Pricing Strategies for Creative Agencies and Consulting Firms

If you are the head of a consulting firm or creative agency that does brilliant work, do you recognise any of these:

  • having your margins chiselled away;
  • being price-shopped against inferior competition;
  • losing out to competitors who are more expensive but no better than you;
  • feeling generally that your pricing model is short-changing you?

If any of that feels familiar, watch the video and read on.

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About Me

Once upon a time, I was the very frustrated commercial director of a marketing agency.

We helped global pharmaceutical companies launch new products.

Hundreds of millions of dollars spent getting the products to launch. Billions riding on the success of the launch.

We significantly moved the odds for them.

That made us like an investment bank advising on a major transaction.

So WHY were we not as rich and powerful as Goldman Sachs, but instead spent time arguing with junior product managers over the cost of an illustration?

I moved on from that job, but the question of how to get paid what you are really worth stuck in my mind.

I looked at the concept of value-based pricing. You are probably familiar with it. You may quite possibly have tried it yourself.

If you have tried it yourself you probably found, as I did, that it’s a lovely theory but quite hard to make work in practice. Most discussion of value-based pricing says something like “do great work and be clear how valuable your services are,” and stops there.

That’s OK as far as it goes, but it’s only step 1. You need steps 2 and 3 to make it work. I now have a process with all three steps, which I explain in the video.


One digital agency was able to raise the fee for one of its services from £3-5k to £46k and find work it was doing for free which became a £10k/month retainer.

If you’d like to talk, you can fix a call via the contacts page.


Past Lives (I have several):

I started with a degree in maths from Cambridge, then accountancy, with a series of finance director roles – a total of 6 over 14 years.

Then solo consultant,:

Published two books, one translated into 7 different languages.

Column for Management Today for 8 years, Forbes contributor for 3 years.

Taught behavioural economics to investment bankers, gave a presentation at the French Ministry of Higher Education in Paris.

In total I’ve worked in 15 different countries in 4 different languages.

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