Knowing Your Numbers Isn't Enough: You Also Owe Your Customers Efficiency

I talk about knowing your numbers and pricing with confidence more than almost anything else. But there's a piece of that conversation I don't think gets said enough, and it's the one that actually keeps me thinking hardest when I'm setting a price: the math is where you start, not where you stop. What you do after the math is where the real responsibility lives.

Let me show you what I mean with my own numbers.

The math doesn't lie, but it's not the whole answer:

Some of the custom cookie designs I make would need to be priced at $15 a cookie if I charged strictly by time and materials. I don't charge that. Not because the math is wrong, it isn't, but because I know the reality of who I'm selling to. Someone might pay $15 for a single showstopper cookie, once, for something special. Almost nobody is paying $15 a cookie for three dozen. If I priced purely by the math on every design, I'd be accurate and irrelevant at the same time.

Building the efficiency so the price can stay fair:

Here's what I actually do instead. In my custom line, I mix designs within an order so the time evens out across the batch — a few detailed cookies balanced against simpler ones, so my average time per cookie stays consistent no matter what's in the box. That's not an accident. That's a decision I make on purpose, every time, so I can hold a price that's fair to both of us.

I've also spent a genuinely tremendous amount of time building efficiency into how I work — batching, workflow, systems that cut wasted motion. None of that was optional, and none of it happened by itself. I built it specifically so I could keep my pricing at a rate that still makes margin and still keeps customers coming back. Efficiency isn't a nice-to-have on top of good pricing. For me, it's a big part of what makes good pricing possible in the first place.

When the price has to move anyway:

None of this means your price should stay flat forever. There have been years I've had to raise mine because my insurance bill jumped 30%, my rent went up, or my labor costs climbed. I didn't cause any of those increases, and I still had to account for every one of them. That's the part of ownership nobody warns you about: the costs that are entirely outside your control are still entirely your responsibility to absorb into your price.

The difference is in why the price moved. Raising your price because your real costs went up is responsible. Raising your price because you never bothered to find your efficiencies, or because you're just guessing at a bigger number, is not the same thing, even though the invoice looks identical to the customer. 

What responsible pricing actually means:

I want every baker I teach to pay themselves a real wage. I'll say that until I'm out of breath. But paying yourself fairly and pricing responsibly aren't automatically the same thing. If you don't know your numbers and you're simply copying what someone else charges, that's not responsible to your customer, it's a guess wearing someone else's math. And if you know your numbers but you're not putting in the work to find efficiencies, that's not fully responsible either — you're asking your customer to fund shortcuts you haven't bothered to fix.

It's a genuine balancing act, and I won't pretend otherwise. But the bakers who can tell me exactly where their price comes from, ingredient by ingredient, minute by minute, decision by decision, have my full confidence every time. The ones who picked a number because it's close to what the bakery down the street charges have not done the work yet, no matter how kind their intentions.

A few honest questions to ask yourself:

• Could you explain to a customer exactly where your price comes from, item by item?

• Are you actively looking for ways to work more efficiently, or have you accepted your current pace as fixed?

• When you last raised a price, was it because your real numbers demanded it, or because you were guessing at what the market would bear?

• If your costs jumped 20% tomorrow, would you know exactly what to adjust, and why?

This is the layer of pricing that goes beyond just doing the math once and calling it done — it's the ongoing discipline of knowing your numbers, protecting your margin, and staying efficient enough that your price stays fair to the people who keep coming back.

It's exactly what I built Price It Right to teach.

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