I was fourteen years old and I was about to explain pricing strategy to a man who had sixteen years on me.
He was the manager of the marina general store where I'd been working that summer. I'd been watching the inventory and the pricing for a few weeks, and something wasn't adding up. The numbers kept telling me we were selling things for less than we needed to cover costs and turn any real margin. I ran the math a few different ways. Same answer.
I ran it once more. Still the same answer.
Two options: say nothing and watch the store bleed through the summer, or say what I knew to someone who outranked me significantly.
I said what I knew.
What That Pricing Strategy Conversation Actually Was
It wasn't really a pricing strategy lesson. Or it was, but that's not what made it matter.
What made it matter was the gap between knowing something and saying it. I knew the markup formula and what the margins said. But knowing something doesn't automatically give you the authority to say it. Especially when the person across the table has a bigger title, a longer track record, and sixteen more years of life.
I said it anyway. Not because I was fearless — I was fourteen, I was not fearless. Because the alternative was pretending not to know something I knew. And even at fourteen, that felt worse than the risk of being wrong.
He listened. We fixed the pricing.
When Pricing Strategy Becomes a Confidence Problem
Here is what I see most often in the businesses I work with today: a woman who knows her pricing is wrong.
Not suspects — knows. She has run the numbers. The work's cost, comparable rates, what she needs to earn to make this sustainable — she's done the math. And she hasn't raised the price because somewhere in the background, *who am I to charge that?* is still running.
That isn't a pricing strategy problem. It's a confidence problem wearing a pricing strategy hat.
The math isn't the hard part. It almost never is. What's hard is saying a number that claims the full value of what you do. Especially in a room where you're worried someone might disagree.
I learned at fourteen that the disagreement is survivable. The number-avoidance is not — not for the business.
The Pricing Strategy Principle From the Marina Store
Here's what I took from that summer: knowing something and staying quiet about it is not neutral.
If you know the pricing is wrong and you don't say so, you are choosing the wrong pricing. Not by accident. By choice. And the business absorbs that cost slowly — across a whole season, in numbers that keep telling the truth while you look the other way.
The pricing strategy question, in my experience, is almost never about math. The formula is usually already there. What's missing is the willingness to say the number the formula produces.
Forty-plus years after that marina conversation, the pattern is identical. The pricing knows what it needs to be. The person in the room is deciding whether to say it.
If your pricing is the thing you know is off and haven't moved on, the 90-Minute Strategy Session is the right place to look at it directly. One conversation, one clear next step.
Or start with a Discovery Call: fifteen minutes, no pitch.
