Jim Haviland: Writing

Your Price Moves Once a Year. Make This the Year. Right Now.

2026-10-25T00:00:00.000Z

Eight times a year, the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland asks business owners and leaders across our region how things are going, and publishes what it hears. It’s called the Beige Book, and it is about as plain as economic reporting gets. No grand forecasts. Just people who run things describing what they see.

The October report has one sentence I’d put in front of every leadership team in Northeast Ohio this month:

“Many contacts across sectors noted that their prices are set annually or by contract.”

And the thought that follows: “they anticipated raising prices at upcoming renewals.”

That reads like an ordinary observation. It’s also a warning hiding in plain sight.

What the report says

From the outside, the picture is a region doing fine on activity and getting squeezed on costs. Business activity in the district “increased modestly.” But “Nonlabor cost pressures remained robust for the eleventh consecutive reporting period.” Fuel led the way and spread into freight, packaging and materials. One builder called the mix of high fuel costs and tariffs a “double whammy.” “Many services contacts cited sharp increases in health insurance premiums,” and professional firms noted rising costs for software, AI tools and computer hardware.

The outlook: “Looking ahead, contacts expected nonlabor cost pressures to remain robust.”

On the selling side, the report found a split. Manufacturers kept raising prices to cover higher costs. But “Some restaurateurs and grocers held prices steady or increased them only selectively,” because customers were price sensitive and competitors were close.

If your price moves once a year, this is the year

Here is why the annual pricing sentence matters. If your prices reset once a year, every month you wait is a month of rising costs you have already agreed to absorb.

Your price decides how hard your year is. Take your profit goal and divide it by the margin you make on each sale. That’s the volume you need. When costs climb and price stands still, the margin shrinks and the volume you need climbs right along with it. Underpricing quietly turns a reasonable plan into an impossible one.

So my rule is simple. Raise prices at least with inflation, every year. Not when it hurts. Every year.

Run it like a campaign

The companies I see handle this well don’t treat a price increase as an awkward email. They run it as a campaign:

One owner. A name, not “sales” or “finance.”
A date. The renewal date is the deadline, so the decision gets made 60 to 90 days before it.
The numbers. Margin by product or service line, so the increase lands where costs actually moved.
The steps. Who hears first, what we say, how we answer the hard questions, and what the team does when a customer pushes back.

Will some customers leave? A few might. In my experience they’re usually the ones who didn’t value you much in the first place. The clients who are a “Hell Yes” for you tend to stay, and profit often goes up even with fewer accounts.

The other side of the story

There is a sobering line in this report, too. In a semiannual survey of nonprofit organizations, 87 percent said their clients’ financial well-being had declined over the past six months, “the highest share in the survey’s history.” Customers are feeling it.

That’s a reason to price with care and to explain your value clearly. It is not a reason to skip the increase and hope the year cooperates.

If you are building your 2027 plan right now, put pricing on the agenda with an owner and a date, before the renewal letters go out. The tools we use for this season are on the Annual planning hub.

Uncertainty Is High. Plan for Four Futures, Not One

2026-10-17T00:00:00.000Z

When I read a small business survey, I look for the gap between what owners are doing and how they feel about it. This month the gap is wide.

According to the NFIB’s September survey, as reported by The National News Desk, a seasonally adjusted net 31% of small business owners raised their average selling prices. That is well above the historical average of net 14%. Another net 31% plan to raise prices, up 3 points from August.

At the same time, the share of owners who rate the health of their business as good fell from 57% to 48%. NFIB’s uncertainty index rose to 90. Its historical average is 68.

Holly Wade, NFIB’s executive director of research, put it this way: “More are pessimistic about what they’re going to come up against, likely due to inflation and fuel prices.”

A forecast is not a plan when uncertainty is this high

From the outside, it looks like a lot of owners are doing the right things one at a time. They are raising prices. They are watching costs. They are hunting for good people. What’s harder to see in the numbers is a plan that ties those moves together.

When uncertainty sits 22 points above its average, the honest answer to “what will next year look like?” is “we don’t know.” That’s not a failure. It’s information. And it calls for a different tool than a single budget built on a single guess.

Four futures, one afternoon

In the Resilience Protocol we use scenario planning, and it’s simpler than it sounds.

