#7: Value Based Pricing with Chris Do

Emmy award winning director and designer Chris Do joins me to discuss pricing strategy. Chris is the Chief Strategist and CEO of Blind and the Founder of The Futur— an online education platform that teaches the business of design. We cover a lot of ground in this episode including value-based pricing, determining a customer's perceived value, differential pricing ethics, pricing psychology, ultimate versus proximate customer needs, raising prices, the placebo effect, channel conflict, and benefits selling. Whew!

Video of Scott's Interview with Chris Do

Podcast Audio of Scott's Interview with Chris Do

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Transcript of Scott's Interview with Chris Do

Scott: Chris Do, the legend, welcome. Thank you for being here, it means so much to me for someone with your level of success and influence to join me on just my sixth show here, so I just want to extend my gratitude and say thanks for being here.

Chris: Thanks for having me, it's a real pleasure.

Scott: Alright, no problem and just so you know, and you probably already know this, but I'm a huge fan of your work, with The Futur and through The Futur I found Blind.com and then looked at all of your past work and the incredible projects that you've worked on, so you have a wealth of experience. I think it's probably pretty rare to go from the design world to being an influencer in the business space, so I think what you're doing with The Futur is really interesting and I'm curious about where it's headed because I see more of your content now being more generalizable beyond design and I think then that's awesome and just creates tremendous opportunity for you.

Could you provide just a little bit of an update on what you're doing with The Futur and the future of that venture?

Chris: The future of The Futur?

Scott: Yeah, exactly, I didn't want to say it.

Chris: Okay, it was set up for you to say it that way. The future of The Futur. 2018 is going to be a year of massive growth for us and so we have to kind of think about whatever's worked in the past may not work moving into the future. We took a poll with our audience and asked them what kind of content, what kind of format is most appealing to you and they're asking for shorter videos. It wasn't a landslide vote but it was mostly like 60% short videos and 40% livestream so we're dialing back the livestream considerably, and at first I was a little resistant to that because we got used to getting into the state of mind, we're going to produce three livestreams a week, which is a lot of work for us to do but then all of the sudden I find it quite liberating. I have all this free time, I don't know what to do with myself. So we're writing and produced more content, I'll be writing more articles but I think you're right on the tip of that which is if we speak to a very narrow audience this is great but it's not going to help us to get in front of a lot of people and that's what we need to do.

So we're trying to produce a variety of content, so we'll go really micro and do or like one or two minute videos on how to do Photoshop or Illustrator, Photoshop hacks or things like that, so you can learn one new useful thing to use really quickly but then we're also doing very broad content about mindset and what it takes to be a successful person in the world. Forget about you as a designer, what do you need to do and to share a little bit more of that, so we're trying to bring all that to bear plus we have some really superstar guests coming on and that's always, I always hope it'll do better but it's kind of interesting when it does or doesn't perform, but we got guys like Andrew Kramer, founder of Video Copilot coming on, if you're in the motion graphics world and you learn anything about animation or compositing, you've heard of Andrew Kramer and I've known Andrew for a long time. We're not close friends or anything but we've known each other for a long time. I’ve got G-man coming on and there's another person I've known for a long time and, he's big in in terms of the motion scene, he's a director and we have, of course, Aaron Draplin coming on, the big man, thick lines, all that he's coming on. And so we're trying to just elevate the guests who are coming on and to give our audience access to people that normally would not see.

Scott: That's incredible, and it's comforting for me to know that so, for me you're a huge guest so it's good for me to know that there are other people out there that are big guests for you, right, it's comforting in some ways.

Chris: We want to give our audience who they want.

Scott: Right-right, exactly and coming into this when you when you agreed to talk to me I really was excited and then I was a little bit stressed out because I was racking my brain trying to figure out what do we talk about, because you have a lot of breadth where us as academics, you know, I'm kind of an inch wide and a mile deep on a few different topics where you've demonstrated a lot of expertise in branding and in pricing and negotiation, so a lot of topics that could really be beneficial to my students and what I ultimately landed on, because I think that I under cover the topic, and a lot of students don't think it's interesting or sexy is pricing.

