Mathew Kerbis is The Subscription Attorney who is on a mission to affordably serve latent legal market clients at scale via the subscription model and inspire attorneys to abandon the billable hour. He founded the law firm Subscription Attorney LLC.
In this episode, Mathew shares how he’s leveraging subscription pricing to disrupt the traditional billable hour model in the legal industry, making legal services more accessible. He highlights his strategy of targeting an underserved market while offering premium pricing options for higher-value clients. Mathew emphasizes his business’s profitability, operating with minimal expenses while maintaining a large margin and serving both small and large-scale clients.
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Why you have to check out today’s podcast:
- Discover how subscription-based pricing is disrupting traditional legal service models, making legal help more accessible and predictable.
- Learn how addressing the vast underserved legal market can create new opportunities for both clients and lawyers.
- Gain insights on how offering premium pricing options alongside accessible subscription plans can balance profitability with customer satisfaction.
“Don’t be afraid to experiment and to try something new. I experiment with my pricing to find what works. And so, you should experiment, too, and listen to Mark.”
– Mathew Kerbis
Topics Covered:
01:37 – How he was led into pricing
03:24 – Discussing the similarities between doctors transitioning to direct primary care (DPC) and lawyers adopting subscription-based pricing
05:05 – Explaining his flexible subscription model
08:48 – Sharing how instead of tracking time or focusing on cost accounting, he views his business costs as fixed expenses
11:03 – Optimizing efficiency and delivering value through his subscription model
14:04 – Arguing that while clients can access AI tools themselves, they can’t match the expertise of a lawyer using them effectively
16:04 – Emphasizing that while AI can generate rapid insights, it requires human judgment to interpret results accurately
18:52 – What he meant when he said he drives prices down and discussing the unmet demand creating a significant opportunity despite price competition in the legal industry
21:53 – Targeting underserved clients while maintaining flexibility to serve both small businesses and larger clients
24:26 – Maintaining accessible pricing while using tiered subscription pricing to price higher
26:30 – Highlighting the importance of strategic pricing to remain competitive without risking client loss or revenue instability
27:30 – Mathew’s best pricing advice
Key Takeaways:
“Ron Baker has educated me on how cost accounting isn’t the way to think about what your actual costs are as a business owner.” – Mathew Kerbis
“What’s great about a month-to-month subscription is, I could drop the client just like they could drop me. And the fact that they have the flexibility to leave at any time actually makes them not leave.” – Mathew Kerbis
“I still want to offer the accessible pricing, but I will have super premium pricing for the best customers that need it.” – Mathew Kerbis
“I don’t assign any dollar number to my time or the hours that I spend because things don’t take as long as they used to. I was using AI when I launched my firm because I knew less time equals more money doing what I do when you’re not billing by the hour.” – Mathew Kerbis
“Sure, you could use the legal AI tools that I’m using, but are you able to get the same output that a lawyer who is actually using the tool in the way in which it was designed can get better output?” – Mathew Kerbis
“Judgment is really important. I don’t think AI replaces subject matter experts, frankly ever.” – Mathew Kerbis
People/Resources Mentioned:
- Ron Baker: https://impactpricing.com/podcast/497-classic-trash-the-timesheet-exploring-opportunities-in-subscription-businesses-with-ronald-j-baker/
- Calendly: https://calendly.com
- Adobe Photoshop: https://www.adobe.com/
- ChatGPT: https://chatgpt.com
- ClaudeAI: https://claude.ai
- Perplexity Pro: https://www.perplexity.ai/hub/faq/what-is-perplexity-proUber:https://www.uber.com
- Grandview Research: https://www.grandviewresearch.com
- Walmart: https://www.walmart.com
- Target: https://www.target.com
- Sam Walton: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Walton
- Jeff Bezos: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Bezos
Connect with Mathew Kerbis:
- Website: https://mathewkerbis.com/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kerbisverse/
Connect with Mark Stiving:
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stiving/
- Email: [email protected]
Full Interview Transcript
(Note: This transcript was created with an AI transcription service. Please forgive any transcription or grammatical errors. We probably sounded better in real life.)
Mathew Kerbis
Don’t be afraid to experiment and to try something new. I experiment with my pricing to find what works. And so, you should experiment, too, and listen to Mark.
