# On Pricing (and How I Built Mine) *There’s a difference between designing a business and just doing work. Pricing is one of those things that forces the distinction.* Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about pricing as a strategic design problem. In my experience, pricing is one of those strategic GTM levers that businesses frequently under-scrutinize and under-utilize. It might be because pricing strategies often assume a final form as a "memo and a model" that for many it becomes a spreadsheet instead of a GTM design element. Or it may be that it's just hard to conceptualize more abstract, second-order GTM outcomes, like [[pricing power]], so teams prefer to treat this as an exercise in [[computational thinking]] rather than [[reification]]. Either way, there's no better way to illustrate the point than to show the work. So when I decided to formalize my independent work under Greenhaus, I knew I needed to think carefully (and out loud) about the role packaging and pricing plays in the overall design of good GTM fundamentals. ## What’s the strategy? For Greenhaus, I want to build a pricing model that matches my intent as a partner. It needs to make sense in the context of my 4Ps, which means it needs to scale with clients, reflect the kind of work I actually do, and push back against some of the unexamined assumptions that show up in most services pricing. I think about defining that strategy through a supply/demand exercise. What do I want to optimize for, and what is it demanding from me? ### What am I optimizing for? I’m not trying to bill the most hours or chase the highest contract. I’m trying to build something sustainable that works for my clients and for me. That means I want my pricing to signal: - **Accessibility, especially at the early stage**: I want my work to be within reach for scrappy $1M companies trying to get their arms around go-to-market. Not just $10M growth-stage teams looking for a fractional CMO. - **Scalability, for me and for them:** I can’t be everything to everyone, and I don’t want to be. My pricing model needs to reflect how I actually create leverage through systematic improvement, and not over-promise on outcomes or undercut the value proposition by anchoring to deliverables. - **Clarity over commoditization:** I’m not selling “deliverables," but progress and momentum. Oftentimes we won't know what we need to deliver until we've found it. If pricing looks like a checklist of things, I’ve probably failed my position and frame. ### What does the market demand? To set strategy, I need to understand what the market will actually support. So I did what I always do and looked sideways. A wide-ranging scan of pricing and positioning across marketing strategy firms, independent consultants, GTM operators, and RevOps specialists gave me some grounding in the category. >Sidebar: I've thought a bit more recently about whether or not this is the right category for Greenhaus. I can make a case based on category entry points that it might be a new paradigm, but category "creation" is not always the smartest or cheapest way to launch. At least for now, I'm sticking with a traditional frame. What I found wasn’t surprising, but it was clarifying: - **Most agencies sell throughput, not thinking.** Pricing is anchored in volume of output (assets, meetings, campaigns, leads, opportunities) rather than in the clarity or quality of decision-making. - **Fractional work is often just headcount swap, and it's a particularly noisy space right now.** The term “fractional” has become code for “cheaper senior hire,” with unclear boundaries and poorly managed expectations. And given the macro-environment, there are a lot of dubious Fractional CxO's in supply at the moment. Pricing is often inflated, or overly anchored to the suppliers FTE compensation bands instead of value delivered. - **True strategy work is either prohibitively expensive or vague to the point of unusable.** High-end firms sell retainers at $30K+/month, but without the operational handoff. Solopreneurs sell “advice” in 90-minute chunks with no path to durable value. From that analysis, I built a set of heuristics that I hope will help me thread the needle a bit: - **% of ARR:** For most early/growth stage companies, pricing should land around 2–3% of ARR annually. That’s enough to feel like a serious investment, but still reasonable relative to the broader GTM budget. - **FTE Value Anchoring:** I wanted pricing that reflects the _leverage_ of a senior GTM leader, without being a full-time replacement. If you're comparing me to hiring, it should feel like you're getting 50–70% of the strategic upside, for 15–30% of the overhead. - **One-Month Project Rate** – Not every company is ready to jump into a full engagement. So I scoped a fixed-fee project rate (~$2.5K–$5K