Pick the two uncertainties that would hit you hardest. Not ten. Two. NFIB’s owners have named theirs already: labor was the top problem cited, and inflation was second.
Turn each into a range. Workers: scarce or available. Costs: climbing or easing.
Cross them to get four futures. Scarce workers and rising costs. Scarce workers and easing costs. Available workers and rising costs. Available workers and easing costs.
For each future, plan two things: the workforce we’d need, and where revenue would come from.

That last step is where the value is. In the hardest future, which roles do we protect first? Which customers and products carry us? In the best future, are we ready to hire, or will we be scrambling?

Why this beats guessing

Scenario planning doesn’t predict anything. It’s a model, and as the statistician George Box reminded us, all models are wrong, but some are useful. This one is useful because it moves decisions to a calm moment. When a number turns red in February, you aren’t inventing a response under pressure. You’re opening the page you already wrote.

It also changes the pricing conversation. Many owners in this survey are raising prices because costs forced their hand. If you’ve already mapped a future where costs keep climbing, the price increase stops being a reaction. It becomes a step in the plan, with a date and an owner.

Here’s how I think about it: 10x is the upside question, and scenario planning is the downside question. Most leadership teams I meet have spent time on the first. Very few have spent an afternoon on the second.

Three questions for your next leadership meeting

What two uncertainties would hurt us most in the next 12 months?
In the hardest of our four futures, what’s our headcount and where does revenue come from?
What would we do on the first day we see that future arriving?

If your team answers those together, you’ll walk out with more confidence than any forecast can give you, because you’ll know what you’d do in each case.

The Resilience Protocol walks through the full process, with worksheets: The Resilience Protocol

Conagra planned for lost volume before it raised prices

2026-10-08T00:00:00.000Z

Responding to: Conagra sales volumes dip as new CEO Brase grapples with inflation pressures, Reuters (via KSL.com), September 30, 2026.

Conagra had a hard quarter on paper. Reuters reported that volume fell 2.1%, organic sales declined, and the shares dropped to a three-month low. CEO John Brase, who took over in June, put it plainly: “You definitely have a pressured consumer. There’s no doubt about it.”

But one line on the earnings call is one I’d want every owner of a 20-to-200-person company to hear. Asked whether competitors were following Conagra’s price increases, Brase said: “we have not assumed any followership in our pricing moves.”

In other words, when Conagra raised prices, it planned as if nobody would raise prices alongside it. It assumed it would lose some volume and built that loss into the plan before the new prices hit the shelf. CFO Dave Marberger said the outlook was already “factoring in greater-than-historical volume elasticities.” And Brase said customer acceptance came in with “no surprises versus our planning posture.”

The decision came before the pressure

From the outside, it looks like the price increase wasn’t a reaction. It was a campaign: a decision, a set of assumptions, a date, and a plan for what would happen to volume.

Compare that with how price increases often go in owner-led companies. Costs creep up. We hold the line because we don’t want to upset anyone. Margin gets thin. Then we raise prices in a hurry, lose one good customer, panic, and start discounting to win them back. We end the year with the same volume, less margin, and a team that now believes raising prices doesn’t work.

The difference isn’t courage. It’s math done in advance.

The math to run before you raise prices

Here is the question Conagra answered and most of us skip: how much volume can we lose and still make the same gross profit?

Say a product sells for $100 and costs $60 to deliver. You keep $40.

Raise the price 8%, to $108. Now you keep $48 on each sale. To earn the same total gross profit as before, you need 40 ÷ 48 of your old volume, or about 83%. You could lose almost 17% of your units and be no worse off.

That number surprises most leaders. We tend to fear losing a handful of customers. The math usually leaves far more room than the fear does.

And the customers most likely to leave are usually the ones buying on price alone, who are often the hardest to serve. The ones who stay are the ones who value what you do. I call them your “Hell Yes” clients.

Turning it into a plan

Conagra has analysts and models. You don’t need any of that. You need four things, written down:

The number. The percentage increase, by product or by customer group.
The break-even volume. How much you could lose and still make the same gross profit, using the math above.
A trigger point. The level of lost volume that would make you stop and rethink. Decide it now, while you’re calm, not in the meeting after the first cancellation.
An owner and a date. One person runs the increase as a campaign: customer notices, talking points for the team, and a weekly look at the numbers.

Conagra also got a reminder that plans meet surprises. Benzinga reported that the company’s transportation costs were rising at about twice the rate it had expected. That’s why the fourth step matters. A plan you check every week can adjust. A plan you file away can’t.