One motivation for that is that you had a really popular video on your YouTube channel which was pricing for designers and I've watched that video a couple times and it's a workshop, and I'll post a link to it in the show notes, but a workshop, where you're kind of writing on a whiteboard and really kind of drilling the audience to give you feedback to figure out, you know, what prices should we be charging for a logo and I just, I really like the way your mind works and the way you kind of walk through that process, so that was probably the main reason I want to dig into pricing.

The other is that I view you as having kind of a unique expertise in that you've priced services, right? You have these design services that you're selling to clients of all different sizes and you've also… especially now with The Futur, you're pricing products, so you sell a lot of different toolkits and you sell a subscription to your Facebook group and I'm sure the thinking that goes into pricing all these different categories of products and services is much different.

So it wouldn't be fair for me to start by asking you how do you price things, but I thought that we might…

Chris: But you're going to do it anyway.

Scott: I'm kind of doing it in a roundabout way. I thought we might start by talking about what pricing variables are the most important and, you know, it might depend on certain things and we can talk about what those dependencies are. So what variables are most important and in what order do you kind of work through them, so you know when I teach marketing we'll say things like, oh you know some businesses they'll charge their cost plus they want to make some margin, so they'll just do a cost plus model and add in the margin they want to make. Others will look at the customer’s willingness to pay and then kind of base their price on that, so there are a lot of different strategies business use with varying levels of success, but what's your strategy or your recommendation for kind of laying out the variables that matter and then working through them?

Chris: Okay, I don't have the same kind of academic experience that you're talking about, I don't necessarily think in these terms and variables so bear with me as I kind of work through my process of explaining it to you.

Scott: Yeah and I think that's a good thing.

Chris: Now there are products that we sell and there services that we create but I think the unifying theme here is that we price based on value to the end-user and a lot of people have a problem with this and their general gut reaction is “so you're saying you'll charge a rich person more money for the same logo as you would a poor person” and I say absolutely 100% yes because the value to the rich person is very different than the poor person. And let's abstract it a little bit and talk about big businesses versus small businesses because the terms rich and poor tend to create a sense of judgement and I'm not judging a small business differently than a big business but big businesses have a lot more to gain and a lot more to lose when they take an initiative and it goes wrong and so the bigger the business, the more they have a chance of it failing and people getting fired.

On the flip side of that, small businesses mom-and-pop businesses the ones around the corner, they don't live and die on a marketing campaign, they don't live and die on the introduction of a new product or a rebrand. Most people will frequent a small business, a local business because there's a relationship with the owner, the staff, the service and the quality of the product itself, so in this case changing a logo or changing something that wasn't in need of change actually might hurt the business. I frequent a chain of fast casual restaurants on the Westside called Tender Greens, they recently went through a rebrand, I think Paula Scher did it with Pentagram, and there was a strong negative reaction from the community, like why did you do this? Why did you change all these things and we don't like it and they're still dealing with that right now. There are business reasons why they decided to do that but this is the main difference between say an IBM versus the cafe around the corner, is that if they need to update their brand there are bigger global objectives perhaps when they move into foreign markets that name or that mark has negative connotations. These are things that the small business would never have to consider, so those are some things that you need to think about so you need to price the customer and not the product itself. What's the value to the customer, now when we talk about products no problems… go ahead.

Scott: It is controversial like you said to have this differentiated pricing and you know sometimes we in marketing talk about channel conflict which is, you know, you're charging one price to these wholesalers, this other price to this group of wholesalers, and then that creates a lot of conflict when they find out about that differential pricing, so but I think what you're saying makes sense… so the value of that brand or that logo that you're creating is different for a big company and the risk that they're bearing is much greater right, in failure, where the small company, if they don't like it or it doesn't quite work out, they can probably retool it without a huge, making a huge sacrifice, on their business, so I think it makes sense.

