Robert Ribciuc is the Managing Partner at EBITDA Catalyst. He helped establish, grew, and managed a successful advisory/consulting firm focusing on pricing strategy and analytics, go-to-market optimization, and revenue management for middle-market corporate and private equity portfolio (PE) clients in diverse industry verticals.
In this episode, Robert shares the key to succeeding as a pricing practitioner: nurturing curiosity. By continually seeking new experiences and knowledge, you’ll not only advance in your current role but also pave the way for future promotions, ultimately leading to a successful career as a consultant.
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Why you have to check out today’s podcast:
- Explore effective strategies for boosting personal and professional development as a pricing professional
- Discover the endless possibilities that come with nurturing your curiosity in the field of pricing
- Find out significant insights about specialization at the same time taking a broad approach in the pricing profession
“Without curiosity, you wouldn’t have tried and you wouldn’t know how much room for improvement to have.”
– Robert Ribciuc
Topics Covered:
01:51 – The breadth of the pricing field extending beyond one’s job
03:57 – Specializing in a particular industry versus embracing a multifaceted approach to pricing
08:37 – The importance of constantly learning and adapting in pricing
12:02 – How pricing professionals can be better at what they do
14:40 – How curiosity gets your job done easily and gets you promoted
20:46 – The challenge of teaching for students in university versus teaching for companies
26:08 – Summarizing what the whole topic is about
28:18 – Robert’s motivational message
Key Takeaways:
“Go read a book about a different industry, something that’s not pricing. Also, get out of your chair and go walk to our product people, go walk to our marketing people and make some friends. Get them to tell you what their job is like and what they’re thinking about.” – Robert Ribciuc
“Curiosity is kind of the opposite of, ‘I can do it easy.’” – Robert Ribciuc
“In many companies the curiosity gets subdued by, ‘Oh, I find that if I just do this repeated cycle my boss is happy enough,’ right? And that can be an illusion.” – Robert Ribciuc
People/Resources Mentioned:
- Ronald Baker: https://impactpricing.com/podcast/497-classic-trash-the-timesheet-exploring-opportunities-in-subscription-businesses-with-ronald-j-baker/
- Susan David: https://www.susandavid.com
- Vendavo: https://www.vendavo.com
- Pros: https://pros.com
- Zoom: https://zoom.us
- Honeywell: https://www.honeywell.com/us/en
Connect with Robert Ribciuc:
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ribciuc/
- Email: [email protected]
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.)
Robert Ribciuc
Without curiosity, you wouldn’t have tried and you wouldn’t know how much room for improvement to have.
[Intro]
Mark Stiving
Welcome to Impact Pricing, the podcast where we discuss pricing value and the entitled relationship between them. I’m Mark Ste, and our guest today is Robert Ribciuc. And here are three things you want to know about Robert before we start. He is the managing partner at EBITDA Catalyst, a pricing strategy firm. He’s been a frequent guest of our podcast as a friend of mine, and his wife is a veterinarian, and we might find a reason to talk about that in a few minutes. Hey, Robert!
Robert Ribciuc
Hey, Mark. Pleasure to join you again. Thanks for having me.
Mark Stiving
Hey, it’s always fun. I just love talking to pricing people and especially people like you. you run the business, you’re so nice about it and open about it. And so what we want to talk about today is how do we run a pricing business, right? So as a practitioner, most pricing people work in a company. They see a problem. And in fact, I’ll tell you, I think their biggest problem is that they think what they do is pricing. Once you get out of that and you start seeing many different companies, many different industries, many different situations, you realize, oh my gosh, pricing is huge and there are so many things going on. How did I think that pricing was just this little piece at the job I had? So let me just pause and hear your comments on that thought.
Robert Ribciuc
I think for sure you are spot on, and I think different people end up in pricing for different reasons. And depending how you are configured and what you like to do, how you like to kind of run your brain on a problem, I think different people end up in different quarters of what you can do with pricing. And for me, one of the temptations and the really interesting parts about it was exactly this multifaceted. If you’re the kind of person that’s curious and doesn’t just want to know about how do I push the buttons on a Vendavo or Pros, but you want to know about multiple functions within the company, and oh, by the way can I apply something I know from a different industry to help my company think out of its bubble? Those are all the dots connecting things. And I think it’s a strength of mine and it’s one that I cultivate by challenging, I guess myself in those dimensions. So definitely, I applied that to my business and sometimes it drives you up the wall. You’ve been a frequent critic of that model, but it’s working for me for now.
