Business By Design

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Your happiest clients are often your best source of new business, yet most owners leave referrals to chance. Mena and I walk through a referral engine framework: earn advocacy first, ask at the right moment, and make the introduction low risk.
You can buy attention, but you have to earn advocacy. Fyre Festival's influencer spend couldn't cover for a promise it never delivered
The right time to ask is straight after a client acknowledges the value they've received. Swap "do you know anyone?" for a question tied to the specific problem you just solved
Referring is risky for the client, so position introductions as a no-obligation second opinion, make the process simple, and commit to treating every referral with the same respect
If you're working out how to get consistent leads for your business, start with the clients you've already delighted. A pricing strategy for small business that protects margin funds the experience people talk about, while discounting trains clients to wait for a sale
Chapters
00:00 - Why customer advocacy needs a system
 02:10 - Buying attention vs earning advocacy: Fyre Festival
 04:32 - The right moment to ask for a referral
 07:24 - A better question than "do you know anyone?"
 09:46 - Why referrals feel risky, and how to reduce that risk
 14:34 - Pricing power and the advocacy flywheel
 18:10 - Five questions to test your advocacy system
 21:22 - Our 200th episode, and what's next: the Engine pillar
References
Ep 199: Why are your best customers quietly leaving? 
Ep 198: Trust is the real thing your customer is buying 
Ep 197: Pricing is a system, not a sticker 
Ep 196: Pricing strategy: are you a price maker or a price taker? 
If this episode resonated with you, please leave a rating on your favourite podcast platform. It helps us reach more incredible listeners like you. Thank you for being a part of the journey!

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Work with Mena & Stuart's team: At ProSolution Private Clients we encourage clients to adopt a holistic and evidence-based approach when making financial decisions. Visit our website.

Follow us: Stuart: Twitter/X and LinkedIn.  Mena: LinkedIn

IMPORTANT: This podcast provides general information about finance, taxes, and credit. This means that the content does not consider your specific objectives, financial situation, or needs. It is crucial for you to assess whether the information is suitable for your circumstances before taking any actions based on it. If you find yourself uncertain about the relevance or your specific needs, it is advisable to seek advice from a licensed and trustworthy professional.

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Here's the uncomfortable truth: by the time a customer tells you they're leaving, you're usually too late to do anything about it. The decision was made months earlier, when they quietly began questioning the value; nobody noticed, and the cancellation email just makes you the last to know. 
In this final episode of the Value series, Stuart and Mena reframe churn as the most honest feedback your business receives, if you're willing to understand what's behind it.
Mena explains why retention starts at onboarding, not the renewal conversation, with the goal being to make value visible as fast as possible, closing the gap where doubt creeps in (Canva as the example). 
Stuart offers four lenses for reading every departure: value, trust, fit, and friction, using MoviePass to show how a single churn number can hide several problems at once. Mena insists each category needs a named owner (with Ritz-Carlton's $2,000 staff discretion showing what real authority looks like).
Stuart then explores when losing customers is healthy: Nike's wholesale pullback and its telling reversal, and Mena covers how to end relationships respectfully, protecting your reputation. 
If this episode resonated with you, please leave a rating on your favourite podcast platform. It helps us reach more incredible listeners like you. Thank you for being a part of the journey!

Click here to subscribe to our weekly email.

Work with Mena & Stuart's team: At ProSolution Private Clients we encourage clients to adopt a holistic and evidence-based approach when making financial decisions. Visit our website.

Follow us: Stuart: Twitter/X and LinkedIn.  Mena: LinkedIn

IMPORTANT: This podcast provides general information about finance, taxes, and credit. This means that the content does not consider your specific objectives, financial situation, or needs. It is crucial for you to assess whether the information is suitable for your circumstances before taking any actions based on it. If you find yourself uncertain about the relevance or your specific needs, it is advisable to seek advice from a licensed and trustworthy professional.

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Every time someone buys from you, they're taking a risk: will you do what you promised? Trust is what gives them the confidence to proceed, and without it, a great product, sensible pricing, and sharp marketing still won't close the sale. This episode unpacks how trust is built, borrowed, and lost.
Mena explains why price and frequency determine how much trust a purchase requires: a $4 coffee versus a $40,000 renovation, and why your sales process must reflect the risk the customer feels (Guzman y Gomez versus a Koala mattress). 
Stuart introduces the trust equation: credibility, reliability, and intimacy, divided by self-interest, with Vanguard's ownership structure as a striking example of how low self-interest can be built into the model rather than merely claimed.
Mena draws the line between borrowed credibility, which opens the door, and earned trust, built through direct experience and the idea of a "trust account" where deposits and withdrawals are never equal. 
Stuart offers four practical ways to make it easier for customers to trust you, and Mena connects consistency back to your systems and why delivering well 80% of the time still leaves customers worrying.
If this episode resonated with you, please leave a rating on your favourite podcast platform. It helps us reach more incredible listeners like you. Thank you for being a part of the journey!

