You know your pricing is costing you, but not exactly where. Guessing at the fix is how owners end up raising a price they cannot defend and losing the customer instead of the fear.
Pricing breaks in four different places, and they feel identical from the inside. Maybe you do not understand what your value is worth. Maybe you understand it but have no structure to capture it. Maybe you have both and still cannot bring yourself to set, defend, or raise the number. Or maybe you set pricing once and never measure it, so it quietly goes stale. Each needs different work. This diagnostic separates the four parts, scores each one honestly, finds the single part holding back the others, and hands you a sequenced plan so you fix the cause instead of the loudest symptom.
This is a sorting instrument, not the fix. It will not set your prices or write your value story. It tells you which part of pricing to work on first, and in what order. It takes about forty-five to sixty minutes of honest answers, your current prices, a rough sense of your costs and margins, and a clear memory of how customers actually react when you quote them.
Pricing builds on knowing your cost floor, the line below which every sale loses money. If your overall costs and margins are genuinely unknown, that comes first and it is solved completely elsewhere. Handle that, then come back and price the value on top of it. Financial health →
Before you score anything, capture the real state of your pricing today. Describe, plainly, how you currently set prices, whether you understand your value and your costs, what your structure looks like, how you handle discounting, and whether you measure any of it. The most revealing question is the simplest: when did you last raise your prices, and why, or why not? The answer usually points straight at the part that is holding you back.
Open the Pricing Baseline Snapshot →Now turn the snapshot into a score for each of the four parts, so the work becomes measurable rather than a vague unease. Answer the twelve statements below the way things really are, not the way you wish they were. Each one is a capability; be honest about where it is only partly true.
The four parts sit in a dependency order. Understanding your value is most upstream, because you cannot structure or set prices for value you do not understand; then comes structure, then setting and managing the actual prices, and measurement is the sustaining layer on top. Your binding constraint is the weakest part that sits highest in that order. The finding above already applies this rule, and this tool lets you record it and see the logic. It is what keeps you from the reflex to just raise prices when the real problem is that you have never mapped your value.
Open the Pricing Constraint Map →Turn the scores and the constraint into a written, sequenced plan. Start with the guide for your binding constraint, add every other part scored below the "capable" line in dependency order, and drop any part that is already strong. Set a target for each and note what better looks like. This is the plan the finding hands you, made concrete on one page you can keep.
Open the Prioritized Pricing Action Plan →Pricing work gets deferred out of fear more than anything else, so the plan needs a date. Name the first guide, the first concrete action, when you will start, and what "started" will look like. That single date is the guardrail against another year of quietly leaving money on the table.
Continue in the Prioritized Pricing Action Plan →You can name your single binding pricing constraint in one plain sentence. You have a sequenced plan, not just a vague urge to raise prices. And you have a dated first action with an owner. That is the baseline read across Measurement and Relationships that the guides then move.
Open the first guide your finding named and begin. When you have worked your sequence, come back here and reassess to see how far each part has moved. Back to the pathway overview →