MBA-led pricing strategy consultancy from Phil Martin MBA — 13+ years inside the UK home care software industry watching agencies underprice their work because they costed up from labour, not down from what the customer was actually willing to pay. Van Westendorp PSM, value-based pricing frameworks, Good-Better-Best packaging, willingness-to-pay research. Three formats: a one-day Pricing Audit, a 2–3 week Pricing Strategy Sprint with a written report, or a 6–8 week Pricing Strategy Build with new packaging shipped.
Founder-led pricing strategy consultancy based in Worcester, working with UK growth-stage SMEs across home care, hospitality, trades, professional services and B2B SaaS. Specialism: turning MBA pricing theory and 13+ years of sector pattern recognition into price points your customers will actually pay — and a packaging structure that gets them to pick the tier you want them to pick.
Same MBA-grade thinking applied at three depths. The right one depends on whether you need a directional read, a defensible strategy, or new packaging actually shipped.
Calendar-bound — max 2 active Pricing Strategy Sprints + Builds in flight at any time. Pricing Audits scheduled in monthly clusters. Waitlist when full.
For a typical UK service business with 10% net margin, a 1% price increase that holds (no volume drop) flows almost entirely to the bottom line. A 1% cost cut adds about 1% to profit. A 1% volume increase adds about 4–5% (because volume brings variable costs with it). Pricing is the single most efficient lever on the P&L — and the one most SMEs touch least.
Most UK SMEs price by adding a margin to their cost base. That tells you the floor — what you must charge to survive. It tells you nothing about the ceiling — what customers would actually pay. The gap between the two is the margin you're giving away.
Willingness to pay is constructed, not discovered. The same service can sell for £500 or £5,000 depending on how it's framed, what it's compared against, and what alternatives the customer is considering. Value-based pricing is the framework for setting the frame deliberately.
Good-Better-Best structures consistently outperform single-tier and two-tier offers. The middle tier anchors. The top tier makes the middle tier feel reasonable. The bottom tier captures price-sensitive segments without contaminating the rest. Most SMEs ship single-price offers and then wonder why customers haggle.
If two out of three quotes turn into customers, the market is telling you the price is too low. The right win-rate for a differentiated service is roughly 30–50%. Higher than that and the price is leaving margin on the table on the customers who said yes. Lower than that and either the positioning or the price needs work.
UK CPI between 2022 and 2026 ran cumulative ~22%. If your prices haven't moved 22%, your real margin has fallen by that much. Most SMEs have raised prices once in three years, by 5–10%. The other 12–17% came directly off the bottom line.
Of UK service businesses we audit, the median existing-customer price increase that gets accepted without churn is 12–18% with the right communication. Most owners assume the ceiling is 3–5% and then wonder why margin keeps eroding. Communication design is half the lever.
Six frameworks that consistently produce defensible pricing decisions when used in combination. The Sprint covers the first four. The Build adds the last two when the offer is complex enough to need them.
A four-question survey run across 30–100 customers and prospects. Triangulates the indifference price (what the market sees as fair), the optimal price point (revenue maximiser), the point of marginal cheapness (below which quality is doubted) and the point of marginal expensiveness (above which price becomes a deal-breaker). The most defensible pricing-research method that doesn't require a research budget.
Price from the outcome, not the input. Anchored on what your service produces for the customer (in £ or in pain avoided) and benchmarked against their next best alternative. Recovers 15–30% margin for differentiated services that price cost-plus.
JTBD interviews surface the underlying job the customer is hiring you to do — and the alternatives they'd hire instead. Pricing against the alternative (not against the competition) typically discovers a 2–4× headroom most owners didn't know they had.
Three tiers, deliberately constructed. Good captures price-sensitive customers without contaminating the premium offer. Best anchors the price ceiling. Better sells most often. The anchoring effect alone typically lifts average revenue per customer 12–25%.
How much volume moves when price moves. Estimated from historical data where available, modelled from sector benchmarks where not. Tells you whether you should price up to maximise margin or hold to maximise volume — they're rarely the same answer.
When the offer has multiple priceable dimensions (feature bundling, contract length, service level, support tier) conjoint reveals which combinations customers value most and what they'd pay for each. Used in the Build format when packaging gets complex enough to need it.
Most engagements at Psychemeta touch pricing eventually. The question is whether pricing is the whole engagement or one chapter of it.
Pricing is the specific question on the table. You suspect underpricing, you're planning a price increase, you're launching a new tier, you're packaging a productised service. You want depth on one decision, not breadth across many.
Pricing is one of several questions. You also need to look at unit economics, recruitment cost, market positioning, or M&A readiness. The Diagnostic Sprint can scope pricing alongside one or two adjacent topics. Picks one of the six business consultancy focus areas; pricing is included.
You want pricing oversight as an ongoing function. Quarterly price reviews, packaging revisions when the market shifts, willingness-to-pay tracking on new offers. Pricing strategy becomes part of the recurring strategic relationship rather than a one-off project.
You're a UK domiciliary home care agency. The bundle's MBA-led advisory tier includes pricing strategy as part of the package — visit pricing, self-funder vs council-fee pricing, packaging for live-in care, retention pricing on existing clients.