Chris: It shouldn’t be controversial though, it should not be controversial, Scott. Because think about it when you drive to a gas station, depending on which block you're on the price changes depending on which chain. Arco gasoline much cheaper than Union for whatever reason because of the brand, because of the positioning, how they compete but you know that you already are part of the system where the price isn't fixed. One person walks into a dealership buys the same car for more money or less money than the person who just left, why is that? And there are a lot of different reasons, maybe because of their ability to negotiate, etc. but there are fluctuating prices even in a commodity market. If you think about it when they sell, when you're talking about differential pricing, and when they sell to one retailer at a different price than the other they might get upset you're right, but if one customer, one retailer, buys a hundred times as many products, they're going to get preferential pricing because they're buying in such large volume, it's very different, that's also the reason why I think in different business models like when you go to a Costco, you can buy products at wholesale because there is no retailer, the supplier, wholesaler is… they're all the same and so that's why and we participate in this all the time, and I’ve talked about this before in pricing, right? If you buy a can of soda at Costco it's going to be 20-cents when you buy it in a 24-pack but then you got to bring that thing home, you got to unpack it, and then you put it in the fridge and then when you go somewhere you have to bring it with, you might put in a cooler, that's the why when you go, when you're at the beach when it's hot, there's a vending machine… that same can of soda is a $1.50 or $2, same can of soda because you need it more, you want it more, and you're paying for the convenience of them unpacking and chilling it and giving it to you so you don't have to deal with the hassle.

Scott: Right, I agree with you and I think that maybe the reason I said it's controversial or the reason that it may actually be controversial is that when people think about cost, so this is from the customer’s perspective, they're interested in your effort and when they see that you put the same effort in for the mom-and-pop shop as you do for the big business then they'll think that they're getting treated unfairly just because they have more money.

Chris: So yeah, I think there's an issue with ethics or perceived ethics and as the same amount of effort went into something and then you're changing the price and it seems very dishonest and I think your assessment of it being controversial is correct, I don't think it's just yours alone because I hear all the time. People are like you're a criminal you're crook, you're dishonest, you're unethical and they can say whatever they want. This is not my idea by the way to say price the customer, this is from somebody else. Value-based pricing is not an idea that I invented, I'm just practicing it that's all and if you don't know anything about business when you hear about this in the first time, it does seem like it's a different language from a different planet, it is seem very antithetic to the things that you might believe.

Alright, now let's talk a little bit about products if you will because you were mentioning that too. The products that we create and how we price our products is dependent on more factors than I would with service, and here's why. In the service space you're basically hiring us and our unique way of thinking and our point of view into the world. The making part is not unique. Everybody can make something, so you're paying for that. For which then, I think, there is few if any competition for, therefore I can charge the price that I want and not have to be so concerned that market forces dictate that I price it at a certain price point. Yes, you can get it done on Fiverr or 99designs for that price but you can't get us to do it and if you want our thinking, our clarity then you'll pay for that. When it comes to a product, this gets a little bit trickier. It's still a unique product to us but for which now there's all kinds of competition. Unfairly, people will start to say well I saw something on Masterclass for $99 and they had a celebrity. So you're saying to me the video that you make is worth that much or more and so it becomes a problem. And so we're competing against the market forces if you will, even though I believe when you watch our video and you pay for that course, you will be a richer person for it in terms of what you know or what you can charge or how you can handle yourself in a client meeting, so you'll make money off our video. I can't say anything about those other classes.

Scott: Right, and maybe it, maybe what you're talking about there with the market forces will… and certainly it will change over time, right, as your reputation grows stronger and kind of The Futur diffuses through the marketplace and you get a lot of positive word-of-mouth and especially as you start to grow beyond just design then then you'll reap those rewards in the future and then maybe you can charge discriminant prices depending on who you're selling to.

So if you, we even talked about this a little bit, but if you sold me a package or you sold my university a package, I would expect you to charge us differently than if you're selling an end user, right, or a designer right a package on how they should pitch a client, so what you're saying makes sense, I think it's just so uncomfortable from the customer’s point of view that it's something you always have to fight against when you're meeting with customers because they'll say things, and you mentioned this in that that great workshop video that I mentioned, but they'll ask you well how much time are you going to spend on this, or what's your hourly rate, and that creates kind of a problem in our mind but I think that you work through that in a pretty methodical way that that makes sense.