[Intro / Ad]
Mark Stiving
Welcome to Impact Pricing, the podcast where we discuss pricing, value, and the inextricable relationship between them. I’m Mark Stiving and I run boot camps to help companies get paid more. Our guest today is Mathew Kerbis. Here are three things you want to learn about Mathew before he starts. First off, he’s a lawyer. I’m not going to tell any law jokes today. He’s the founder of Subscription Attorney. He’s been doing this for three years. He’s the host of the podcast Law Subscribed. He had me on a few months ago, or maybe a year ago, who knows? And he recently started a podcast called Law for Kids. How cool. Maybe I could understand something about the law. Welcome, Mathew.
Mathew Kerbis
Well, insightful as always, Mark. That’s the idea. Is it really for kids or is it for people who are with their kids?
Mark Stiving
Or is it for people who think they’ll never get it if they don’t…? You didn’t want to call it Law for Dummies?
Mathew Kerbis
Well that’s insightful, as always, Mark. I’ll leave it at that.
Mark Stiving
Maybe that one was taken. So, welcome, Mathew. How did you get into pricing?
Mathew Kerbis
Well, when you are a lawyer and you actually have even a scintilla of a business mind, you start thinking about how this firm is making money and paying me? And a lot of law firms say, well, they bill by the hour. And I only had to do that at one out of the three law firms I worked for before I started my own practice. But even when I was working at fixed fee related practices, I was always thinking, well, what, like, they’re paying me X amount, so how are they charging? And like, what’s their total revenue? And I always thought about stuff like that. And I don’t know if that’s just sort of how I’m built or maybe I’m the kind of kid that liked econ in high school, and I liked tax law in law school. Well, I’m not a tax attorney and I’m not an economist. I’ve always been thinking about that. And the billable hour makes no sense. I did that for five years. And so I was always looking for a better way. And subscription seemed obvious, and I just started consuming everything I could in about 2018, all about the subscription economy and trying to figure out how I could apply that to the legal industry. So at least when it comes to legal services, I’m definitely in the pricing game now.
Mark Stiving
Nice. So it’s fascinating, but I’ve been spending a lot of time trying to apply pricing to DPCs. And so DPCs are direct primary care physicians. And these guys, by definition, they’re in the subscription business. But, reading about how they have to make this decision to jump from fee for service to a DPC practice is a fascinating decision. And I think it’s becoming very popular in the medical world. And yet in the legal world, I don’t see hardly anybody jumping into the subscription space. What’s going on?
Mathew Kerbis
Yeah. And I will say that the DPC world is actually relatively new to me. I was interviewed about how AI’s changing legal services and the billing model for Fast Company and a DPC doc actually reached out to me who’s involved with some national association. And I’ve just been diving really into all their resources and listening to some podcasts in that space. And there is an immense amount of overlap into what the physicians who go DPC need to do compared to what I did three years ago when I left to start my own subscription-based law firm. And it’s uncanny, some of the thought processes, because I’m listening to interviews of doctors who did it that I go through now on my podcast. I’m not alone. I’m definitely an early mover, but I’m definitely not the first.
But on my podcast where at least in, I’ve produced around 150 something odd episodes and you’ve been on twice Mark. And episode 56 is Mark’s first episode on the pod. And one of the most downloaded episodes still to this day. Because we talk about pricing and a lot of lawyers have questions about that, who want to do this. but all in, I’ve interviewed between 50 and 60 lawyers who have ditched the billable hour and are experimenting with alternative fees to the billable hour. What in any other industry would just be what people charge for things. But we call them fixed fees or subscriptions or combination thereof. And so I’m definitely not alone. But I claimed the title of the Subscription Attorney. And so I also help law firms. I primarily practice law, but I do consult with some law firms to help them figure out their pricing.
Mark Stiving
Okay. Just so that we can all get a level set, what do you do for a subscription? So I’m going to pay you your fee for the month. What are you doing for me?
Mathew Kerbis
Well, I’m definitely still experimenting with my fee structure and exactly the benefits, because I’m only three years into this and I’m not afraid to experiment. And I actually just for the second time in three years, I’ve had a client ask me today as the date of recording that, ‘Hey, you’re providing a lot of value to me. I think I need to pay you more money.’ And I said, ‘Okay, great. Let’s have that conversation.’ I kind of already knew that and I was going to have that conversation maybe in another month or two. But that the customer, that the client reaches out with that kind of a thing like that almost never happens. ‘Hey, I’d like to pay you more money,’ right? Thenyou must be providing a huge amount of value.
