The Pricing Baseline | Cost-Based vs. Value-Based Pricing for Owner-Led Businesses
The Pricing Baseline
Projects don't become unprofitable by accident
It happens when your pricing doesn't reflect what it really costs to deliver the work.
The Pricing Baseline gives you the structure to build prices that protect your cash and profit, so every project delivers its expected financial outcome.
Join The Waitlist →For owner-led businesses where revenue looks stronger than the cash left behind.
What You'll Get With The Pricing Baseline
Build the Structure Behind What You Charge
Know What the Work Really Costs
Identify the direct, overhead, and miscellaneous costs your price actually needs to carry.
Know Your Minimum Rate
The lowest number you can charge and still protect your margin, so you never quote below what the business actually needs.
Choose the Right Pricing Model
Compare cost-based, value-based, and other pricing approaches, and determine the correct model for your business.
Connect Your Price to the Outcome It Creates
Understand the frameworks for tying what you offer to the result it produces, so the number is backed by more than emotion.
Test, Adjust & Refine
Evaluate the price against real delivery data, then adjust as reality changes.
A Manual You Keep Coming Back To
Not a book you shelve but a repeatable tool. Every new project gets checked against the same structure, so the correction holds long after the first read.
The Client Paid in Full But The Project Still Lost Money.
A loss on one project could be a delivery failure but losses across multiple projects are a sign of something deeper - a price built on the wrong assumptions from the start.
The fix isn't simply pricing higher. It's pricing from a baseline that was built correctly in the first place.
Pricing only protects margin at the point of sale.
What happens after the sale is determined by how the price was built, not how high it was set.
The Structure Behind Prices That Hold
Not a confidence or a mindset book. A structured method for closing the gap between your Financial Intent (your prices) and Operational Reality (what your projects cost to deliver), so your cash and profit survive execution.
It applies the same costing discipline used in manufacturing, where pricing a production run wrong means losing money on every unit, to service and project-based work. Because your projects are production runs. They've just never been priced like it.
What The Pricing Baseline Covers
The costs to factor in
Direct costs are where every quote starts. What determines if a price survives delivery is everything else most businesses never account for.
Both cost-based and value-based pricing, side by side
Most pricing advice picks one method and tells you to use it always. The Pricing Baseline shows both, how each is actually built, and how to know which one fits a given project instead of guessing.
Why price reviews don't stick
If you've raised prices before and the pressure came back, the method was wrong. A price increase without a method change is a temporary fix, not a correction.
Pricing forward, not backward
Not from what feels competitive. Forward from what delivery actually costs once real work moves through it.
Overhead, allocated correctly
Most founders know they carry overhead, but few know how much of it each project carries. As a result, projected margins disappear into costs the client wasn't billed for.
The Value Messaging Framework and Value Thread Template
The named tools for connecting what you offer to what it's worth to the client, so price is backed by more than cost.
This Book Is for a Specific Kind of Business
The Pricing Baseline was written for established, owner-led businesses where:
What Else Is Included
Every copy of The Pricing Baseline includes the Pricing Objection Scripts™ as a bonus.
Pricing Objection Scripts™
Because a correct price still has to be said out loud. The real conversations that follow, discount requests, scope additions, "that's too expensive," payment terms, and how to hold the line without losing the relationship.
The framework builds the price. The scripts help you keep it.
The Pricing Baseline is on its way
Every project you price after this stops being a guess. You'll know the number before you send the quote, not after delivery tells you if you got it right.
Join the waitlist
Be first to know when The Pricing Baseline is available, plus the Pricing Objection Scripts™ bonus included at launch.
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Built From What Actually Breaks
Written by Temi, a former Big Four accountant who ran manufacturing operations before working with hundreds of founder-led businesses on this same structural problem.
Big Four trains you to reconstruct what actually happened in a business, not what the records show. Manufacturing trains you to see that a production run priced wrong loses money on every unit it makes. The Pricing Baseline brings both disciplines to the one decision that determines whether a business is genuinely profitable or quietly subsidized:
How the price gets built.
Frequently Asked Questions
The Pricing Foundation Your Business Has Been Running Without
Every future price gets built on a structure that holds. Not on optimism or what feels competitive. On the actual cost of execution and the margins your business needs to survive.
