unicolet.org

My uncle taught me this thing when I was a teenager about how he used to price his business. He ran a plumbing company. What he did was basically the first 75% of hours were priced at 100%, so the regular rate, but at 75 to 80% [of hours], he would increase the rate; at 80 to 100% [of hours], he’d increase it, and at over 100% of a normal work week, he’d increase the rate even more . And he was super transparent with people about this, like, “I’m really busy right now. I hate to give you this quote, but to do the job properly, here’s what we’d have to price it at.” From  Ryan Holiday: How to Win the War with Yourself [The Knowledge Project Ep. #208]  

I recently mentioned in my best of 2024 this quote from  Ryan Holiday: How to Win the War with Yourself [The Knowledge Project Ep. #208] : The problem is that the financial upside is always clear. Opportunity costs are sometimes clear, but often not clear. today I read this The Register article about Pat Gelsinger "resignation" from Intel. It mentions some of the opportunity costs that Intel got wrong (in hindsight, and many years later): The Itanium was going to be the high-end architecture, so there was no need for 64 bit extensions to x86, no matter how hard Microsoft asked. AMD disagreed, forcing Intel to grumpily adopt its standard. Atom was going to be the portable processor of choice, so let's flog off the Arm license. I find it always extremely fascinating to read about these stories, and hopefully learn something from them. And I think, in this case, it's really as Ryan Holiday put it: the financial upside is always clear (and sometimes too optimistic) and ...