Carragee Consulting

Q&A with Daniel Meyer

Interview guideline – New Linkedin Post format

About the interviewee – very brief description (pitch) about the person:

• Current role and major previous career steps

I collaborate with pricing consultants through EBITDA Catalyst and data experts at Action Analytics on a wide variety of strategic pricing and analytics projects.

• Field of expertise (Industry, B2C vs. B2B, etc.)

A big portion of my work, especially in Consulting has been B2B focused, in industrial manufacturing and distribution, but early on I worked for an airline, a university and recently even a plumbing company.

• Years in business 17
• Other achievements

In the last five years I’ve been focused on visual communications, programming and ML.  I love new technology and trying to help companies figure out our how to adapt their processes with the smart adoption of new tools, methods and frameworks .

Q: What are the most important factors You consider when determining the price of a product or service?

A: People respond to incentives – My first college class was Economics and since then my way of thinking has been shaped by the battle between the rational mind and the reality of human behavior.

If I had to boil it down I consider first– who is the buyer vs the user and in what ways are they not aligned? What are compliments, substitutes for and outcomes from buying what I’m pricing.

In B2B pricing you definitely cannot sell on features, you’re working with professional procurement who isn’t your natural enemy, but certainly an imperfect conduit.

Q: Can You share a mistake or learning from Your career related to pricing?

The most humiliating mistake I made was as a first year analyst at NWA.  I was being shown a way to make mass price changes for hundreds of thousands of fares and I was supposed to lower all prices by $15 in response to competition.

When I came in the next day I discovered I had deleted old prices without adding in the new ones because part of the process was incomplete – leaving the entire domestic network uncompetitive overnight.

It taught me the power of systems, SOPs and training.  Humans make mistakes and your systems need to find the balance between [speed + flexibility] and [rigor + accuracy + repeatability].

Q: What’s Your take on AI in the context of Pricing?

A: I so excited about the potential.  I have a lot of thoughts on this topic I’d like to get into it more deeply, but I’ll try to be brief…

It’s not a panacea – you still need foundational capabilities like good data and decision frameworks.  The only thing more dangerous than bad strategy is bad strategy executed quickly, inflexibly and at scale.

Companies are far from extracting all the benefits of the digital revolution and standard ML use cases. They will do well to continue to invest in those rather than try and skip to neutral networks, LLMs and AI out of FOMO or uninformed executive pressure.

I’m hot on using vector databases to assemble data from across systems and bring previously hard to use unstructured data sources together.  Optimization, anomaly detection, sentiment analysis the list goes on and on of the great work you can do!

Q: What is a company You admire for their approach to Pricing?

A: This question stumped me for a while.  Pricing is so multifaceted and it’s not a one shot deal.  You can price well in moments of time, given certain conditions and then lose the thread at moments notice.

I’m going to chose to highlight IKEA because they have been a durable brand, that has had success outside their home market and they make you think things are inexpensive even when they are probably more similarly priced with same-quality alternatives than you think.

Q: Best general business, career, or life advice You would give to Your best friend?

A: Make friends and try to have fun and learn something.  For most people, your jobs consumes too much of your life to be happy generally without being happy at work.