Click here to subscribe to our weekly email.

Work with Mena & Stuart's team: At ProSolution Private Clients we encourage clients to adopt a holistic and evidence-based approach when making financial decisions. Visit our website.

Follow us: Stuart: Twitter/X and LinkedIn.  Mena: LinkedIn

IMPORTANT: This podcast provides general information about finance, taxes, and credit. This means that the content does not consider your specific objectives, financial situation, or needs. It is crucial for you to assess whether the information is suitable for your circumstances before taking any actions based on it. If you find yourself uncertain about the relevance or your specific needs, it is advisable to seek advice from a licensed and trustworthy professional.

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Two businesses can charge the same price today and be on opposite margin trajectories five years from now, purely because of the architecture sitting underneath that number. One gets more profitable as it grows; the other gets squeezed with every new customer. This episode is about designing that architecture on purpose.
Mena starts with discounting as a diagnostic: persistent discounting isn't a sales problem but a signal pointing at one of three causes, and J.C. Penney's disastrous 2012 "fair and square" experiment shows why you can't simply switch off years of trained customer behaviour. Stuart then unpacks the traps of unit pricing, the default model most owners fall into without choosing it, from the billable hour that punishes efficiency to the petrol-station race no one wins on quality.
Mena lays out the real choice between fixed, tiered and modular pricing (with Australia Post, Canva and IKEA as clean examples), and Stuart explains why scope is the boundary that makes any of them work. Finally, Mena drives home the cost base as a non-negotiable floor, using Porter Davis Homes' collapse under fixed-price contracts as the cautionary tale. Closes with four steps to build your own pricing system.
If this episode resonated with you, please leave a rating on your favourite podcast platform. It helps us reach more incredible listeners like you. Thank you for being a part of the journey!

Click here to subscribe to our weekly email.

Work with Mena & Stuart's team: At ProSolution Private Clients we encourage clients to adopt a holistic and evidence-based approach when making financial decisions. Visit our website.

Follow us: Stuart: Twitter/X and LinkedIn.  Mena: LinkedIn

IMPORTANT: This podcast provides general information about finance, taxes, and credit. This means that the content does not consider your specific objectives, financial situation, or needs. It is crucial for you to assess whether the information is suitable for your circumstances before taking any actions based on it. If you find yourself uncertain about the relevance or your specific needs, it is advisable to seek advice from a licensed and trustworthy professional.

Send us Fan Mail
Price is the most powerful profit lever most business owners never think about. In this episode, Mena and I break down the pricing strategy question that matters most: are you a price maker or a price taker?
A modest price rise can lift profit far more than an equivalent cost cut or volume increase, since it drops straight to the bottom line and improves your margin without touching your cost base
The value map: plot your competitors on price against perceived value to see whether your market is commoditised or genuinely open to premium pricing, and where the white space sits
If you're a price taker, there are only two real levers, deliver more value than the market expects, or build a leaner engine so you can deliver at a lower cost
Price is a signal customers read before they've experienced anything. Price too low and the market assumes the quality is low too, price too high without anything to back it up and you're exposed
Chapters
 00:16 - Why pricing is the most powerful lever on profit
 02:29 - Building the value map: price makers versus price takers
 06:21 - What to do if you land in the price taker camp
 10:15 - Price as a signal: what buyers read into it before they buy
 12:43 - When value based pricing tips into unfair pricing
 17:55 - This week's homework: map your own position
Reference links
 Last week's episode on building a brand promise is referenced directly at the open, and next week's episode on pricing models is flagged at the close. Neither title nor link is confirmed in the transcript itself, so whoever publishes this should drop in the actual links rather than me guessing at either title.
If this episode resonated with you, please leave a rating on your favourite podcast platform. It helps us reach more incredible listeners like you. Thank you for being a part of the journey!

Click here to subscribe to our weekly email.

Work with Mena & Stuart's team: At ProSolution Private Clients we encourage clients to adopt a holistic and evidence-based approach when making financial decisions. Visit our website.

Follow us: Stuart: Twitter/X and LinkedIn.  Mena: LinkedIn

IMPORTANT: This podcast provides general information about finance, taxes, and credit. This means that the content does not consider your specific objectives, financial situation, or needs. It is crucial for you to assess whether the information is suitable for your circumstances before taking any actions based on it. If you find yourself uncertain about the relevance or your specific needs, it is advisable to seek advice from a licensed and trustworthy professional.