Your price decides how hard your year will be. Decide it on purpose.

If you want to run these numbers on your own business, the Get Your Numbers Right course walks a leadership team through pricing, margin and cash flow, step by step.

Top 10 Reasons to Implement an Intentional Operating System

2026-10-07T00:00:00.000Z

Every business owner eventually hits a ceiling of complexity. The sheer grit and intuition that gets a company to its first million in revenue usually fractures on the way to ten million. Implementing a Business Operating System (BOS) or strategic framework (such as EOS, Scaling Up, or the Value Builder System) is the mechanism that shifts your role from Chief Problem Solver to Chief Executive. It is the transition from owning a demanding, stressful job to owning a highly valuable, transferable asset.

Here are the top ten statistically backed reasons to leverage a formal operating framework, organized by the three things business operators care about most: surviving the chaos, scaling with intention, and cashing out at a premium.

Phase 1: Surviving the Chaos & Reclaiming Your Time

1. You want the business to survive its own growth.

The Desire: To stop feeling like one bad month could sink the ship.
The Statistic: Roughly 50% of small businesses fail by their fifth year, predominantly due to cash-flow mismanagement and lack of market fit (Bureau of Labor Statistics / SBA).
The Framework Impact: Operating systems force disciplined cash-flow forecasting and weekly metric tracking, identifying financial cliffs months before you go over them. (Search term: "BLS small business failure rate statistics")

2. You want your team to execute without constant direction.

The Desire: To stop answering the same questions every day and empower your team to make decisions.
The Statistic: 95% of employees do not understand their company’s strategy (Harvard Business Review).
The Framework Impact: Frameworks distill complex strategy into one-page plans (like the One Page Strategic Plan, V2MOM® or Vision/Traction Organizer®) ensuring every employee knows exactly how their daily tasks drive the primary goal. (Search term: "HBR employees do not understand company strategy")

3. You want your ideas to actually get done.

The Desire: To bridge the gap between your annual vision and the daily grind.
The Statistic: 48% of organizations fail to meet at least half of their strategic targets, primarily due to poor execution rather than bad ideas (Harvard Business Review / Bridges Business Consultancy).
The Framework Impact: Frameworks implement "rocks" (90-day priorities) and structured weekly meetings that hold leadership accountable to execution, rather than just discussion.

Phase 2: Intentional Growth & Financial Performance

4. You want revenue growth that doesn’t just mean more hours for you.

The Desire: To scale the top line predictably.
The Statistic: Companies with written, documented business plans grow 30% faster than those flying by the seat of their pants (Journal of Management Studies).
The Framework Impact: A framework forces you to document the sales process, ideal customer profile, and marketing ROI, turning revenue generation into a repeatable machine rather than a reliance on your personal network. (Search term: "Journal of Management Studies written business plan growth statistics")

5. You want profit margins that reflect your effort.

The Desire: To stop leaking cash on misaligned projects and inefficient operations.
The Statistic: Companies whose daily operations are closely aligned with their strategy report 65% better financial performance than their peers (The Economist).
The Framework Impact: By tying financial budgets directly to strategic priorities, a framework ensures that capital is only deployed toward efforts that improve EBITDA. (Search term: "Economist strategy alignment financial performance")

6. You want access to capital on your terms.

The Desire: To secure lines of credit or investment without pledging your house as collateral.
The Statistic: Businesses with a formal plan and tracked metrics are twice as likely to secure external funding (University of Oregon / Bplans).
The Framework Impact: Banks and investors bet on systems, not just visionary founders. A framework provides the historical data and standardized reporting that lenders require to minimize their risk.

Phase 3: Maximizing Valuation & Securing Your Legacy

7. You want to stop being the biggest bottleneck (The "Switzerland Structure").

The Desire: To take a four-week vacation without the business burning down.
The Statistic: 78% of business owners lack a formal transition team or succession plan, making the business virtually unsalable because the value is entirely tied to the owner (Exit Planning Institute 2023).
The Framework Impact: Frameworks focus heavily on building "structural capital"—processes, documentation, and a strong second-in-command—which drastically reduces owner dependence. (Search term: "Exit Planning Institute owner readiness statistics")

