaway before before we jump to the rapid fire round. So, audience, here we go. Number one, create a pricing questionnaire or process where the customer feels on how much they are willing to pay. Don’t give them options. I love that one, Pierre. That was good. We use that, too. Number two, don’t do price testing. It takes way too long.

 

[00:29:21.870] – Per

You just found out. You were doing for two and a half years, you said.

 

[00:29:27.480] – Sean

Sometimes you learn the hard way. Yeah. Right. Number three, price anchoring. Put your big price first. That ridiculous price example of Apple, that’s gold right there. Number four here, five pricing options or last. Keep it simple.

 

[00:29:47.110] – Per

Yeah, love it. Absolutely.

 

[00:29:49.030] – Sean

All right. Can you give us, or is there anything I didn’t ask and maybe you want to provide an answer to, but any last, like a key takeaway you can give our audience?

 

[00:29:58.780] – Per

Well, The most important thing really is to understand that pricing does not live in a vacuum, and it goes to the testing piece and all of that. And you have to have your product to market fit, correct. You have to have your marketing fit, correctly. You have to have your sales methodology and so forth, correct. And that all leads to almost always the ability… It leads to something called pricing power. Pricing Pricing power is the ability… The term was coined by Warren Buffet in an FCC interview he did, 2008. And he then said this was during the recession then. And he said that the most important criterion to evaluate where to invest money is whether the company has pricing power. And then he continued saying, And pricing power is the ability to increase prices and not lose sales volume. In order for that to work, all of the above that I mentioned, the correlation between product, service, marketing, sales, all of that needs to take that holistic view, because everything matters.

 

[00:31:17.750] – Sean

I do remember reading about that since we’re in the stock space. And when Warren Buffet said that, it’s like, Gosh, when you can find a company that can do that, they can increase their prices but keep their volume. You’ve got a business with a wide moat, as he phrases. It’s hard to compete with. It’s a beautiful place to be.

 

[00:31:37.130] – Per

Yeah, but not too wide, because then you’re in the blue ocean. Sure. You don’t want to be there.

 

[00:31:43.340] – Sean

All right. You provided a lot of great tips. We’re going to have you promote your book at the end, but let’s get to the rapid fire round. This is the episode where we get to find out who Per 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?

 

[00:32:03.670] – Per

Well, unfortunately, I read. I don’t really listen to podcast. I have my company at home, so I don’t commute. There’s no time to listen to podcast.

 

[00:32:16.960] – Sean

No worries. Let’s jump to question two, which is, what is a recent book you read and would recommend?

 

[00:32:22.420] – Per

Well, this is a book that is called The Man Who Broke Capitalism. It’s a very, very very in-depth understanding of how Jack Welch took the most admired and largest company in the world, GE, and completely destroyed it. It’s very interesting in that we are now seeing the same thing play out at Boeing.

 

[00:32:50.660] – Sean

Yes.

 

[00:32:51.970] – Per

Okay? Yeah. They’re on the fifth CEO that was trained by Jack Welsh.

 

[00:32:59.960] – Sean

I’m adding this book to the top of my watch list.

 

[00:33:02.500] – Per

The Man Who Broke Capitalism. It’s by David Gellis.

 

[00:33:06.870] – Sean

Love it.

 

[00:33:07.510] – Per

Gellis. Yeah.

 

[00:33:09.560] – Sean

All right. Next question here is a fun one. What is your favorite movie?

 

[00:33:13.280] – Per

I would think it’s the Back to the Future, truly. I love that. Yes.

 

[00:33:19.400] – Sean

Yes. Love it.

 

[00:33:21.280] – Per

All right.

 

[00:33:22.830] – Sean

What is the worst advice you ever received?

 

[00:33:27.040] – Per

Stick your head down and don’t stick out.

 

[00:33:29.900] – Sean

Pretty obvious there. Don’t listen to that. Flip that equation. What’s the best advice you ever received?

 

[00:33:36.990] – Per

No fear. Have no fear. Have your fear. Even if you’re scared, shitless, you can do it.

 

[00:33:44.360] – Sean

I don’t know if you watch the recent Dune movies, but Fear is the Mindkiller. It’s from the books written in the ’60s, but anyway. That’s a nerd moment for myself. I’ll stop talking. All right. Last question here is back to the future. Time machine If you could go back in time to give your younger self advice, what age would you visit and what would you say?

 

[00:34:06.250] – Per

I started my first company, or I got the first CEO job, I say, when I was 30 years old. And I I could have started that at least five years earlier. So I go back to the best advice. I would have really been pushed to have that advice, Do it sooner than later. I And the sooner you start, the sooner you can finish, and the sooner you start, the quicker you can grow.

 

[00:34:39.180] – Sean

A lot of people have said the same thing, is they wish they would have done it sooner, whether it’s starting a business or investing in this or creating that, so on, so forth. So, yeah, totally agree. Great advice. All right. If somebody is interested in reaching out to you, where can they go? And then tell us about your book a little bit.

 

[00:34:57.130] – Per

Well, the book, this is Actually, the subtitle is more important than the actual title. And the subtitle is a holistic approach to pricing power. And in that, I detail all the stuff that a company can and should use to gain that pricing power and to leverage that pricing power. I think there’s something that is very important to consider here, and that is that any company is in business because Because they deliver something of value to their clients. If they don’t, eventually they disappear. If you can price for profit, which is what I’m talking about, you get more resource for more product development, you get more resource for service definitions, more resource to market, to go to market, more resource to deliver more value to more clients, even hiring better people that are typically more expensive. You get the ability to serve more customers with better products, better services, and so forth. That all comes from the profits. As a side result of all this is an increase in shareholder value. But going back to my book recommendation here, it is not the shareholder value that is done by artificially cut corners for for the next quarter.

 

[00:36:31.560] – Per

You have to have a long term view. And going back to GE and the book, the only thing that remains of GE is the aircraft engine manufacturing. Everything else is gone, right? There are people who bought, for example, people bought their white goods manufacturer, including the GE name, but it’s not GE anymore.

 

[00:36:57.010] – Sean

I love the example there, and I’m adding I’ll send a book to my watchlist. For the audience here, I’ll keep it really easy for you. So the book that is written by David Gals is The Man Who Broke Capitalism: How Jack Welch Gutded the Heartland and crushed the Soul of Corporate America. Wow, powerful title. So that’s one book to add to your shopping cards. I mentioned watchlist earlier. Sorry about that. Shopping Cards. And then Per’s book is The Price Whisper, a holistic approach to pricing power. I think Two really good options, entrepreneurs out there. Pricing is so critical. If you do not get it right, you’re spinning your wheels for years. You got to get it right. And let’s shorten that timeline to land on the right pricing. So Per, really appreciate your time. Thank you.

 

[00:37:44.600] – Per

Well, Sean, it’s been a pleasure. I trust that there will be some knowledge, some information here for the audience. And I want to also thank you so much for your time.

 

[00:37:55.050] – Sean

Absolutely. Well, let’s stay in touch. Thanks again. See you.

 

[00:37:59.070] – Per

Cheers. Bye-bye.

 

[00:38:00.670] – 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.