And I think I am. But ultimately what it boils down to for that client and my favorite clients is a pure subscription. So they’re going to pay me a fixed amount every month. And in exchange for that, what do they get? Well, at a minimum, what they get is they get unlimited scheduled calls. And for this particular client, I actually just experimented with something new. And I think that’s one of the reasons why he’s finding so much value is that I made a unique Calendly custom link just for him to keep in the contact of my firm on his phone, and he could look instead of just calling me, which he wanted to do, and I do have a scheduling link in a client portal, but maybe only half my clients use it, right? But now what he could do is he could just look and see if I’m available and then call me rather than just call me randomly, even if he refuses to use the link.
And so I’m experimenting with different things there, but that’s now a subscriber benefit for him, right? To have that custom link to see my availability rather than a general one all my clients get. He’s getting four projects a month from me. And a project is a singular contract, a singular letter, or a singular research topic or research question. And if we’re talking about a contract with multiple exhibits, that will probably, depending on the amount of pages, that will probably be multiple projects. And I’ll have that conversation. I’ll be transparent. At the end of the day, I’m a service-based business, right? And so that’s what he’s getting. He’s getting just a pure subscription. He pays a flat amount a month, and those are the things he gets. And whether he uses one project or four, he’s getting the value. But I want him to maximize his subscriber benefits.
And if he goes over a project, I have a la carte charging that I do $50 a page. And so for my low-level subscribers who are only starting at $20 a month, they get that a la carte pricing on a per project basis. If they still want somewhat of a metered approach, a $50 per page is easier to understand than X amount an hour. Well, how long is it going to take you to read the page? Right? So clients still like the per page pricing. We can talk about it. I’ve experimented in that space too, but what I usually do, Mark, because I’m in the services business, is a client goes over their project limit for whatever set amount they have per month. I’ll be magnanimous, ‘Oh, don’t worry about it.’ Right? Because what I want them to do is I want them, like, this client reached out to me and said, ‘Hey I’ve been getting a lot of value from you.’
I think I should pay you more. What I’ll usually say is, after two or three months that that happens, I’ll say, ‘Hey really, you’ve been using five or six projects, I have to bring you up to the next tiered-subscription level,’ right? And I have a very high conversion rate with that. And if they don’t want to do that, then I say, well, then, I’m going to have to start enforcing this a la carte additional pricing for you. I try to keep my answer short for you, Mark, but that’s the simplest way I could explain it.
Mark Stiving
No, I thought that was a great answer. Because you captured a whole bunch of different concepts there. One of which in the world of subscriptions that I love is that, when we have overage, we don’t have to charge for it. We can charge for it later. Right? It’s like, let’s be nice and then say, ‘Hey, look what’s happened in the recent past.’ So I’m really curious, do you have, by the way, this is something that everybody who tries to move to subscription has this fear of, do you have any customers who cost you more than they pay you?
Mathew Kerbis
Well, a friend who’s become a friend, Ron Baker, has educated me on how cost accounting isn’t the way to think about what your actual costs are as a business owner. I never put it into the cons. I never put it into the framework of cost accounting because I also don’t track my time at all, Mark. And so, like, what is it costing me? Well, as long as I have the time to do the work for the client at a speed at which they remain satisfied so that they stay subscribed, my costs are my fixed annual operating expenses. Any, maybe, marketing or advertising I want to do, and the salary that I decide to pay myself and the distributions that I give myself and keep the rest in a war chest, right? For my business.
Those are my costs. And those are my only costs. And I was profitable day one in terms of, I had one subscriber when I launched my practice that paid for more than that first year of operating expenses. Not my salary , but operating expenses when I got started. And that’s just the power of the subscription model. And so that’s the only way I think about my costs. Now, I could have unhappy clients if I am too overwhelmed and I’m not able to get all the work done at a speed in which they will be satisfied. But I don’t really think about my costs beyond my fixed operating expenses and what I want to pay myself.