So, can you talk a little bit more about how you determine what that value looks like, so I'm yet I'm going in to sell my product to this company I'm in some B2B services exchange and I've done my research on Google, but I still don't have a good sense for, you know, what their revenue looks like or the size of this business.

Chris: Okay, there's a couple of things to think about and I think the reason why some people are shocked about the concepts that we talked about is because our client base is very different than perhaps the client base of somebody that's out there just graduated school. We work with Fortune 500 companies, Fortune 1000 companies, and they are in the hundreds of millions of revenue if not in the billions of dollars. Their net worth is ginormous and so when we talked to these people, generally speaking I try to gauge with them what the initiative is and what it means to their company, so I'm not going away and just bidding in the dark I don't like to do that. Blair Enns has a new book that's coming out called “Pricing Creative Services” I believe or something like that and he says you should say a price before you show a price so we often will talk to our clients about the general ballpark, the budget, and what we do is we price bracket and we anchor high so we're trying to understand from them what the value is to them, and what you don't realize as the designer on this side of the equation is they're coming into the meeting with some sense of how much they need to spend and what this is worth to their company, and it's your duty to try to extract that piece of information from them in the least a non-confrontational way, so that we can have a real adult conversation about business.

A lot of creative people don't understand that business people work fundamentally like this when they say we need to buy raw materials, we need to buy iron or steel or something they need to be able to talk to them like what can I get per ton and if I buy 200-tons of this on an order or if they could promise you future business what kind of price can I get, so they're already talking about numbers or thinking about it in their mind. It's just the awkward creative person who doesn't have a lot of business experience walks into room thinking this is going to be tense filled like how do I talk about… I can't talk about this, I mean if I mention it they'll think I'm crass and I'm not a creative person when in fact they're sitting there thinking “I wonder if they're ever going to bring up the money. I have no idea, what kind of shock is this going to be when they send us the proposal” and they almost want you to say it.

Scott: Yeah-yeah, of course and is that difficult for you because you're selling, I don't know if you would term it this way, but brand elements or something like a logo that could potentially over time improve brand equity, which these are somewhat nebulous in that you know you're not talking in terms of sales dollars necessarily. So I give you this logo and you're going to make an extra million dollars next year it's really hard to say that, so when you're selling a product like that how do you go about that conversation of trying to figure out the value?

Chris: Right, so we were just talking about this and I don't sell the logo, I don't sell the website, I don't sell the packaging or anything else, what I do sell is in a way I'm selling myself, I'm selling the strategic thinking and the clarity that I provide, so what we do is we try to elevate the conversation away from what it is that we do, what we make, and this is a trap that a lot of creatives have. They don't understand that who they are is different than what they make, they bundle those two things together and if you think about it I was making this analogy to somebody… if you were to cut off your finger are you less of a person without that finger? Is that finger you and the response is no, so we've cut off your hand, we're going to raise the stakes here, is that hand that's now detached from your body you and the answer is again no. I'm still me, so I guess most people would describe myself as their brain, their heart, or their spirit, or soul is what makes them right, so when we go in and try to talk about our work and what its value is they attach themselves to it and now they can't separate it and these are different things, these are very different concepts. So what I want to do is I want to detach what I make and what I do or who I am is the way I think. So what I want to do is talk to the client, engage them on that level, so I want to ask them… okay great, you come and you've asked me to design you a new logo. I can do that for you, actually a lot of people can do that for you and quite well and at a wide variety of prices, but what I want to know from you is what is driving this conversation? Why do you think you need a new logo?

So now I transition from talking about, oh what kind of logo do you want what's the look and the feel, and what logos inspire you to why are we even having this conversation in the first place? And that's the first sign that the client recognizes I'm not just like every designer, I am going to drive deeper at a problem and so in that way I imagine it in their mind is your value just went up by a couple of zeros. And you might discover in a conversation with your potential client, the prospect, that they don’t actually need a new logo. There's nothing wrong with their logo, aesthetically it's fine. It could be a little bit better but fundamentally if we help them fix maybe their app or the user experience in their store or maybe the decor is really off. Something is off and this is when the client is prescribing their own solution which is a dangerous thing. I need a new logo. I need a new this. Well, let's diagnose the problem before we prescribe a solution, so now I'm in the consultative selling mode where I'm working like how doctors, psychologists, engineers work. They asked lots of probative questions and they're trying to figure out what are we doing? That's really what I'm selling.

