Show Notes
Every agency owner nods along to value pricing. Most quietly go back to the rate card by the second meeting. Gareth’s argument isn’t that value pricing is wrong. It’s that nobody agreed the height of the wall first.
What we get into:
- The garden wall: why you don’t ask a builder his hourly rate, and what that means for how agencies should be pricing work
- Why the hourly rate is an admission, not a preference – what it’s really telling you when a client insists on it
- Why value pricing has become the industry’s moral high ground, and why most agencies still can’t pull it off
- The three-part con: the three hard things value pricing asks an agency to do at once, and where that falls apart
- Why AI makes this worse before it makes it better
- The walk-away test: the one question that tells you a job’s about to collapse into hours, and what to do about it
The core idea
You can’t price the value of something the client hasn’t yet defined for themselves. An undefined ask is a feeling with a budget attached, not a priceable object. Clarity has to come before value, every time.
Not because clients don’t deserve value pricing. Because you can’t sell them a wall nobody’s agreed the height of.