Mark Stiving
Very interesting answer. By the way, I love Ron Baker too. and so nothing against that. I think it’s the business that you have that allows you to do that, right? The fact that what you’re selling is your time. Because if you were paying someone to spend each hour that you spend working, then you would say, ‘Okay, what’s it costing me to do this?’ And then we’d have to rethink that to say, but I think the point that I really wanted to make is that let’s pretend that you put a number on yourself and say, look, I charge 200 bucks an hour, or what, 500 bucks an hour, whatever the number is, I don’t care. And these guys use way more hours than they pay for, in terms of how much money they’re paying me and how much it’s costing me. What I really love about subscriptions is oftentimes, yeah, we get a client or two like that, but we have a whole bunch of clients who we’re making a lot more money than we’re spending. And so therefore it all works out in the end. And that’s totally fine. But the fear is someone’s going to use all my hours, someone’s just going to take advantage of me.
Mathew Kerbis
Well, that’s what’s great about a month-to-month subscription, Mark, is I could drop the client just like they could drop me, right? And the fact that they have the flexibility to leave at any time actually makes them not leave. Because they have that flexibility. And now, as the services industry in a regulated industry like law, I can’t charge a year in advance and give a discount because if they decide to unsubscribe, I’d have to refund any honored fees anyway. So I don’t offer that option. And I actually, I wish I had, I was able to leverage some of the tactics of the subscription economy for legal services. Unfortunately, I can’t. But I still, a little bit, disagree with you, Mark, and I know you, like, being disagreed with on your podcast. I’m not afraid to disagree.
Mark Stiving
Totally okay.
Mathew Kerbis
So I don’t assign any dollar number to like my time or the hours that I spend, because also things don’t take as long as they used to. I was using AI and it was machine-learning based AI when I launched my firm because I knew less time equals more money doing what I do. And I used that to repeat myself for lawyers when I explained that less time equals more money when you’re not billing by the hour. And so I was already using automations and AI and everything like that. Well, when GenAI hit the scene, and I’ve been leveraging some form of generative AI, which now people are just calling AI since November of 2022 and ChatGPT launched because I was there playing around with GPT 3 and it wasn’t useful. But when 3.5 came out, I was like, ‘Wow, this is incredible.’
So it’s in the dozens of different types of AI tools and I use maybe four or five of them more than I use any other tools. And some of those are legal specific that cost $200 a month, but they’re significantly better for legal work. So things just don’t take a long time anymore, Mark, like, if things that used to take 10 hours, take 10 minutes, which I think they do, and really it’s a few seconds, but you still spend 10 minutes iterating with the AI to draft the contract to do the analysis. Like you don’t just step, like, prompt it once and be done. You iterate, iterate, iterate. And that might take 10 minutes. So for 10 hours to bill for that versus 0.2, which is what you bill for 10 minutes, you’d have to 50X your billable rate.
It’s just sort of nonsensical. It just gets to a point where it doesn’t make any sense anymore. So I just try to do things as fast as possible, leveraging the AI and automation tools that I have and instead, and if something takes me a long time, I don’t think all that costs me a lot. I think how could I automate something there so that it doesn’t take that much time next time? And that’s maybe the only place where it makes sense to track time. And I don’t track it at all. But it’s like, okay, I kind of know that took a long time. I time blocked an hour last week and an hour this week and I’m still not done with it. There’s something here I need to productize or automate this.
Mark Stiving
Yep. So you didn’t disagree with me on anything, Mathew. I’m sad, right? So what I heard you say was, I don’t track costs, which I heard that before, or I don’t track hours and I’m becoming more efficient. So it’s even less likely that anybody’s going to use too much of my time. Right? Which is great, right? I mean, it’s actually interesting because are people going to stop using you because of AI?
Mathew Kerbis
I’ve had a potential client ask me this exact question and my response, I was ready because I think about these things all the time. At any point in the last decade plus you could have downloaded Adobe Photoshop. Does that make you a graphic designer? Sure, you might be able to accomplish some things that you couldn’t before without that tool. But if it really matters, and by the way, designing stuff maybe doesn’t matter as much as a legal thing is happening to me and the consequences are significantly higher if I get it wrong than if I did, this logo doesn’t look perfect. Sure, you could use the legal AI tools that I’m using, but are you able to get the same output that a lawyer who is actually using the tool in the way in which it was designed can get better output?