Most pricing consultants are either MBAs with no operational depth or operators with no analytical framework. The combination is rarer — and produces decisions that survive contact with the customers actually being charged.
Porter's value chain, Christensen's JTBD, sensitivity modelling, cost-volume-profit, Van Westendorp PSM, conjoint analysis — the analytical toolkit applied to your problem, not name-dropped in a slide.
Phil spent 13+ years inside the UK home care software industry — selling, supporting and implementing for hundreds of domiciliary agencies — before founding Psychemeta and building three SaaS products. That's a wide cross-section of how UK service businesses actually price (and underprice) themselves. The patterns generalise; the home care lens just makes them especially visible.
The Principal does the work. You're not buying a team of associates while a partner manages the relationship. One named lead from kickoff to deliverable on every engagement.
Maximum 2 active Sprints and Builds at any time. Pricing Audits clustered monthly. When full, waitlist. Quality is bounded by attention; attention is bounded by client count.
Start with a Pricing Audit if you want a quick directional read. Move to the Sprint when you need a defensible strategy. Email the Principal directly if you're not sure which format fits — we'll come back with a recommendation, a proposed start date, and an honest read on whether the audit is worth doing at all.
A pricing strategy is the set of decisions a business makes about how it converts the value it delivers into the price it charges. It covers four things: the price point itself (what number on the invoice), the structure (what's bundled vs unbundled, what tiers exist), the basis (cost-plus, value-based, competitive, dynamic) and the experimentation loop (how prices change over time as the business learns what customers will actually pay).
Most UK SMEs default to cost-plus pricing — add up the cost, add a margin, charge that. That leaves 15-30% of margin on the table because customers don't price based on your cost; they price based on the alternative they'd choose if they didn't buy from you.
Cost-plus starts from your inputs (labour, materials, overheads) and adds a margin. Value-based pricing starts from your customer's outcome — what is the result worth to them, what's their next best alternative, what would they pay if you didn't exist.
Cost-plus is internally focused and almost always underprices a differentiated service. Value-based requires customer research (interviews, willingness-to-pay studies, Van Westendorp PSM) and then prices against the outcome, not the input. For most service businesses with a credible differentiator, value-based recovers 15–30% margin that cost-plus leaves behind.
Two to three weeks. Customer interviews (4–8), competitive benchmark research, Van Westendorp Price Sensitivity Meter run on your current and proposed prices, packaging analysis (Good-Better-Best fit assessment), unit economics check against the proposed structure.
Delivered as a 15–25 page written report containing: current pricing diagnosis, willingness-to-pay range from the PSM data, recommended price points with rationale, proposed packaging structure, a 90-day implementation plan, and a sensitivity table showing margin impact at each recommended point. Followed by a 90-minute leadership readout call.
We recommend price points with supporting evidence — willingness-to-pay data, competitive benchmarks, sensitivity analysis. The decision is yours. The Sprint and Build formats deliver a recommendation; you sign off before any communication to customers.
The reason: we're consulting on your strategy, not running your commercial decisions. Pricing is one of the highest-stakes decisions an SME makes and the owner has to own it, even when the advice is rigorous.
Depends on the sector, channel and price point. UK B2B service businesses commonly see £40–£250 cost per qualified lead from paid channels (Google Ads, LinkedIn) and £8–£60 from organic SEO at maturity. Cost per closed customer is typically 3–10× the qualified-lead cost.
The right benchmark is not 'industry average' — it's what does CAC need to be for the unit economics to work at your price. If your average customer is worth £5,000 lifetime value, a £400 CAC is healthy. If they're worth £50,000, a £4,000 CAC is healthy. Pricing strategy and acquisition cost are the same equation viewed from two sides — most businesses get them wrong by setting price independently of CAC, or by chasing low CAC without checking what it implies for retention.
Probably. Most UK SMEs we audit have not raised prices in 2–3+ years. CPI between 2022 and 2026 ran cumulative ~22%; if your prices haven't moved 22%, your real margin has fallen.
Beyond inflation: if your win-rate is above 60%, you are almost certainly priced too low. If existing customers never push back on renewal increases, you are priced too low. The right question is not 'should we' but 'by how much and how do we communicate it'. The Pricing Strategy Sprint answers both.
Two methods, used together. Van Westendorp Price Sensitivity Meter — a structured survey of 30–100 customers and prospects that asks four price-anchored questions and triangulates the optimal point and the indifference range. And direct customer interviews (4–8 depth interviews with current and former customers) to surface the language they use to describe value and the alternatives they considered.
For larger projects we layer in a conjoint analysis if the offer has multiple feature dimensions that could be repriced. The output is a defensible price range, not a single number.
Yes — and home care is the sector Phil has the deepest pricing pattern recognition in. 13+ years inside the UK home care software industry meant watching hundreds of domiciliary agencies set prices, mostly badly. The two common mistakes:
The Home Care Bundle includes pricing strategy as part of the MBA-led advisory tier. Standalone Pricing Sprints for home care agencies also work — start with the Audit if you want a quick read.