Don't be too modest

Nicolas Giraud is the second CFO in this series, and that is not a coincidence but a deliberate contrast. Yorick Bloemen works as an internal CFO, full-time on his own two startups; Nicolas is the external expert, seeing multiple startups in parallel with CFO as a Service. Yorick said here earlier that pricing is rarely a financial problem and that the CFO gets a say, not the say. Nicolas reads it straight from your numbers. Founder and managing partner, since 2011 in the CFO seat at startups, scale-ups and small SMEs, often as co-founder too. Fundraising done, hired internationally, and sat through difficult boards over promises reality could not deliver. His summary of CFO as a Service: “combining entrepreneurial experience with hardcore finance knowledge.”

His starting point sets the tone. Founders who start talking about finance end up with their accountant. But “your accountant, of course, mainly looks at the past.” A growth story needs someone who looks ahead.

Pricing through the CFO’s lens

The conversation started where his work often starts: raising money. Does pricing come up in a due diligence? Often, he says, because a financial plan gets challenged, and pricing is an explicit part of it: “your revenue is your pricing times the size of your market.” The math does not get simpler than that. If you cannot defend the number in that plan, you lose the conversation guaranteed, however good the product is.

Then the conversation moved from the plan to practice. As a Service means several companies in parallel, and regularly a new client in the portfolio. The intake starts with the past, because the past tells you what is really going on. Then top line and bottom line: revenue, EBITDA, cash flow. Pricing sits in that top line, so I asked whether they look at it consciously with new clients. “Consciously? Yes and no. If there’s no problem, less consciously.” If there is a problem, pricing gets analyzed right away. A bit of an unexpected answer for me: the moment the numbers pinch, your price is on the list of suspects.

The margin leaks into goodwill

So I asked where margin gets eaten that should have been pricing power. Everything extra you do to keep a client happy often falls outside what was agreed for that price. And “that simply eats a piece of your margin. But it doesn’t necessarily get charged to that client.” It starts with the awareness itself: this is more than we agreed, so we invoice it. That does not always happen, and that is where Nicolas pushes. Two remedies: stop doing the extra work, or sell it “at a proper surcharge, so the margin actually improves.” Every extra you do not invoice is in your numbers anyway, just on the wrong side.

When I asked for the most common pricing mistake, he would not generalize, it depends on the company. Except for SaaS: “there you look at value-based pricing by definition”, because cost-plus is impossible there. What your customer is willing to pay is not in a spreadsheet, you find it by “looking and trying and experimenting”. And who watches over this in the organization? Usually the CEO, in slightly larger organizations the chief commercial officer, because they have the best feel for the market. His own role he sums up sharper than most job descriptions. At his clients there is a lot of goodwill to serve customers as well as possible, “but then it’s our role to say: yes, but we do need to make sure we get paid for this.”

Predictability above all

Long or short contracts? He did not have to think about that one: “Oh, always long term.” Same for his clients’ contracts with their customers: as long as possible. The why is the core of his trade: “much of what we do as CFOs is about creating predictability in companies.” Frédérique warned in this series about what such a long contract does to your price along the way. From the CFO seat, that risk is worth the predictability.

When I then asked for an anecdote where he learned something about pricing himself, he pushed it ahead of him: “Ooh. Ask me that one again later.”

Dare to name it

Then my standard closing question: what is so obvious to you that you look at founders and think, guys, think about this? He did not hesitate for a second: “Durf gewoon de waarde van je product te benoemen.” Simply dare to name the value of your product. And then the sentence that lingers longest: “we as Flemish entrepreneurs often have this thing of: would we dare, would we be allowed, could we really ask that much?” The solution is not a trick but an attitude. Be proud of your product and the impact it has, and play that card. Don’t be too modest, but don’t exaggerate either, the customer still has to be able to pay it. Able and willing, I added. “He can and wants to pay, yes.”

AI does not make Nicolas cheaper

Before the recording we had already talked about AI and saved it for the camera. What strikes him: everything is accelerating. “If you look at, for example, Claude Cowork, and how it integrates with Excel.” Building financial models and plans goes faster than when his team does it themselves, and exactly because of that he can focus on where his added value really sits: the long-term strategy, not the dashboards.

So I asked the cheeky question: does Nicolas get more expensive per hour, or cheaper, because I know the AI does the work? His answer came in two parts. “The price won’t change.” And then: “But you will need fewer hours of Nicolas.” The analytical work, the variance analyses, the actuals versus budget: he lets AI prepare that, so his hours go to what the CEO or the sales director should do with it. More clients in parallel, and over time, I offered, that can make him more expensive, with expertise across markets. “Yes, correct. Correct.”

This is value-based pricing, applied to itself. The value of the advice does not change because the analysis gets faster, so neither does the rate. If you sell hours, AI makes you cheaper. If you sell value, AI makes you better.

At the very end, when I asked whether there was anything I should have asked, the postponed anecdote finally came. A company decided from one day to the next to raise prices by 20%. A niche product, so the chance of customers walking away was small, but it remained “a fairly bold move”. The core: “they had actually been selling below price for years.” First experimented, only then the full roll-out, and the margin improved seriously. I did the math out loud: at plus 20% you can afford to lose one customer in five before your revenue feels it. But the real lesson was in his follow-up: the increase is the occasion to talk to your customer about value. “And that comes back to daring to demonstrate the strength of your product.”

For five guests, this series looked for where pricing sits: in the contract, in the roadmap, in the budget model, in the product, in the P&L. With Nicolas it ends where it should end: with the question whether you dare to speak your value out loud.

The full conversation with Nicolas Giraud is on YouTube, in Tsjirpa’s Tentacles of Pricing series. The conversation is in Dutch, with Dutch and English subtitles.