value-based-pricing
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Andrew Graff and the trouble with counting hours
After three decades at Allen & Gerritsen, Andrew Graff is still questioning the machinery of agency life. His targets include the timesheet, the assigned desk, and the idea that a chief executive has finished learning.
The best creatives I know hate selling.
A manifesto for talented creatives who freeze the moment a client asks 'what do you charge?' Written to promote Natural Born Seller, a full-day sales workshop led by Emmy-winning designer and The Futur founder Chris Do, the piece reframes selling as an act of service rather than manipulation. It walks through the limiting beliefs that keep skilled creatives broke - money shame, conflict avoidance, scope creep, wavering confidence - and answers the three objections most likely to keep a creative agency owner on the fence about attending the August 6, 2026 event in Vancouver.
PERSUIT
PERSUIT is an enterprise SaaS platform that helps corporate legal departments scope, price, select and manage their outside law firms. Founded in 2016 by former DLA Piper partner Jim Delkousis, it runs competitive RFPs, structures alternative fee arrangements, benchmarks rates and - after its 2025 acquisition of Apperio - tracks legal spend from intake through invoice payment. The company built on a simple premise: clients value outcomes, not billable hours.
Jim Delkousis
Jim Delkousis is the founder and CEO of PERSUIT, a New York-based legal technology company that helps corporate legal teams run competitive, transparent processes for hiring outside counsel. A former DLA Piper litigation partner with 25 years in BigLaw, he left the partnership in 2016 to build a platform that shifts legal buying from billable hours toward outcomes and value. PERSUIT now works with Fortune 1000 legal departments and thousands of law firms, and in 2025 expanded into legal spend and matter management by acquiring Apperio.
LeveragePoint Innovations
LeveragePoint is a Boston-area B2B SaaS company that helps enterprises quantify, communicate, and capture the economic value of their products. Spun out of Monitor Group's Strategic Pricing practice in 2009, its cloud platform turns static spreadsheets and slide decks into interactive value propositions and ROI stories that sales teams use to justify higher prices and win more deals. It serves manufacturing, specialty chemicals, high tech, healthcare, and software companies, and is extending into value marketing and AI-assisted value modeling.
Paid
Paid is a monetization platform for AI agents. Instead of charging by the seat or the API call, it lets agent builders price by the outcome an agent delivers - points of margin saved, tasks completed, revenue generated - then tracks the underlying costs and margins in real time and hands the customer a receipt proving the value. Founded by Outreach creator Manny Medina and a team that previously built billing at Salesforce, Palantir and Pleo, Paid raised $33.3M across a 2025 pre-seed and seed and is building the plumbing for how software gets paid when the software is an autonomous worker.
Peyton Marshall
Peyton Marshall is the founder, Chairman, and CEO of LeveragePoint, a Newton, Massachusetts SaaS company that helps B2B firms quantify, communicate, and capture the economic value of what they sell. An economist by training with a PhD from MIT, he spent twelve years in investment banking in London at UBS and Goldman Sachs, then fifteen years as a CFO and operator in healthcare and IT companies, before founding LeveragePoint in 2009 to turn value-based pricing from a theory into an everyday sales tool. He has grown the company to multi-million-dollar revenue without raising venture capital.
Chris Do
Chris Do is a Vietnamese-American designer, Emmy-winning creative director, and founder of The Futur - an educational platform on a mission to teach 1 billion people how to make a living doing what they love. He fled Vietnam as a toddler on April 30, 1975, built Blind into a $7M+ annual motion design studio serving Nike, Xbox, and Sony, then pivoted at 42 to education - amassing 2.7 million YouTube subscribers, 500K community members across 190 countries, and a $5,000/hour consulting rate. His philosophy: hard truths, gently told.