Mark Stiving
Well, so let’s be fair, as a critic, and I don’t think I’m really a critic. Here’s what I am. I’m a capitalist and a coach, and I want people to make as much money as they possibly can, right? And so I believe wholeheartedly, if you were to pick an industry and say, I am a pricing expert in this industry, that it’s so much easier to make a gazillion dollars. And that’s because you’re going to add a ton of value, but B, you learn the language, you learn the industry, it’s easier to build a brand, people get to know you. And so I think it’s so much easier to choose an industry and make a ton. And I’ll toss out a name and prove that to you. Think of Ron Baker and what he does in accounting and professional services, right? He is the man, everybody knows him. Everybody wants to go to him in that space.
Robert Ribciuc
Yeah. And I mean, look, I think the specialist versus multi-line practitioner versus the full-on generalist, it can be an open conversation for a long time. And I think that you are right if you are looking for the most return financially on a unit of work, okay? And that’s your definition of how you’re going to measure success. I would probably agree you might do better specializing because the work gets less and less as you learn that line, learn that industry. And I sometimes… maybe I’ll use this analogy, and I don’t know if it will land or not. When I was growing up, I grew up in communist Romania, and there was no such thing as using a calculator on your math exam or any of those things.
Then, we all learned to do math the hard way by doing it. And similar with the number of different things, we didn’t have the tools that automate, simplify, et cetera, right? Then I came to America and it was like, what? You do multiplication without the calculator and all that kind of stuff. And I’ve learned that yes, of course you can solve simple things with the calculator much faster, but knowing the why and the ability to connect the dots and that gymnastics that your mind has been through to do it the other way pays off in a lot of different areas, be it besides just doing computations, right? And I think within our industry, becoming an expert at something that you do over and over is a little bit like getting a calculator. You know how to do this. The formula is in there and you just repeat, right? And not necessarily being in just one industry, yes, it makes some things more effortful, but if you also measure yourself on what you’re learning and how you’re challenging your growth and so on and so forth, I think you find different types of payoffs. And to your point, you may not get to be a billionaire as quickly as other people. but if that’s not your foremost objective, for me, that balancing act works really well.
Mark Stiving
Okay. I think that’s a very fair statement, except you’re too young to make it, right? I want you to go make a gazillion dollars. Now for me, I’m, I’m totally okay not making a gazillion dollars. I do what I do because I love what I do, right? And I think it’s a lot of fun. And as I don’t have an industry. Yeah, right? I just work in whatever space feels right, an opportunity comes up. But let me reiterate what you said and say why that’s so important. And that is, I have a set of frameworks that I use, and I believe these frameworks are true, okay? And then I find a client where it doesn’t work, and now I have to figure out why doesn’t this framework work for this client? And that gives me the chance to change my framework, change my thinking, and so constantly I’m coming up with new ideas for that exact reason, right?
I do a ton of value-based pricing work as does everybody, right? And we want to talk about what’s the value of the solution. And when I think about the value of the solution in B2B, I always measure it in incremental profit dollars to your customer, right? That’s value to your customer. And, then we do that for enough customers, and we could start to see there’s these market segments, these people that are solving different problems. And I got to do this exercise with one of my clients and it just didn’t work out. There was nothing that was matching. And I was like, what the heck is going on? And then I stepped back to think, and what I finally realized is these guys were a platform. They weren’t a solution. So they’re like, Zoom, right? How do you put a dollar value on someone using Zoom? Or they’re like, LinkedIn, how do you put a dollar value on someone using LinkedIn? It’s too many things. So that one exercise caused me to think through what’s the difference between a platform and a solution? And how would I price platforms and how would I price solutions? And so it’s a constant learning experience.
Robert Ribciuc
Yeah. And I mean, it’s fascinating that you use that example because I’m living in something similar right now. I have this project with one of several with a FinTech slash enabler of cross border commerce, e-commerce that basically serves clients from across the world that basically want to sell their goods in different jurisdictions, geographies. And you’ve got to enable the whole stack payments, checkouts, potentially logistics, et cetera. And the number of degrees of freedom as to what kind of a situation a customer of this client of ours, right? The B2B customer could be using their solution for, and what types of, somebody could be sitting in Brazil and wants to sell only to the United States, or somebody would want to sell to places where they hardly use credit cards. Like you name it.