Go for it. I mean, frankly, like I tell them the tools that I use. Sure, play around with it. I think we don’t want to try to hide that. We want them to see what we’re using because here’s what they’re going to do anyway, Mark. What’s going to happen is, and I explain this to lawyers, I do a lot of continuing legal education. You’re going to spend five hours on something and then your client is going to go to ChatGPT or Claude or one of these tools and ask the same questions and get output in a few seconds. And we could read the difference and know that there’s a substantive difference between those things. But they’re a lay person, they don’t know the difference, but it looks similar to them. Are they going to be happy to be paying you by the hour and something that to them only took a few minutes? Probably not. So it behooves us to leverage these tools lest we be replaced by them. And frankly, potential clients getting in a whole bunch of trouble by not hiring lawyers.
Mark Stiving
Yeah. I find that interesting because I use chatGPT a lot too, but I never ask it pricing questions. And I have a different set of questions. I ask questions about how customers make decisions and it’s the fact that I have a series of frameworks that I can run that through to say, here’s how we get to decisions companies can make. But anybody could do that if they knew the questions to ask and how to interpret the answers
Mathew Kerbis
Right. Judgment is really important, Mark. I don’t think AI replaces subject matter experts, frankly, ever. Because what I am doing is, even if I do ask the legal questions, right, analyze this contract from the perspective of party B and identify any red flags and propose alternative language to alleviate the red flag, right? Something like that, right? That would be an example of a first pass prompt I might give the legal AI to a contract. I’m not just blindly giving that to the client. I’m seeing the output and exercising my judgment, oh no, actually we want that jurisdiction. That actually is a neutral thing that the AI’s identified. That’s fine. Right? Now, if my client sees it now, and they’re doing it on their own, they might start arguing in the negotiation about jurisdiction without realizing, oh, no, no, no, actually this favors you, this particular thing or the term is too long. Well, actually, that term being long is good for my client. So I’m still exercising my judgment with the AI analysis output. And so our judgment does not go away. If anything, it becomes the most valuable thing subject matters have to offer.
Mark Stiving
Yeah. The ability to look at something and know, is this good or not? And, in fact, we all have seen AI lie to us. So AI is not always right.
Mathew Kerbis
No. But it still does things exceedingly fast, right? And so like, that’s the helpful thing and the more things you give it, I think the more likely it is to hallucinate and make mistakes. Perplexity Pro is very accurate, but Perplexity’s deep research tends to have inaccuracies because now it’s looking at more things on the internet. And the internet is full of junk and false information. And so, like, sometimes just like with people, if you let them do too much research, like you got to constrain them. And that’s the way I like to think about AI. It’s more like working with a person and just like we have our flaws like AI is not a calculator. It’s not outputting immutable truth. It’s language. It’s probability. It’s a lot like working with a person.
Mark Stiving
Yeah. I walk into the doctor all the time and tell them I have some made up disease because I did the research, right? I’m just going to talk about pricing for a second. So here’s what happens in the world of pricing. I want to buy a lawyer. I want to subscribe to a lawyer. Love your service. It’s a great service. There’s someone down the street who does what you do at half the price. I just made that up. Yeah. I’m going to go with them. Unless you can find a way to differentiate yourself. Of course. Now, this I think, is a real fear for you because if you truly are doing what used to take you 10 hours, now you’re doing it in an hour, that means some other lawyer can do the same thing. And so that’s going to drive prices down in your market. Is that a true statement or not a true statement?
Mathew Kerbis
I am that lawyer trying to drive prices down right now, Mark.
Mark Stiving
Please don’t tell me that.
Mathew Kerbis
But here’s the thing. And I’m actually adjusting my pricing in the near future here. I have a draft update of my website. I’m working on it, shifting my pricing around a little bit. And I’m even taking a page out of the Mark Stiving book or one of your many books. And I’m getting rid of my 99 cent pricing except for the $19.99 a month, at least in the short term, in the long term, that will be $20 a month. But, in the legal industry, we have a massive latent market. So in the same way that Uber expanded the market and tapped into that latent market of folks who would pay somebody to drive them from point A to point B where there wasn’t a taxi or a cab, we have that in the legal industry.