depending on complexity and ARR) as an accessible entry point. These are explicitly not “deliverables” but high-signal diagnostic or design sprints to uncover the real problem. - **Scope Modifiers** – I created a pricing system that adjusts based on _how I show up_—from lightweight advisory to fully embedded leadership. This protects margin, reinforces alignment, and reflects the real cost of context switching. ### How I Think About Engagements Greenhaus is optimized for meaningful engagements. Strategic, transformational work—especially around GTM systems—doesn’t happen in a week, and it doesn’t conform neatly to a list of deliverables. It takes time to cycle. It’s often iterative. And the signals that tell us it’s working show up upstream, long before they reach top line volumetric or financial metrics. Those signals sound like: - “We’re closing deals 15 days faster this quarter.” - “Our close rate is up 8% on qualified opps.” - “Pipeline creation from this program is finally trending up.” - "More people are engaging with this channel." Long before they sound like: - “We added $2M to our run rate.” - “Our churn improved by 6%.” - “Our CAC:LTV ratio flipped.” - "Our Share of Search is up 5%" Most partners navigate this by optimizing for the wrong thing: - They price to **deliverables**—solving symptoms, not causes. - Or they chase **retainers**—turning strategy into a slow drip of output. The result is a market full of silver-bullet sales decks and agencies that are just inflated FTEs. At the same time, AI is shifting the economics of services. We can deliver more leverage, faster but that means our **pricing needs to reflect strategy, not time.** Just like products are moving from seat-based to outcome-based pricing, my take is that service firms have to evolve. And that means being honest about two things: 1. **Successful work takes time and flexibility.** A GTM system isn’t a campaign. It’s an engine. You don’t fix it with one thing, but by compounding improvements that tune it over time. 2. **We can’t promise outcomes. But we can own the inputs, and design systems that maximize signal.** Pricing to financially-based outcomes isn't an honest model for go-to-market work. Instead, I want to be open about how controlling inputs, removing friction, and helping teams test, learn, and adapt can deliver indirectly. All of this presents a unique challenge for how we present value, manage contracting, and ultimately develop pricing. #### Value and Packaging Over the course of the last six months, and from my own experience as an in-house leader, I know that I need to be open and flexible about how to be most valuable. At the highest level, my value proposition is a simple one: > I'm a trusted, experienced hand to help you find and fix go-to-market friction. What that means in practice is both deeply contextual to my partners' business and usually something fluid that changes and evolves over time and with the market. From my many years as a GTM leader, I always found navigating and managing external partner relationships challenging because of this. Sometimes you need an advisor, sometimes you need someone to do the work you've defined. Sometimes you don't know what the work is and you need help thinking through it. Other times you need to bring in someone to own the work soup-to-nuts. As an independent consultant, I like to think about the legs of the stool under my value proposition as flexibility, context, and continuity: - Flexibility means that we can mold and shape to the business context of the partner, rather than forcing our work into predetermined shapes (deliverables, procedures, frameworks, etc.). - Context is a specific nod to [[adjacent context]], or the very specific benefit you get when you bring outside eyes and fresh insights to bear on a difficult challenge. In strategic, human work this is an extremely valuable way to break patterns, reframe challenges and opportunities, and bring energy and urgency to your already talented and capable team. - Continuity of relationship means we stay connected through change. Instead of handing off and moving on, our relationship can sustain momentum across cycles, adapting our scope, focus, and involvement as your business evolves. All of this points to how the value proposition is deeply rooted in solving problems _with_ founders and GTM leaders, not just for them. So a big part of how I've designed engagements, contracts, and pricing reflects my approach to help address the challenge of working external partners. #### Contract Design I believe, fundamentally, that there are [[How I Show Up|four ways to show up]] at any given time: as an advisor, as a contractor, as a consultant, and as an embedded leader (I don't love "fractional" but that's more of a marketing choice). This flexibility, and the need for sustained engagements to realize value, introduces some complexity into contracting. 