Pricing, Meet Your Scaleup Director — with Omar Mohout
Maarten Laruelle Pricing was Omar Mohout’s first book. Thirteen years after Lean Pricing, he sits on the other side of the table — advising founders on M&A and finance for tech companies at Deloitte. So I asked him the obvious question: after all those deals, how do you look at pricing now?
His answer: it matters more than ever. Pricing is the number one way a company captures value, and the one thing founders keep underestimating until the day they can’t.
Pricing as the biggest growth lever
Most founders treat pricing as a tactical decision. Set the number, get back to the roadmap. But pricing is the highest-leverage decision in the company, and it’s the only one that touches every euro of revenue.
A 1% price increase doesn’t sound like much. Until you realize that 1% drops almost entirely to your bottom line. There’s no extra cost of goods, no extra headcount, no extra marketing spend. It’s pure margin.
Why pricing stays intangible and gets ignored
Pricing is hard to see, hard to measure, hard to attribute. You can’t point to a single feature that drove a price change. So it gets pushed off the priority list — not because it doesn’t matter, but because the wins are diffuse.
That’s the trap. Founders chase shiny features that are easy to brag about, while leaving compounding margin on the table.
Does pricing make the M&A checklist?
Yes. And it should be on the founder’s checklist three years before they think they need it.
The reason: the multiple a buyer pays sits on your last three years of EBITDA. If you fix pricing six months before a sale, you don’t move the multiple — you’ve only changed the most recent quarter. Fix pricing three years out, and every year of improved margin lifts what gets multiplied.
The three-year runway before you sell
This is the part founders consistently miss. Pricing changes take time to land. Existing contracts have to roll over. New customers have to come in at the new structure. The market has to absorb the message.
If you want pricing to lift your exit, you need three years of clean improved margins on the books. That means starting now, not later.
The exit multiplier: 1% price, four to eight times the value
Here’s the math that should keep founders up at night. A 1% price increase that holds becomes a multi-year EBITDA increase. That EBITDA gets multiplied at exit — typically four to eight times for healthy SaaS businesses.
So that 1% you didn’t capture isn’t worth 1% of revenue. It’s worth four to eight percent of your exit value. Founders who do the work almost always say the same thing afterwards: if only we had done this much earlier.
Long contracts versus pricing power
Long contracts feel like security. They lock in revenue. But they also lock you out of pricing changes. The customer you signed at last year’s price is the customer you can’t reprice next year.
Before an exit, the questions matter: how long are your contracts? When do they roll? What does your repricing path look like? Buyers will dig into this. So should you.
Pricing is more than the price point
The number isn’t the pricing strategy. The structure is. How you charge, what you bundle, what’s metered, how you renew, what you contractually keep flexible — that’s the pricing architecture. Get that right and the number is almost a detail.
When founders should actually start
The honest answer: now. Whatever stage you’re at. Pricing improvements compound. The cost of starting today is small. The cost of starting in two years is the exit value you didn’t capture.
First-time versus second-time founders
Second-time founders price differently. They’ve felt the exit math. They know what they wished they’d done. First-time founders almost always undershoot — not because they’re wrong about the market, but because they’re modest about what they’ve built.
Fundraising: valuation is not everything
The terms of the deal matter more than the headline number. Clauses around liquidation preferences, anti-dilution, board control — these can quietly wipe founders out at exit even when the valuation looks great on the way in.
Omar’s blunt advice: don’t do the deal yourself. The cost of an advisor who’s seen a hundred deals is rounding error compared to what you’ll lose by missing one clause.
What to watch for
If you’re heading toward a raise or a sale in the next few years:
- Pricing is on the checklist. Treat it as a three-year project, not a quarterly tweak.
- Track your margins. Buyers will. So should you.
- Audit your contracts. Know where your pricing power sits.
- Get help on the deal. First-time founders pay for the advisor either way — explicitly or in lost value.
About Omar
Omar Mohout eats, sleeps and drinks startups. He wrote Lean Pricing and now works on M&A and finance for technology companies at Deloitte, helping founders get ready for an exit.
About this series
Pricing, Meet Your [Role] is a series where I sit down with experts from the fields around pricing and find out where their world and pricing meet.
Working on your pricing with an exit in mind? Let’s talk.