EXPERIENCE 001
The Value in the Room
The Value in the Room
The Value in the Room
Business Development & Commercial Strategy
Business Development & Commercial Strategy
Business Development & Commercial Strategy
Growth doesn’t always mean producing more. Sometimes it means recognizing how much value is already sitting in the room, unused.
Growth doesn’t always mean producing more. Sometimes it means recognizing how much value is already sitting in the room, unused.
Growth doesn’t always mean producing more. Sometimes it means recognizing how much value is already sitting in the room, unused.
Growth doesn’t always mean producing more. Sometimes it means recognizing how much value is already sitting in the room, unused.
I once worked with an independent consultant who ran expert-led workshops for corporate clients, and who was convinced the market wouldn’t support a meaningfully higher price. They knew their material well — they understood the problems their clients brought into the room and had real expertise to offer. Their hesitation wasn’t about competence. It was that they saw a ceiling: only so much information could fit into a workshop, only so many hours were available, and in their mind, charging more meant personally producing more.
I thought the problem sat somewhere else. They were treating themself as the only source of value in the room, and that assumption was limiting the workshop before the market ever got a chance to weigh in.
Expert-led businesses fall into this trap easily. The expert learns something, organizes it, presents it, and charges for access to that knowledge — a perfectly understandable model, right up until growth becomes a question of personal output. More research. More material. Longer sessions. More preparation. The expert turns into a factory, and the only way to produce more is to run the factory harder. I didn’t think that was what their clients actually needed. The people attending these sessions worked inside real companies. They managed people, navigated difficult conversations, interpreted policy, made mistakes, solved problems — and carried all of that experience into the room with them. The workshop just wasn’t making use of it yet.
So I started thinking less about what additional material they needed to prepare, and more about what kind of interaction the room itself could create. What happened if participants brought their own challenges into the discussion? If one person’s problem helped another recognize something developing in their own company? If someone described an approach that had worked, someone else pushed back on it, and the consultant helped the room understand why the two approaches produced different results? The goal wasn’t to turn the workshop into an unstructured conversation — their expertise still mattered, arguably more than before, since someone still needed to ask the right questions, catch bad information, and translate individual stories into something the whole room could use. But that role is different from standing at the front of the room trying to personally manufacture every insight, and the distinction between being the source of value and creating the conditions for value to emerge became the actual redesign.
That reframing changed the economic logic underneath the offer. The original model implicitly said the workshop’s value depended on how much expertise the expert could personally deliver in the time allotted. The alternative said the value depended on what people understood, confronted, exchanged, and carried back into their organizations afterward — and those aren’t the same measure. One puts the entire burden on the expert’s output. The other asks the expert to design a better system, and I’ve come to see the same pattern in founders who think every client relationship has to run through them, or managers who think leadership means providing every answer personally.
Once the offering itself changed, the pricing question got easier to examine honestly. They were afraid a higher price would push the service past what the market would bear, and I took that seriously — then looked at what comparable offerings in the market were actually charging. Several were more rigid and offered less real interaction than what this workshop was now capable of creating, which raised the actual question worth asking: was the market really refusing to support a higher price, or had uncertainty been standing in for evidence the whole time? Those are different problems, and I don’t think confidence alone creates value — the offer still has to deserve the price. But the reverse trap is just as real: a business can improve the offer, gather evidence the market supports a different position, and still hesitate because self-perception hasn’t caught up with what the business has actually become.
That was the more interesting problem to solve. The underlying question was never really will customers pay this — it was closer to am I allowed to ask for this, and the answer to that isn’t encouragement. It’s an argument solid enough that encouragement becomes unnecessary. Comparable offerings already in the market, at higher price points and with less depth, made that argument for us. After the redesign — the workshop content, the pricing, the broader structure of the business — traction increased in multiples over the course of the following year.
The lasting lesson wasn’t that people should simply charge more for what they do. It’s that value can be designed, not just delivered. Expertise doesn’t shrink when it makes room for other people to contribute to the room — it can matter more by becoming less central to every single moment of it. Sometimes growth doesn’t require an expert to produce more. It requires them to stop believing they have to personally produce every unit of value that’s in the room to begin with.
Growth doesn’t always mean producing more. Sometimes it means recognizing how much value is already sitting in the room, unused.
I once worked with an independent consultant who ran expert-led workshops for corporate clients, and who was convinced the market wouldn’t support a meaningfully higher price. They knew their material well — they understood the problems their clients brought into the room and had real expertise to offer. Their hesitation wasn’t about competence. It was that they saw a ceiling: only so much information could fit into a workshop, only so many hours were available, and in their mind, charging more meant personally producing more.
I thought the problem sat somewhere else. They were treating themself as the only source of value in the room, and that assumption was limiting the workshop before the market ever got a chance to weigh in.
Expert-led businesses fall into this trap easily. The expert learns something, organizes it, presents it, and charges for access to that knowledge — a perfectly understandable model, right up until growth becomes a question of personal output. More research. More material. Longer sessions. More preparation. The expert turns into a factory, and the only way to produce more is to run the factory harder. I didn’t think that was what their clients actually needed. The people attending these sessions worked inside real companies. They managed people, navigated difficult conversations, interpreted policy, made mistakes, solved problems — and carried all of that experience into the room with them. The workshop just wasn’t making use of it yet.
So I started thinking less about what additional material they needed to prepare, and more about what kind of interaction the room itself could create. What happened if participants brought their own challenges into the discussion? If one person’s problem helped another recognize something developing in their own company? If someone described an approach that had worked, someone else pushed back on it, and the consultant helped the room understand why the two approaches produced different results? The goal wasn’t to turn the workshop into an unstructured conversation — their expertise still mattered, arguably more than before, since someone still needed to ask the right questions, catch bad information, and translate individual stories into something the whole room could use. But that role is different from standing at the front of the room trying to personally manufacture every insight, and the distinction between being the source of value and creating the conditions for value to emerge became the actual redesign.