So Grandview Research published their report on 2024 legal spend in the US and it was, I’m rounding up here, but it’s an even number. $400 billion was spent on lawyers in 2024 in the United States. There’s other research that points to only 22, 23% of the market of legal needs being served. So that means there’s 78% of the market that has legal needs unmet by lawyers. And there’s a lot of reasons why I believe one of those reasons is pricing uncertainty with the billable hour and how much is it going to cost? Even some people could afford to pay it, but they need pricing certainty and don’t get it. Well, the inverse would mean that there’s a $1.3 trillion market opportunity, Mark. And now I’m only licensed in Illinois and I’m in the forties in terms of subscribers.
In terms of clients, right now. I don’t need more than a hundred clients, right? Like the market is so big, because I get this question a lot from lawyers. Aren’t you worried about competition? No. Like, not even close. I’m trying to have a sustainable lifestyle business. I’m not trying to grow a big giant law firm that does subscriptions, although I’ve had some folks reach out to me about that. So I don’t know, I mean, talk to me in a couple years from now, but there’s more than enough market opportunity that I’m not worried about.
Mark Stiving
Okay, I could almost agree with you. Almost. So first off, here’s a rule that I give my clients all the time, never lead a price decrease, right? Never lead a price decrease. And so what I hear you saying is, I’m going to drive prices down in my industry. And that’s not a fun place to play. Now, granted, you’re playing in a new technology you’re using new things that you could pull that off with. I think if I were recommending, not that I know your business well enough to actually recommend something but what comes to my mind is, can we hold prices where we have them today, and then offer a lower-end service to people who are not being served for whatever reason. And so that way, I’m not leading a price decrease in my industry, but I am capturing all of those unserved people that we need to serve. Knowing you, that’s probably what you’re doing. But…
Mathew Kerbis
Yeah. And again, very insightful, Mark, and you’re spot on, right? Like, I do serve some clients who are institutional clients that just hated paying lawyers by the hour. Those are actually some of my best clients and my highest paying clients. And they’re just happy to have pricing certainty. But then like most of my clients and the target market that I’m looking to serve, they’re not paying lawyers anyway. And so, yes, while I am maybe potentially driving prices down, I’m the low cost other provider, right? So like there is no Walmart or Target for legal services, right? Like, it just doesn’t exist. And so, and actually Sam Walton, I’ve consumed a bunch of his stuff and I really like some of his ideas. And so I’m trying to apply some of that and some of what Bezos has done with Amazon to this idea of legal services.
And so I’m really just trying to target a market long unserved by lawyers. And so to that extent, some lawyers might look at what I’m doing as I’m the one lowering prices, but realistically prices are just not being offered to these folks, period, that they could afford. And my per page pricing at a base level, if somebody wants to test me out, even a small business owner, they sign up at $20 a month, they pay me $50 a page. It actually scales incredibly well, better than you’d think. So if somebody has, they’re getting paid a thousand dollars because they’re doing a standard routine at some comedy club in Chicago, was it worth 150 bucks for me to review that three page contract for them? 170, right? If they subscribe and unsubscribe, absolutely. And I’ve done that a few times, right? And that’s just one example of a one-off sort of a contract.
And it’s simple for me. It doesn’t take a lot. Or if there’s a small business owner, it doesn’t have a contract, they’re doing handshake deals or over email, like I could draft them up a three, four-page contract, is it worth $150, $200 for them? Absolutely. But then I get a client who’s got a commercial lease that’s coming up and it’s 40 pages, well that’s $2,000. Realistically, a lot of that stuff is probably not negotiable. A lot of it is boilerplate. And so I’m not actually necessarily spending a bunch of time on every single page. Most of the value are in a few of the clauses on a few of the pages. But, it’s an easy number to understand. And so it actually scales incredibly well and it still could cost a lot of money, right? But no person is going to have 40 pages for me to review. And if they are, they’re an executive getting a contract offer at a company and they could afford it, right? And so even the per page pricing I think scales really well and I’m able to serve those down market and up market using the same exact pricing structure.
Mark Stiving
Nice. So have to say, Mathew, you’re forcing me to think.
Mathew Kerbis
You’re welcome.