8. You want a premium valuation multiple, not a discount.

The Desire: To get paid for the asset you built, not just the cash flow it generates.
The Statistic: The multiple matters more than the profit line. Moving $1M of EBITDA from a 3x multiple (owner-dependent, disorganized) to a 5x multiple (systematized, recurring revenue) adds $2M of value instantly. Growing profit by $200K at a stagnant 3x multiple only adds $600K (CT Acquisitions / Value Builder System).
The Framework Impact: Buyers pay premiums for predictability. Frameworks drive up the 8 core drivers of company value (like recurring revenue, clean books, and diversified customer bases) that dictate your multiple. (Search term: "Value Builder System 8 drivers of company value")

9. You want a deal that actually closes.

The Desire: To avoid the heartbreak of a deal falling apart during due diligence.
The Statistic: A median 32% of investment banker sale engagements end without a closed deal, with the "buyer-seller valuation gap" cited as the number one reason (Pepperdine Private Capital Markets Report).
The Framework Impact: Operating systems normalize your EBITDA and ensure your books survive the intense scrutiny of buyer due diligence, bridging the gap between what you think the business is worth and what a buyer will actually pay. (Search term: "Pepperdine PCM report valuation gap deal failure")

10. You want the freedom to walk away on your timeline.

The Desire: To exit when you want to, not when burnout forces you to.
The Statistic: 49% of owners want to exit within 5 years, yet 64% of broker-represented sellers had no formal exit planning in place before going to market (Exit Planning Institute).
The Framework Impact: The fixes that move a valuation multiple—like developing management depth or building customer capital—take 12 to 36 months to show up in the numbers. A framework is essentially a proactive, multi-year exit plan that ensures your business is always "market-ready," giving you total control over when and how you step away.

Sources

Here are the detailed sources and publication contexts for each of the statistics provided in the previous breakdown:

Phase 1: Surviving the Chaos

1. 50% Failure Rate by Year 5

The Claim: Roughly 50% of small businesses fail by their fifth year.
The Proof: This is derived directly from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) Business Employment Dynamics data. The BLS tracks establishment survival rates annually. Their consistent historical baseline shows that 20.4% of businesses fail in year one, and 49.4% fail within five years.

2. 95% of Employees Don't Understand Strategy

The Claim: 95% of employees do not understand their company’s strategy.
The Proof: This specific metric comes from a seminal study by Dr. Robert S. Kaplan and Dr. David P. Norton (creators of the Balanced Scorecard framework), published in the Harvard Business Review paper "The Office of Strategy Management." The published abstract explicitly states: "On average, 95% of a company's employees are unaware of, or do not understand, its strategy".

3. 48% Miss Strategic Targets

The Claim: 48% of organizations fail to meet at least half of their strategic targets.
The Proof: This is tracked by the Bridges Business Consultancy through their recurring global "Strategy Implementation Survey." As cited in Forbes and the Institute of Project Management, their findings explicitly state: "48% of organizations fail to reach at least half of their strategic targets" due to poor execution.

Phase 2: Intentional Growth

4. 30% Faster Growth with a Plan

The Claim: Companies with written plans grow 30% faster.
The Proof: This originates from a comprehensive study conducted by the Cranfield University School of Management, published in the Journal of Management Studies. Researchers analyzed the growth trajectories of planning versus non-planning firms and concluded that businesses with a formal, written plan grew 30% faster than their counterparts who operated without one.

5. 65% Better Financial Performance

The Claim: Companies closely aligned with their strategy report 65% better financial performance.
The Proof: This is from The Economist Intelligence Unit's (EIU) global executive report titled "Why Good Strategies Fail: Lessons for the C-suite." The report's data tables reveal that among companies with high strategy-to-execution alignment, "65% of these companies also report much better financial performance than their peers, compared with just 18% of other companies that say the same".

6. Twice as Likely to Secure Funding

The Claim: Businesses with a formal plan are twice as likely to secure external funding.
The Proof: A joint study conducted by the University of Oregon Department of Economics and Palo Alto Software (Bplans) analyzed real-world entrepreneurial data. The study concluded that businesses with a plan are "twice as likely to secure funding or grow their business" compared to those that do not plan.

Phase 3: Maximizing Valuation

7. 78% Lack a Transition Team

The Claim: 78% of business owners lack a formal transition team or succession plan.
The Proof: This data is consistently published by the Exit Planning Institute (EPI) in their National State of Owner Readiness Report. The EPI's foundational industry data states that despite wanting to exit, "78% of business owners still need to develop a transition team" and "53% of owners don't have a written, formal transition plan".