Scott: Right-yeah that's great and these laddering techniques, this is something that we teach all the time because, you know, you can ask someone why do you want a razor blade that has five blades and they'll say, oh you know I want a closer shave, but then if you keep probing then you can start to get content that you can use in advertising. So, you know, why do you want a close shave? I want to be more attractive to other people. And then you start figuring out what kind of advertising I'm going to put… or imagery I'm going to put in my advertising. It's very powerful to kind of try to get to the ultimate causes which for business might be, oh we're losing market share or something like that. Most designers are never going to get at a problem that big and be able to relate what they're selling to that problem so it's a really interesting and tactical thing that you're doing here which is probably why you're so successful.

Chris: Now you bring up a great point. I want to talk about this a little bit. This is the difference between selling features versus benefits. So if you're writing out an ad campaign and, so for all the creative people that are watching or listening to this, you might talk about five blades it's titanium steel, forged in this kind of thing and you think that's a great ad. But when you keep asking these why questions you're driving into a fundamental need of root emotional reaction to this. It's because I want to be more attractive or I want to have this boost of confidence, so this is one the benefit comes in which is an emotional thing because I feel more empowered because I want to walk into a meeting feeling confident, whatever it is that that makes you feel, the kind of root motivation it’s much deeper truth. So you can have a balance of both, more blades to make you feel confident or whatever it is and that's looks like, wow okay I get it now feel five times more confident with these blade.

Scott: Yes and that balance has shifted over time so if you look at modern advertising almost every advertisement now is making an emotional appeal at the you know at the top level and then at a secondary level they're talking about features. And usually it's only effective to talk about features if the if that target consumer already knows a lot about the benefit, and they're like okay now there's this new feature to the iPhone, so maybe you can talk about that, but yeah it is it really is about getting at those fundamental, universal needs that are present for your target market, which is an awesome lesson that spans beyond just pricing. This is for everything, right? But if you're trying to drive that price higher getting at those fundamental needs is going to help you considerably, you know. I'm from a consumer psychology background so one thing I always wonder with practitioners like you who are out there and you’re pricing products and you’re pricing them differently, is how you factor in the psychology of different customers that are in your customer base. So I imagine the psychological mechanisms that are happening for executives at Nike are much different than that mom-and-pop shop right, so you might want to price really high for Nike because they'll perceive that it's very high quality, right, where have  those price sensitive customers at the at the lower end of the spectrum and you have to be really careful about what their perceptions are going to involve, you know risk of going under because they're spending too much money on a logo or something along those lines.

Chris: That's right and I think most people feel that if a price is higher there it must be better whether you’re Nike or the mom-and-pop shop. I remember an episode on Penn & Teller where they talk about water, how drinking water in the United States for the most part, unless you live in some contaminated areas, is actually just as good if not better than fancy bottled water. And so what they did was they brought people to a fancy restaurant and they served water from the hose or the faucet in the back and they talk about it, so they have like the equivalent of a sommelier I don't how to say that but the wine expert which is the water expert. And they just talk about it and the guy drinks the water and he says to his date, like, I told you this place was good check it out and they're just like laughing in the back it's because it's perceived it's all packaging and perception. Sean Archer talks about this. Your perception your lens that you look into the world actually has more to do with how you feel about it than the reality itself.

Scott: Yes, yeah, the water story is funny for me because I was by when I was in my Ph.D. program, I was buying Smart Water all the time and my wife would make fun of me so she set up a blind taste test for me where she bought I think six different brands of water and then asked me to rank them and I ended up ranking the Whole Foods store brand at the top which is much less expensive than Fiji or Smart Water which I would tend to buy.

Chris: Very expensive.

Scott: Yeah and I joke about that with my students too because I'm a marketer and I teach marketing but I fall for the same tricks that that everybody else does which is one of the fun things about marketing.