Mark Stiving
Yeah, exactly. So I ran into a quote by Bezos the other day, and I thought this was pretty fascinating. And I’ve used it to start some of my presentations occasionally, and the quote goes something like this, there are two types of companies, those who try to raise prices and those who try to lower prices, we are the latter company. And I start my presentation out with that quote, and then I say, and I don’t work with the latter company. I’m here to help you figure out how to raise prices. Yeah.
Mathew Kerbis
Yeah. And I’ve read your book, too. Yes. And so I do think about raising prices, but for me, raising prices is more getting somebody up to a higher level subscription.
Mark Stiving
Sure.
Mathew Kerbis
And like leveraging what you talk about in your book to get them up the ladder, right? And so I do think about that, but I’m more like Sam Walton and like lower your costs, right? Like, not necessarily, and I think I’ve lowered my cost as much as I can. And so I’m still like, my margin is huge, Mark, like I’m talking about, I’m operating a, like a six-figure revenue business with less than $10,000 in annual operating expenses. So, could I charge more? Yes, but am I profitable? Yes.
Mark Stiving
Oh God, Mathew, I hate those words. So I am totally okay with saying, am I profitable? Yes, that’s a really good thing. Could I charge more? Yes. So what should follow that is, okay, let’s raise prices, right?
Mathew Kerbis
And I have offerings for the premium customers. And part of me reading your book, I’m re-categorizing some of my pricing and I do have significant premium offerings now, to being a personal attorney or a business attorney. That’s how I’m taking care of that, Mark, is I still want to offer the accessible pricing, but I will have super premium pricing for the best customers that need it.
Mark Stiving
Nice. So I don’t know about you, but I’m a huge fan of more money is better than less money. It’s just a rule I live by.
Mathew Kerbis
Yeah. But, then again, if I start charging too much, some folks might say, well, I’d rather roll the dice on a billable hour attorney and see if it takes them as long to do the stuff, right? So like, I still have to be strategic in how I convey my pricing and my premium options to my potential clients.
Mark Stiving
Absolutely. And the other rule is, you don’t win them all. Right? But, you need to win your share, otherwise your price is ridiculously high.
Mathew Kerbis
Right. Absolutely. And if you charge too much in my line of work to one client, and then you lose that client, you’ve taken a substantial hit to your overall revenue. And I tried to spread out that risk, as well.
Mark Stiving
Because of the fact that it’s subscriptions, right? It’s recurring revenue or reoccurring revenue more so than recurring revenue, right? So, Mathew, I got to say, it’s fun to talk to you. You do force me to think, but we’re going to have to wrap this up. Last question, what’s one piece of pricing advice you’d give our listeners that you think could have a big impact on their business?
Mathew Kerbis
Don’t be afraid to experiment and to try something new. And A/B testing or ABC testing is one of those ways that you could do it. I experiment with my pricing to find what works. And so you should experiment too and listen to Mark.
Mark Stiving
Yeah. Well, I love the last part. I think A/B testing, whether it’s A/B testing or not, just experimentation, trying new things, seeing what works. It’s incredible. And you are essentially changing an entire industry. Well, who knows if they follow you, but it doesn’t matter because you’re eating, supporting the family. So Mathew, thank you so much for sharing what you know and for all your time today. If anybody wants to contact you, how can they do that?
Mathew Kerbis
The best way is to reach out to me on LinkedIn. You could search Mathew Kerbis, though I spell Mathew with one T, but you could also search the Subscription Attorney and you’ll find me there, too. And if you’re interested in other talks that I’ve given, and if you want to see where this talk will be in the future, mathewkerbis.com.
Mark Stiving
Excellent. And to our listeners, thank you so much for your time. If you enjoyed this, would you please leave us a rating and a review? Mark Herring left this one for me on LinkedIn. This is a piece of it, but I really liked it, so I’m going to share it with you.
‘I’ve had the opportunity to work remotely and in person with Mark. I know he’ll tell you his superpower is pricing, but I think it’s his ability to explain complex concepts like price and value, and make them into very simple and actionable insights. Whether it’s pricing or value positioning, Mark has a way of cutting through the noise and helping our sales and marketing teams focus on what really matters, showing customer value.’
Thank you, Mark. The check is in the mail, as always. And finally, if you have any questions or comments about the podcast or if your company needs help getting paid more for the value you deliver, feel free to email me, [email protected]. Now, go make an impact!
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