8. Valuation Multiple Math (3x vs. 5x)

The Claim: Moving from a 3x to a 5x multiple yields exponentially higher returns than just adding profit to a stagnant multiple.
The Proof: This is the core mathematical framework of the Value Builder System, created by John Warrillow (author of Built to Sell). While the specific dollar amounts ($1M at 3x vs. 5x) are illustrative examples used by M&A advisors to explain enterprise value, the underlying data from Value Builder's assessment of over 70,000 businesses proves that improving their "8 Drivers of Company Value" (like structural capital and owner independence) reliably pushes a company's multiple from the industry floor (e.g., 3x) to the ceiling (e.g., 5x or higher).

9. 32% Deal Failure & The Valuation Gap

The Claim: A median 32% of sale engagements end without a closed deal, primarily due to the valuation gap.
The Proof: This is tracked annually by the Pepperdine Graziadio Business School in their Private Capital Markets Report. Their surveys of investment bankers and business brokers consistently show that roughly a third of engagements fail to close (cited as a median 32% failure rate), with the "valuation gap between buyer and seller" ranking as the number one reason deals fall apart.

10. Exit Planning Disconnect (49% vs. 64%)

The Claim: 49% of owners want to exit within 5 years, yet 64% of broker-represented sellers had no formal exit planning.
The Proof: This synthesizes two leading industry reports. The Exit Planning Institute (EPI) State of Owner Readiness survey found that "49% of owners plan to exit within five years". Conversely, the Pepperdine Private Capital Markets Report data on broker engagements reveals that "64% of sellers who hired a business broker had done no formal exit planning before engaging to sell".

Most companies raised prices this year. Many found it harder.

2026-10-07T00:00:00.000Z

Responding to: Pricing Strategies of Regional Firms: Results From Our September 2026 Survey, Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, October 1, 2026.

The Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond asked businesses in its region how they are setting prices. The answers read like notes from the leadership rooms I sit in every week.

Only 13% of firms reported making no price adjustment in 2026. Before the pandemic, that number was 27%. Twenty percent now adjust prices monthly, up from 14% before the pandemic. The reason is no mystery: 58% pointed to rising input costs, half pointed to labor, and, in the survey's words, "Almost half of firms reported the need to restore profit margins."

Here is the line that stopped me: "Thirty-seven percent of responding firms found it harder than last year to adjust prices."

More companies are raising prices, more often, and a big share of them say it's getting harder. From the outside, I don't think the hard part is the number. I think it's the timing.

What waiting costs

When costs go up and we hold our price, we don't avoid the increase. We pay it ourselves, out of margin. Month by month the gap grows. Then one day the numbers force our hand, and we raise prices late, all at once, from a weak position. Customers feel the jump. The sales team has to explain it without a plan. Everyone remembers it as painful, so next year we wait again.

"Restore profit margins" is a polite way of saying the margin was already gone.

I say this a lot: your price decides how hard your year is. Take your revenue goal and divide it by your price. That's the volume you have to sell. Underprice by 10% and you've quietly signed up for a lot more work to hit the same number, often more than your team can do.

What I see working

The owner-led companies that handle this well, usually 20 to 200 people, do three things.

They raise prices at least with inflation, every year. Not when it hurts. Every year, on a date everyone knows. Customers adjust to a predictable rhythm far better than to a surprise.
They run the increase as a campaign. One owner. A date. The steps: which customers hear first, who calls the biggest accounts, what the talking points are, how we'll track who stays. A price increase without an owner is a wish.
They accept that some customers will leave. Usually it's the ones who never valued the work. The customers who say "Hell Yes" to what you do tend to stay, and profit often rises even with fewer accounts. That's worth modeling before you decide, not after.

The survey also found 83% of firms trying alternative approaches, like customer-specific or inflation-linked pricing. Those can help. But a smarter pricing method won't fix a late decision. The discipline is deciding while everyone is calm.

Two questions for your next leadership meeting

When did we last raise prices, and did the increase at least match our cost increases?
Who owns our next price increase, and what date is it on the calendar?

If either answer is "we're not sure," you're in good company. It's the most common answer I hear. It's also the easiest one to fix.

I'm teaching exactly this at COSE BIG on October 15: how to set prices, map cash flow, and find where profit leaks. See the Profit Playbook session resources.