Chris: But you can't not help but to fall for the tricks because as part of our human nature and how we've developed as a society as a culture. You buy things that you believe in so when you buy Smart Water because as electrolytes it helps you kind of be more balanced, there are some benefits to that and so you buy into that whole thing because it says something about you whereas if you buy cheapo Crystal Geyser or whatever it is, it's like oh I just I'm just I'm a commodity buyer I don't care what I put in my body so it says something about you. So from the headphones that you're wearing to the car that you drive, you're consciously or unconsciously making a statement about who you are on what your beliefs and values are, that is why you will often go out of your way to the coffee shop that is like three blocks farther away than the one that's right next to you because for whatever reason that says something about you like… it could be a mom-and-pop so you drive past three chains it could be the exact opposite where you drive past three mom and pop coffee shops because you want that consistency of the chain and so there's an association, attachment to a brand and that's just part of human psychology.

Scott: Yes, and it’s… and even though objectively it might be silly for me to buy Smart Water yeah if you could argue if it makes me feel better or if I perceive that it tastes better than it is worth the additional money.

Chris: Then it is better.

It's the placebo effect right there, I feel smarter I feel more balanced and you start to send these positive vibes through your body and then you get better. There's a great story on I think it was Radiolab how there were faith healers and there was an investigator who went in to infiltrate faith healers and what happened was… the long story short, they realized if they just make people believe that they're going to get better, that 50% of time it's successful so the exact same success rate as traditional Western medicine, so faith healers are just as effective, it's really bizarre, and so they're saying like for little things or for everything, it's like for even for cancer it's bizarre, so your body has an incredible ability to heal itself and there's some science behind this too.

So, if you believe that Smart Water makes you smarter, more balanced and you release the chemical compounds in your brain, it actually does make you feel smarter and you are smarter, right.

Scott: Yeah that's, and I'm glad you brought up that story, because it's interesting thinking of, you know, that and there are some, you know, holistic healers and people like that who will tell you to kind of meditate and imagine your body attacking the disease and things like that and you're right, objectively it seems kind of silly to some of us, but it's effective because you know it's psychological and also the way that our brain functions can actually result in some healing which is absolutely fascinating.

Chris: Yes, there is some science behind this before people are going to these guys are off their rocker right now, right, so let me explain the science. They're saying that the chemical compounds in your body exist and like when you take an aspirin or a Tylenol it recognizes that the compound, it's just you happen to be deficient in it or there's a concentration of that chemical. It only works because your body knows what it is so if you have a headache you pop in an aspirin or something and then it releases that so then it can chill out your head so you don't have a headache anymore, but your body actually naturally produces this so if a faith healer comes in and you believe in it enough they're like you know what, you won't have this headache anymore your body starts to release the same compound. There's lots of stuff obviously that people we have yet to discover about how our bodies work but there's some science behind this.

Scott: That's cool, I knew when you agreed to come on the show you would take everything in an interesting direction, so I appreciate it you're so well-read and you’re kind of, you know, you're really tuned in to everything that's happening which is amazing because I imagine you're also tremendously busy, so I appreciate you bringing that insight to the conversation.

Chris: Hopefully we haven’t lost the entire audience at this point.

Scott: No, I don't think so, I think it's interesting, I think it's fun. And I want to be sensitive of your time but I wanted to ask you one more thing because you're, as you know, you have you're managing you know multiple businesses and all kinds of different product types, so I could see a scenario where you set a price and then that's kind of the price forever. Your Facebook group is one example, I think the entry fee is $75 for a membership so I'm wondering a little bit how you set that price, but what's more interesting to me is how you manage that price because of course you've set expectations of the existing members, but if you find that like you have 5,000 members then the group will become unbearable. So do you kind of use pricing as a control or you realize that they the values a little bit higher than we thought it was but how are we going to do all this without ticking off all of our existing customers?

Chris: Right, I think you'll like this story. I think, and I believe in this, that if you want to reduce friction transitions are very important. I teach transitions in storyboarding going from moment to moment so there's flow. I talk about transitions as you're doing a presentation to a group of people how sometimes it's abrupt when you shift gears so you need kind of a segue piece a story or a slide to kind of help to gently ease us from one arc to the next.

