Mastering Services Pricing

Preface

It was an unusually warm summer’s day when I turned my car into the country house hotel where partners from a global law firm had gathered for their annual retreat. I was to deliver a keynote speech on the post-crisis pricing challenges for professionals, as they dealt with an unfamiliar growth in client power and were experiencing daily problems in winning and retaining work.

Gathering my thoughts as I drove along the impressively long avenue of trees leading to the house itself, I smiled as I remembered a long-forgotten conversation I had with a plumber who had told me that he priced ‘by the driveway’, which meant that the longer this was, the more he charged. ‘Well they can afford it, can’t they?’ he had explained. His words stuck ...