Prices up 50%. One customer left.
Go and look at the last 5 deals you won. Count the ones where they argued about the price. Not very many, is it.
The rest were your customers telling you you’re cheap. You perhaps chose not to hear it.
There are 3 ways to grow:
1) Win more customers.
2) Sell more to the ones you’ve got.
3) Charge properly for the work you already do.
Two of those need more people, more delivery, more everything.
The 1/3 requires a conversation. The one you keep avoiding. You heard that correctly. Yes. You.
You’ve been picking the first 2 for years. And your margin hasn’t moved a bloody inch.
I had that conversation once, with 3 months of cash left in the business.. Put every price up by 1/2. One customer walked. A big one, and it stung.
I went round to our other clients expecting an arguement.
No one fought. What they said instead has stayed with me ever since.
50% price rise. One customer left.
Revenue is up. So why does every big decision still feel like a guess?
You’re making £400k calls with the same accountant and mentor you had at half the size.
The business outgrew your support structure. CEOfriend fixes that.
An AI team for founders at £1m to £20m. Upload your P&L, ask the CFO where the leak is, get a concrete answer.
Takes five minutes. First month free with code STWTRIAL
- Grab the book. F**k Plan B covers scaling in more depth, with the practical founder lessons behind customer obsession, honest communication, hiring, small teams and managers who coach.
- Watch the £30m scaling video. Start there if you want the founder-level version of these principles, using Rackspace and Peer 1 as the proof base.
- Subscribe to the newsletter. Get direct, practical thinking on scaling, founder bottlenecks, leadership rhythm and building a company that can run without you in every room and every episode of the podcast first..
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Scaling is hard until you fix these 5 things
Running your company isn’t just getting harder. It’s getting slower. A decision that used to take you a day now takes 3 weeks. Nothing about it got more difficult. It’s just sat in a queue behind everything else in your head. Every sign-off, every discount, every hire below your senior team, every pricing call nobody […]