That reframing changed the economic logic underneath the offer. The original model implicitly said the workshop’s value depended on how much expertise the expert could personally deliver in the time allotted. The alternative said the value depended on what people understood, confronted, exchanged, and carried back into their organizations afterward — and those aren’t the same measure. One puts the entire burden on the expert’s output. The other asks the expert to design a better system, and I’ve come to see the same pattern in founders who think every client relationship has to run through them, or managers who think leadership means providing every answer personally.
Once the offering itself changed, the pricing question got easier to examine honestly. They were afraid a higher price would push the service past what the market would bear, and I took that seriously — then looked at what comparable offerings in the market were actually charging. Several were more rigid and offered less real interaction than what this workshop was now capable of creating, which raised the actual question worth asking: was the market really refusing to support a higher price, or had uncertainty been standing in for evidence the whole time? Those are different problems, and I don’t think confidence alone creates value — the offer still has to deserve the price. But the reverse trap is just as real: a business can improve the offer, gather evidence the market supports a different position, and still hesitate because self-perception hasn’t caught up with what the business has actually become.
That was the more interesting problem to solve. The underlying question was never really will customers pay this — it was closer to am I allowed to ask for this, and the answer to that isn’t encouragement. It’s an argument solid enough that encouragement becomes unnecessary. Comparable offerings already in the market, at higher price points and with less depth, made that argument for us. After the redesign — the workshop content, the pricing, the broader structure of the business — traction increased in multiples over the course of the following year.
The lasting lesson wasn’t that people should simply charge more for what they do. It’s that value can be designed, not just delivered. Expertise doesn’t shrink when it makes room for other people to contribute to the room — it can matter more by becoming less central to every single moment of it. Sometimes growth doesn’t require an expert to produce more. It requires them to stop believing they have to personally produce every unit of value that’s in the room to begin with.
Growth doesn’t always mean producing more. Sometimes it means recognizing how much value is already sitting in the room, unused.
I once worked with an independent consultant who ran expert-led workshops for corporate clients, and who was convinced the market wouldn’t support a meaningfully higher price. They knew their material well — they understood the problems their clients brought into the room and had real expertise to offer. Their hesitation wasn’t about competence. It was that they saw a ceiling: only so much information could fit into a workshop, only so many hours were available, and in their mind, charging more meant personally producing more.
I thought the problem sat somewhere else. They were treating themself as the only source of value in the room, and that assumption was limiting the workshop before the market ever got a chance to weigh in.
Expert-led businesses fall into this trap easily. The expert learns something, organizes it, presents it, and charges for access to that knowledge — a perfectly understandable model, right up until growth becomes a question of personal output. More research. More material. Longer sessions. More preparation. The expert turns into a factory, and the only way to produce more is to run the factory harder. I didn’t think that was what their clients actually needed. The people attending these sessions worked inside real companies. They managed people, navigated difficult conversations, interpreted policy, made mistakes, solved problems — and carried all of that experience into the room with them. The workshop just wasn’t making use of it yet.
So I started thinking less about what additional material they needed to prepare, and more about what kind of interaction the room itself could create. What happened if participants brought their own challenges into the discussion? If one person’s problem helped another recognize something developing in their own company? If someone described an approach that had worked, someone else pushed back on it, and the consultant helped the room understand why the two approaches produced different results? The goal wasn’t to turn the workshop into an unstructured conversation — their expertise still mattered, arguably more than before, since someone still needed to ask the right questions, catch bad information, and translate individual stories into something the whole room could use. But that role is different from standing at the front of the room trying to personally manufacture every insight, and the distinction between being the source of value and creating the conditions for value to emerge became the actual redesign.
That reframing changed the economic logic underneath the offer. The original model implicitly said the workshop’s value depended on how much expertise the expert could personally deliver in the time allotted. The alternative said the value depended on what people understood, confronted, exchanged, and carried back into their organizations afterward — and those aren’t the same measure. One puts the entire burden on the expert’s output. The other asks the expert to design a better system, and I’ve come to see the same pattern in founders who think every client relationship has to run through them, or managers who think leadership means providing every answer personally.
Once the offering itself changed, the pricing question got easier to examine honestly. They were afraid a higher price would push the service past what the market would bear, and I took that seriously — then looked at what comparable offerings in the market were actually charging. Several were more rigid and offered less real interaction than what this workshop was now capable of creating, which raised the actual question worth asking: was the market really refusing to support a higher price, or had uncertainty been standing in for evidence the whole time? Those are different problems, and I don’t think confidence alone creates value — the offer still has to deserve the price. But the reverse trap is just as real: a business can improve the offer, gather evidence the market supports a different position, and still hesitate because self-perception hasn’t caught up with what the business has actually become.
That was the more interesting problem to solve. The underlying question was never really will customers pay this — it was closer to am I allowed to ask for this, and the answer to that isn’t encouragement. It’s an argument solid enough that encouragement becomes unnecessary. Comparable offerings already in the market, at higher price points and with less depth, made that argument for us. After the redesign — the workshop content, the pricing, the broader structure of the business — traction increased in multiples over the course of the following year.
The lasting lesson wasn’t that people should simply charge more for what they do. It’s that value can be designed, not just delivered. Expertise doesn’t shrink when it makes room for other people to contribute to the room — it can matter more by becoming less central to every single moment of it. Sometimes growth doesn’t require an expert to produce more. It requires them to stop believing they have to personally produce every unit of value that’s in the room to begin with.