1) I've been doing this work for a while, but Greenhaus is a relatively new business entity, with a relatively new perspective on service delivery. This has [[pricing power]] implications. 2) How my clients need me to show up should impact pricing and terms, but it's not always clear who my clients need me to be without fist doing discovery. This has contract implications. To solve for this I designed a flat-fee discovery and assessment project to anchor every new engagement. This is a deliberate choice to de-risk partnership relatively to point 1 above. My initial preference was to include this as part of every contract with an explicit opt out, because contracting sort of sucks. But with respect to point 2, I realized that a non-negligible amount of the time the scope of our engagement (how I show up and for how long) really does depend on some shared discovery and buy-in. At least for now that means every new engagement starts with a $2500, one month project to do some discovery and asses the GTM status and potential of every partner, hopefully earning the right to a longer, more meaningful engagement. #### Pricing Model Design When it comes to building a pricing model the goal is to distill all of this context into something coherent. I talk about packaging and pricing as a *reification* exercise because it's one of the critical things that turns your abstract position on value into something real and testable. For Greenhaus, I've landed on a model that's primarily determined by ARR, sales cycle duration, and mode of engagement (AKA, how I show up). Because the complexity, scope, and stakes of involvement increase with run rate, I first use a tiered system to determine a base monthly rate. It looks like this: | ARR Range | Base Monthly Rate | | --------- | ----------------- | | <$1M | $5,000 | | $1–3M | $6,000 | | $3–5M | $8,000 | | $5–10M | $10,000 | | >$10M | $12,000 (capped) | Next I apply a modifier based on how I need to show up. My hypothesis is that each of these implies a scope of work, some guidelines about expectations, the shape of the work, and how intensive it will be for both of us: - Advising → 0.75x - Contracting → .9x - Consulting → 1x - Embedded Leadership → 1.3x Lastly, because this type of work takes time and consistency, I apply a multiple of your average sales cycle (3X) to determine the *suggested* minimum contract length. In practice this is negotiable, but it's valuable to frame the scope of investment correctly. We're not talking about purchasing deliverables, but investing in long term GTM success. ### What questions did I wrestle with? Plenty. Some I’m still testing. ### 1. What’s the right entry point? $5K/month is not cheap. But it’s also not a senior hire. It’s not an agency retainer. It’s a focused, experienced strategic partner helping you build your GTM system. For early-stage teams, I often scope fixed-fee “foundation sprints” to de-risk the entry. ### 2. How long does strategy take to show results? I used average sales cycles (30–120 days) and multiplied by 3 to set my minimum engagement durations. The thinking: it takes one cycle to align, one to execute, one to see results. If you’re not ready for a 3-month commitment, we’re probably not ready to work together yet. ### 3. Am I competing with a full-time hire? At the upper tiers, yes—and that’s intentional. But I’m not trying to be your VP of Marketing. I’m trying to help you build the systems and structure so that your VP of Marketing can win. The closer I get to embedded leadership, the more that line blurs. And I’m okay with that, because the value is clear. ### 4. What about outcome-based pricing? I love the spirit of it. But most of the outcomes I influence are hard to isolate—and the attribution game is a swamp. Instead, I try to **price to progress**. Every project is structured around a milestone, a phase, a transformation—not a time bucket. If you want to pay for revenue, we need to talk about ownership, not just influence. ## What am I still testing? - **Framing**: I don’t love that a pricing model—even a thoughtful one—can make it feel like I’m selling hours or deliverables. But you have to sell *something,* and I'm still working on how to communicate value more effectively. - **Top-end scale:** I’ve hard-capped monthly pricing at $12K, but that might evolve into project + advisory blends. Especially with companies above $10M ARR, I’m exploring how to scope project-based buildouts that complement or augment internal teams. - **Term-based discounts**: I currently apply small discounts (5–10%) for 9–12 month terms. This feels reasonable, but it’s a lever I’m watching closely. Too much discounting starts to feel like arbitrage. Too little and I miss a chance to reward commitment.