And so I think that normally you think segmentation, can you do three or four segments and keep it simple? And in this situation, it doesn’t work. It’s like a visual chart with a potential two by three matrix at the top. And depending what cell of that you land in, there’s like 16 more adjustment factors that could go into how valuable your solution is to your customer. And initially I was like, oh my gosh, this is like so much more effort to think about this than other areas that might be more straightforward. Like, I don’t know, I’m selling cereal and so forth. And I’m enjoying that challenge immensely, and it’s forcing me to connect new dots. And I think it’s also a place where, because of that complexity there isn’t a recipe and you can add a ton of value for the client, helping them cut through that complexity and still getting back to, okay, how am I going to make something actionable out of this, right?
Mark Stiving
And how do I make it correlated with the way my customers are getting value,
Robert Ribciuc
And at the end of the day, where is that trade off between, there’s 211 scenarios of how people are going to get value, and they vary on these 22 dimensions. And yet that can’t be your pricing strategy because your salespeople are going to go and shoot themselves and shoot you first, right? Yeah.
Mark Stiving
And so in that respect, you and I have a huge advantage over a lot of people that have pricing jobs, right? A pricing practitioner, because we see so many opportunities and we get the chance to say, hey, my framework doesn’t work. Or, the solution’s not obvious to me. And so we have to go figure it out, and it gives us a way to build a new framework or build a new thought process. I’ve got my own answer to this question, but I’m going to ask you first, what advice would you give a practitioner working at a company, a pricing person so they could somehow learn the way we learn?
Robert Ribciuc
Yeah, I mean, as you probably recall, I was in the shoes of giving that advice as a head of pricing at several different companies including Honeywell and the like. And it was more than just advice. I kind of made it the requirement for my team. The first is to take advantage within the company. So if you’re sitting in America and working on your Vendavo pricing over here, talk to the guy in EA who doesn’t have Vendavo and is having to do it all in SAP or perhaps not using software at all and cross pollinate, right?And you can go in any number of directions with what a global company can do with that concept, whether it’s geography, lines of products, specifics of currency hedging and pricing and so on.
But more importantly, I also ask them go read a book about a different industry, something that’s not pricing, because remember, and with that, also get out of your chair and go walk to our product people and go walk to our marketing people and make some friends, and like get them to tell you what their job is like and what they’re thinking about. Right? And you know this as well as anyone there’s more there than just them learning to get their mind to solve problems better. But there’s also the interpersonal and functional siloing and all the things we face in pricing execution where people just don’t listen to pricing because, well, you never came to visit them, and they don’t know you from Adam, and they don’t recognize your legitimacy to tell them how to price their stuff.
Mark Stiving
Yeah. So, I liked everything you said, and as you were talking, I could boil it all down to a single word. And that’s curiosity, right? Being more curious…
Robert Ribciuc
Master of simplicity. I mean, can I have you around more often? Why did I use so many words? Because I do. And why you use only one as you do that, that’s why you’re the educator not…
Mark Stiving
…trying to be critical. But, if you think about it, if we could get people to be curious about what other people are doing, what other situations are, I think that’s just huge. And by the way, could you be curious about how your customers think?
Robert Ribciuc
Right? And I have that, I mean, the FinTech project I just described, but several other projects that I have going on right now where literally that conversation occurs where you’ll have one of the executives saying, I got to train my team to remember to actually talk to the customers. Or like, we haven’t done a bunch of listening into customer interviews in a very long time. And some people recognize that should be an alarm signal. But it’s surprising how we’re all kinds of human beings. Many of us have this pull towards can I do it with less effort? And before you know it, can I do it with less effort? Well, you can win if you find a scalable automated way. Or, but you can also lose if you start giving up on these habits of curiosity. Curiosity is kind of the opposite of I can do it easy.
Mark Stiving
Yeah, yeah.
Robert Ribciuc
It’s sort of like, what else can I learn? And yes, every now and then curiosity can in fact end up helping you do it more easily because you learn something new, a new solution, a new technology. But in too many companies, the curiosity gets subdued by, ‘Oh, I find that if I just do this repeated cycle my boss is happy enough,’ right? And that can be an illusion.
