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Why That Number Isn't What You Should Be Asking?

What does the market bear? What does your competition charge? What do you think you can get away with? These are the three questions most founders ask when they set a price, and Ed Lee has spent the last decade watching them lead people straight into underpricing themselves.

Ed is the author of The Last Mile of Trust and has worked with over two thousand companies on how they price what they sell. For years he watched founders carry the same insecurity into every pricing conversation, shrinking the number the moment a client hesitated. Then he started to see that insecurity eroding the very thing that made his clients worth paying for.

In this conversation, Ed makes the case that what someone pays is directly tied to what they believe they are getting, not to what the comps say. A consultant pricing at $3,000 because that is what the market shows, while delivering $50,000 worth of transformation, does not read as a deal. It reads as a mismatch, and mismatches make buyers walk away, not the quoted price. Ed shares how to find the right number for your business. It’s not the number he says, it’s how much they trust you.

Ed and I have worked together for the last year, and what stands out about him is that he is unapologetic about needing time with his family. His business supports his life, not the other way around, and I watched him live with that friction and resolve it one step at a time. The friction he feels when charging what he is worth is the same friction he faces every time he puts his family first. It’s an investment for him.

If you are tempted to price something by asking what everyone else charges instead of what you are worth, this episode is worth a listen. You will walk away with a way to find your number, and proof that facing friction instead of running from it is what makes the number hold.

Chapters:
00:00 Cold open — Pricing builds trust, not just numbers.
00:46 Intro — Beate welcomes Edward Lee, author of The Last Mile of Trust.
03:32 The friction myth — How “frictionless” can erode your secret sauce.
04:52 Price as identity — Your number signals value, impact, and trust.
08:39 Adobe case — Subscriptions, AI add‑ons, and when features backfire.
12:40 Pricing as a filter — Qualify ideal customers; repel discount‑seekers.
14:41 Values and balance — Family, presence, and the workout analogy.
23:33 Evolving the offer — How Ed reshaped Hello Advisor’s pricing and model.
27:14 Book + key takeaway — Where to get it, toolkit bonus, and why price is the last mile of trust.

About Ed Lee

Ed Lee is the founder and CEO of HelloAdvisr, a pricing strategy consultancy, and the author of The Last Mile of Trust. He has advised more than 100 high-growth companies on pricing and monetization, with a combined valuation exceeding $1.4 billion. He teaches at UCLA, serves as expert-in-residence at Oxford University's Saïd Business School, and hosts the Margin for Error podcast.

Connect with Ed Lee

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How Maeve Ferguson stopped fighting the inner work and built a business that Harvard professors apply to join.

Maeve Ferguson builds diagnostic assessment funnels for the highest end of the thought leadership market. Harvard professors. New York Times bestselling authors. She is data-obsessed, systems-driven, and the last person you would expect to credit her business transformation to weekly identity reprogramming sessions and subliminal audios.

She thought hypnosis was training someone to be a monkey on a stage.

What Maeve discovered, after years of having the right strategy and the wrong clients, is that the business is her mirror. She was not attracting the wrong people because her offer was wrong. She was attracting exactly who matched the identity she was putting out. When she changed her identity everything changed.

I brought Maeve on because her story is the proof of concept for everything this show is built on. You cannot out-strategy an identity that does not match where you are trying to go. The inner work is not the soft option. It is the only thing that makes the outer work land.

We also go deep into the messy middle , the void between who you were and who you are becoming. Maeve moved through her transition in a few months. I am in it right now. If you are somewhere in that space of a personal transformation, this conversation will explain a lot.

Listen to the episode and find out.

About Maeve Ferguson

Maeve Ferguson is The Authority Architect, the strategist behind the diagnostic infrastructure that transforms established thought leaders from 'respected but replaceable' to Category of One.

Creator of The Client Engine™, Maeve works with 7-10 figure thought leaders, bestselling authors, and industry authorities, including Dr Arthur Brooks, Jen Kem, the Hyatts, Mike Kim and Selena Soo, building the systems that turn intellectual property into infrastructure that qualifies, converts, and scales without them in the room.

With a background in Big Four accounting and private equity, Maeve brings data-driven precision to an industry drowning in tactics. Her methodology helps clients build diagnostic authority that rivals Myers-Briggs and StrengthsFinder in sophistication.
She runs her consultancy from a working horse farm in Northern Ireland whilst raising two young children. Proof that brilliance with infrastructure actually works.

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Alice Kao on daily authorship, childhood trauma, and six climbing gyms.

When Alice Kao was three years old, her mother walked out the door carrying two large suitcases and did not turn around. When she was fourteen, her mother dropped her off alone in America near a school with some cash and left. Alice spent the next thirty years running a story about what that meant , that she was not smart enough, not pretty enough, not worth staying for. That story became the engine. It drove her through surviving alone as a teenager in a country where she did not belong, through a devastating heartbreak in Hong Kong, through building Sender One Climbing into six locations across Southern California and raising six million dollars from 115 community investors.

Then she found out the way she interpreted her story was dead wrong. The facts were not what she had believed for thirty years. The wound was real. The story was not.

And the voice that generated it is still there every single morning. It still wants to tell that story.

If you have ever woken up and felt the weight of a story you cannot shake, the one that says you are not smart enough, not ready, not worth the room you are about to walk into , this episode is the one you need to hear. Because Alice did not heal the wound. She built a daily discipline around deciding what it means. Every morning she chooses who is at the keyboard through authorship and it is the most underrated business skill a founder can develop. Write your own story.

In this episode we go into the phone call that broke the story open, the morning practice Alice has built around narrative authorship, and why imposter syndrome does not have to be gone before you can build something extraordinary.

About Alice Kao

Alice discovered climbing while living and working in London in 2008, following a difficult breakup. She was inspired by the healing and self-discovery that climbing brought her, which led her to co-found Sender One in 2011 upon returning to the United States with her business partners.

Alice hates following rules but loves rallying people to believe in an idea. She wears her heart on her sleeve and is not afraid to cry in meetings. She was born and raised in Taiwan and moved to the US when she was 14. Alice's superpower is her ability to ask for help relentlessly, because no one has all the answers!

Connect with Alice Kao

Website | LinkedIn

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We appreciate you, thank you for listening. Let us know in the comments what resonated in this episode, we want to hear from you.

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