Our pro group used to be free. It used to be open to the public, so the first decision I made was I want to make it a private group. It can still be free, my partner at that time Jose is like why would you do that? Because I want to create a safe place for us to discuss real things and to be not concerned that this is going to get back to their clients, he goes okay, so we did that and then I said okay now that it's private I want to charge $25 per month, so why do we do that? Because I'm spending a lot of time managing, directing, having conversations, doing webinars with this group. He says like okay so we lost a bunch of people because you know it's hard to pay for something when it was free, yes. But a bunch of new people came in and so each cycle we kind of wash out the people from before and we bring in new people. It's 25 bucks a month and then I was talking to somebody and I said you should really join this program and we're supporting each other. He says, you know, I thought it was a joke what kind of value would I get from joining a group that's 25 bucks a month and I thought about that so I raised the price to 75 bucks.

Because there's two reasons why. One is perceived value, if you pay more for something it must be more valuable right and to probably just as equally important is I wanted to hurt a little bit. When you don't pay for something, you don't use it. I need it to hurt just enough so that you feel connected and committed to it and we will probably be raising the price again because the value of the group is getting higher and higher and you're right, it'll become unmanageable when it gets to a certain point and it would just be bananas. We’ll have to splinter it off into multiple groups depending on what level you're at, maybe you're an agency owner, small to medium sized business owner, or just starting out, you’re a student or solopreneur, and we can do that so we can service the community better, yes because there's a lot of crosstalk, right? Some people are students, some people have been running their businesses for some time, but yeah so I think it's about that financial commitment. Here's a little story I want to share with you, there is a business coach that I'm aware of, I don't know his details but my coach was telling me about him, and he lives in the middle country let's just say he lives in the Midwest somewhere and he's well-known well-respected. So the CEO of IBM might seek him out but he has very specific terms. You must come to me, I do not come to you and why would he do that because he wants you to have a certain mental commitment to working on this that you're going to dedicate the time, resources and you're going to take this seriously so it's not a power play. It's really to the benefit of the end-user and it's not to say you have to come to me but I think those concepts are really important.

Scott: That's so cool and the other thing I'm wondering because you talked about these transitions or segues then that you can use them for pricing, so do you imagine that if you go from let's say $75 a month to a hundred and twenty-five dollars a month that there will be some kind of like roll out like this is our content plan for the next six months or the next year, so that those 75 dollar payers have, you know, you have less attrition among those existing customers.

Chris: Right, we did the same thing from 25 the to the 75. I said I appreciate you guys and I want to reward you for your loyalty so for a limited time, you can purchase in advance a years’ worth of membership at the low price of 25 before it flips over but this window is closing really fast. So you have 30 days to decide if you want to be here for another year but you have to buy it in a year… a year's worth, otherwise you're going to pay the new price so we saw a flood of sales just come in because they wanted to cash in on that before they got booted out or before the price went up and if you think about it at $25 for a year, three or four months in you have gotten basically the membership for free if you were paying at the new price, so yeah we try to do that because I don't want to leave anybody out in the cold.

Scott: Yeah and it's good for you and them but also there's that awesome kind of a psychological boost of them thinking they're getting something that's a lot more valuable than what they're paying which always feels good for us as customers as you know.

So, I feel like I've already eaten up too much of your time. I want to talk to you all day I'll be honest because I think you're an awesome person, you're a great storyteller and I think that your mind works in a way where you can make connections naturally and you know very comfortably where it's difficult for most people, for me and for most people that I talk to.

So I appreciate your time, I think I'll probably pester you down the road to talk about something different but I promise that I’ll give you some breathing room and if this show hasn't grown up a little bit by then then I won't even ask you, okay. So I'm going to put, I'm going to put in the work to make my audience a little bit bigger but I just want to reiterate that I'm very thankful for your time and your guidance… and I've hired you for a few hours as a consultant too so I consider you kind of a mentor of sorts for me so just thank you for everything and we'll chat again soon.

Chris: Thank you very much.

Scott: Alright, thanks Chris.