Mark Stiving
I love what you just said. And if you’re a pricing practitioner out there, listen again to this because what Robert just told us is when we’re curious, we’re actually adding work to our plate. We’re doing more stuff. And then if you find something that you could actually apply, you’re adding even more work to your plate. Whereas if you just put your head down and say, how do I get through my day? How do I get my deliverables done? I don’t want to talk to anybody. I don’t want to know anything different. You can go home at five o’clock, but you’re not going to get promoted. Right? You’re not going to be a better person and contribute more to the company. and so this curiosity thing, I think says everything about do you want to grow your career or do you want to be where you are?
Robert Ribciuc
I think that’s very fair. And to kind of expand on this, I mean for me there’s even, what can I do outside of the mainstream of pricing engagements that stretches other dimensions? So as we speak, I’m teaching at the business school at the University of Minnesota, and it’s the first time I’m teaching a full course. I have guest lectured a number of times. I was a guest on the main pricing course in the MBA program for the last few years. And it’s the first time I’m teaching a full course. And there were a lot of people who are like, what are you doing? Like, that’s going to take so much extra time off your plate? I’m going to make delivering in your main line of work so much more challenging and demanding. And there’s truth to that.
But there is also truth to, as a professional educator, having to explain it to other people is sometimes the best way to learn. It’s also sometimes the best way to learn how to place, whether it’s your students or your clients in sort of like, what is the real need here? Where do I meet these people where they’re at? Right? And I’m going to be the first to say this first course, a lot of curveballs blindsided. Didn’t expect this, didn’t expect that. So, there’s this personality on LinkedIn who also writes very good books called Susan David. She talks about processing our feelings and emotions. And when you feel that feeling of discomfort, like, ooh, I’m not living up to my standard of excellence in this, or things are not going according to plan, that is basically your signal that the opportunity to learn you’re being stretched.
And that discomfort is your measure of opportunity value, right? And if you have that mindset right, you’re going to run into some things that other people might say. And I may have said 15, 20 years ago, and I was much harsher on myself and much more afraid of these risks. Somebody might say, well, this is kind of a semi, not your standards, like maybe a seven out of 10 or some people were unhappy or whatever. And fine. Like all of that is, without curiosity, you wouldn’t have tried and you wouldn’t know how much room for improvement to have.
Mark Stiving
Yep. I agree completely. real quickly, I’m debating whether I want to say these words or not.
Robert Ribciuc
The moment you say that, I know you’re going to say them because I know.
Mark Stiving
Exactly. I was a professor at one point in time and teaching college students I find very painful and very challenging. And even when I guest lecture now at UNR, university of Nevada Reno I still find it so hard. I think it’s a little better than it used to be. But what I don’t like about teaching at college is that people want a grade and they want a good grade, and they don’t want to do a lot of work. And when you teach for companies, which is what I do all the time nowadays. Everybody actually wants to know the content, they want to know how to apply it, and it is such a different experience. So, if I could give you any advice, it’d be to figure out how to teach for companies and not universities, because… And you still get challenged too, by the way.
Robert Ribciuc
Yeah, I mean, look, I think you are spot on. And when it comes to really young people, particularly in a society like ours that’s pretty affluent, and a lot of us have the necessities our families provide, et cetera, et cetera. So you will certainly run into all the things these young people don’t know. And it’s not just about pricing or marketing or analytics, whatever you’re teaching under the headline of the course, but more importantly, what you just described, like, do these folks know what they should be after with their time and their investment in their program? And of course, judging them would be totally wrong because we’ve been there. Right? When we were their age and there were things we didn’t know. I came to this country from a society where grades and succeeding academically in class was basically the only way to stand out under communist regime, right? People got placed in jobs based on where they finished in the university. So you have a whole system that for decades has imbued well, you’ve got to get good grades. And I came here and I over-indexed on it. I’m very good at getting good grades.
