Set your costs, then your price. Build a brand, then your customers. Set the metric, then the result. We have it backwards. Pricing: find the value, then set a price, then figure out what makes sense for you to charge for that price. Brand: design your customers, they’ll build your brand. And you’ll find the red thread on all of those brands, to make a cohesive one. Metrics: figure out what you want as the outcome. Then think of the result, then the measurement. The metric is the measurement...

Markup and cost-plus are not the only ways Pricing doesn’t get to be built up from the ground up. (And it's not math either). It’s not about how much something costs you and how much more you want to make. It doesn’t have to do anything with how much you know, how much time you spent learning your craft, how much effort you put into, or how much you think you deserve. It has to do with how much of the value (what’s important to your customers) they find reasonable for them to pay —and be...

Or is it? While revenue is important, it’s the wrong thing to measure to know if your business is doing well and can go a level up. It doesn’t require a rocket scientist to know that more revenue than costs makes profit. Yet revenue is the thing that can make you miss the mark. What happens if you're underpriced and leaving lots of money on the table? What happens if your costs are hidden and you're bleeding dry? Revenue is a vanity metric.