01
The Price Answer
- One page and a desk card
- Anyone who quotes
We help owner-run businesses get paid for being good.
The Price Study is a six-week engagement for owner-run companies.
We interview your customers, including the ones who left, and build the answer your estimators give when a buyer brings up a cheaper quote.
Run one number before we talk.
- discount tax
1. what you pay each year when your people cut price to match a cheaper quote.
The Price Study runs at one fixed price, agreed before we start. Your discount tax will tell you whether that price makes sense.
Bring this number to the call (opens a scheduling window)Discount tax calculator
12
Six weeks from now, your price holds when you're not in the room.
Your estimator
- Hears a lower number, reaches for “quality,” and discounts.
- Names what the cheaper quote leaves out, in your customers' words, and stands firm on the number.
Your quote
- Reads like the other guy's, so the buyer compares totals.
- Shows a buyer what the difference pays for, with nobody from your company in the room.
02
The New Quote
- Your proposal, rebuilt in your own tool
- Your estimators
You
- Guess why customers leave, and defend the price yourself.
- Know which lost bids came down to price and which didn't.
03
The Customer Record
- Six to eight recorded customer interviews
- You, and whoever runs the company next
What you'll hold at the end.
You keep the files in a folder you own, plus two printed copies bound as one book. The New Quote template stays in Word, Excel, or your estimating software.
Price Answer page Desk card Quote before and after The closed Price Study book
Your team writes down “price.” Your customers tell us something else.
For each customer who left, you see the reason your team recorded next to the reason the customer gave us. A two-page summary shows which losses came down to price and which came down to response time, the quote, or something else.
- Regional property manager (sample)
- Price
- “Your guy took eight days to send the quote. The other one came the next morning.”
We ask the people you can't.
Customers who left won't tell you why. Your estimators won't tell you when they discount.
We don't work for you, so both talk to us.
How we treat your customers
- You introduce us. We contact only people you've named.
- We reach out three times across two channels, and you see each attempt in a log.
- We ask permission before we record, and we sell your customers nothing.
How we treat your team
We sit down with your estimators to learn how a price conversation goes. We don't grade anyone, and we don't attribute what an estimator tells us by name.
Six weeks, and what each one asks of you.
Week 0Site day
- Spend a day in your building. Interview you with the door closed, then your longest-tenured people and whoever quotes. Walk through the bids you lost this year.
- Give us the day. Send customer names and warm intros by day 3.
Week 1–3Interviews
- Interview six to eight customers: some who stayed, some who left, some who came back.
- Nothing beyond the intros.
Week 4Build and test
- Write the Price Answer and rebuild your quote.
- Use both on two or three live quotes. Give us 15 minutes with whoever handled each one.
Week 5Presentation
- Two hours at your office. Your estimators say the Price Answer back in their own words before we leave.
- Bring whoever runs sales and operations, your estimators, and whoever might run the company next.
No live quotes in week 4? We role-play the price conversation with your people, using real objections from the interviews.
- One site day, a handful of introductions, a few 15-minute debriefs, and a two-hour presentation.
After the presentation, you get one round of revisions and our view on what to fix next. The engagement ends there. We don't do retainers or monthly reporting.
We've spent years inside businesses like yours.
Old Growth works with owner-run companies that have been around long enough to get good: contractors and trades, machine shops, printers, manufacturers, distributors. In these businesses, the buyer holds your number up next to someone else's before deciding.
A small team runs each study. One lead interviewer stays with you from site day through the presentation, and a writer and a designer build the work.
“We kept getting compared to guys with a few mowers and a trailer.
Now customers see the difference before we ever send a price.”
What if your old customers won't talk to us?
We won't build the work on fewer than five interviews.
If former customers don't respond, we move down a fixed list: customers who left more than a year ago, then prospects who took a quote elsewhere, then the people who refer work to you. If we're still short, we add two weeks at no cost. If we're short after that, we build from what we have and show you where the gaps are.
Who isn't a good fit for this?
- Owners who want a website, logo, video, or campaign.
- Companies that win work through sealed low bids with no conversation.
- Owners who won't introduce us to customers who left. Those interviews are the core of the work.
- Teams that won't change how they write quotes.
- Anyone looking for ongoing sales coaching or a retainer.
Start with 20 minutes.
We'll talk through the last few bids you lost and what the customer said. By the end of the call, you'll know whether the Price Study fits your company. If it doesn't, we'll say so.
- 20 min
- Phone call
- Your discount tax, or your average discount and how many quotes a month turn into a price conversation
- If the study fits, we send a one-page proposal with scope, start date, and price within two business days
- Nashville, TN