I was very bad at exploring the men’s opportunities for networking, group activities, all these things that actually make for success in a society like America. take on independent study all those types of things you can do. And I try to share with my students, yeah, I can see you’re upset that you didn’t know everything on the exam and you think the exam is too hard, and so on and so forth. There’s plenty of that, right? And can I help you shift your focus? First of all, grades in many of these programs average to some very generous A- or B+. So it’s like, is that where we want to spend our energy, whether you’re going to get an A- or a B+, or should we talk about how do we get the most out of your learning opportunity and maybe even more importantly, make you that resourceful, gritty, resilient person that when it gets hard, you actually see opportunity rather than an opportunity to complain, right? And so that is a challenge that if you’re going to teach, you have to accept at times it can be uncomfortable because you’re right, I try to say, well, if you were in the workplace right now, people wouldn’t give about how hard this feels or whatever, right? But you have to remember, these are young people they haven’t learned and they need a safe zone to learn it before they get to the workplace. And it starts getting learned the hard way.
Mark Stiving
You are a much better person than I am. And I am so glad the world has people like you in it.
Robert Ribciuc
You’re very kind. I have my very large share of screw ups and past failures that I’ve tried to learn from and you mentioned my wife and having influences in your life that calibrate okay, there are other models out there. Being a happy person, there are other models out there of being a successful person I think is also important. And we can get lucky or unlucky sometimes with the models that surround us.
Mark Stiving
Okay. I want to try to summarize my takeaways from our conversation, if that’s okay. And I want to do this for the listeners. If you are a pricing practitioner, be curious, be curious about a lot of different things. That’s how you’re going to get promoted. That’s how when you become a consultant, if you go out on your own, that’s how you’re going to be successful. Be curious. If you are a consultant like Robert and I, kind of are then you have two choices. You can focus or not. And if you don’t focus, neither Robert nor I focus as much as we should or could. We learn a lot. We see a lot, but I got to tell you right now, there are several hundred pricing consultants in the world. And if you come out and say, hey, I’m a new pricing consultant and want to get jobs, it’s hard, right? It’s going to be hard to find new opportunities. But if you can pick a focus, if you can pick an industry and become known, become an expert at that industry, and maybe it’s the industry you come out of as a pricing practitioner, then it’s much, much more likely that you can go find opportunities and find jobs. And by the way, you’ll grow a much fast, a much bigger business, much faster than Robert and I do. So, Robert, was that a horrible summary or was that spot on?
Robert Ribciuc
I think it’s spot on the side of our conversation about the benefits of specialization, which you and I both recognize. I think there’s the other half of our conversation where we say there’s also clients out there hiring people like Mark and Robert that could be hiring a specialist in their industry. And that too happens for a reason, right? And so at the end of the day, it just depends is your objective to make it as easy for yourself as fast as possible, get that highest return per unit of work? or is it maybe a little more nuanced than that and you are happy to keep learning and there’s a payoff for you and the balancing of knowing a lot about a fair amount of industries.
I think we’re sitting in a very good place. I and our partners, Armin, Maciej, and Wojciech were very fortunate. Like literally we’re turning business down left and right at the moment or delaying projects. And so somehow there is a way to also make this work and in the process have some of the benefits that I just mentioned. And for example, I get to do a project in the pet industry and talk to my veterinarian wife about it and have a lot of fun getting her takes. And so I think, I wouldn’t want people to come out with, like this is a dying breed and there’s nothing to be had in this because I’m doing as well as I want to at the moment. And if anything, there’s too much to do. So I think that’s also important to include in the summary.
Mark Stiving
Yeah. So, I’ll add some nuance to it then. And that would be if you are hungry, then you’d better focus and go find business. And if you’re not hungry, if you’re doing okay, do what we do, it’s way more fun. You get exposed to a lot more things.
Robert Ribciuc
Yeah, I like that. And again hunger has its nuances, right? There’s hunger, like I just got to find the next project and I’m not paying the rent without that, right? And that’s one type of hunger. And then there’s hunger. I’m doing pretty well, but I’m not going to be happy until I have $25 million in the bank. And the latter I’ve learned is it can motivate some people, but it’s not who I want to be. I don’t want to drive myself on that type of principle. And again, I find that there are a lot of happy people in industries where they don’t think like that at all. So just kind of last wise words if I had any.
Mark Stiving
Alright. Hey Robert, this has been a ton of fun. If anybody wants to contact you, how can they do that?
Robert Ribciuc
I’m on LinkedIn, Robert Ribciuc and also just email always works, [email protected].
Mark Stiving
And those, at least the links, it’ll be in the show notes for sure. And to our listeners, thank you for your time. If you enjoyed this, would you please leave us a rating and a review. And if you have any questions or comments about the podcast or pricing in general, feel free to email me, [email protected]. Now, go make an impact!
