Subscribe RSSMs. Rohr knew money was moving through the company, but at the end of the month, there never seemed to be any left. Then, in 1990, just as the company seemed to be on the brink of a collapse, she read a column about pricing by Frank Blau in Plumbing and Mechanical Magazine . Thinking he was way off in his opinion that contractors typically don’t charge enough for their services, she sent him a letter telling him how wrong he was. Wouldn’t you know it, after getting the letter, Mr. Blau called her up at home and told her something along the lines of, “You don’t know your assets from your elbows!”
Humbled, Ms. Rohr asked Mr. Blau if he would agree to mentor her, which he did. And the first two things he told her were: 1, she needed to raise her prices by 500 percent. And 2, she needed to look into open-book management .
Ms. Rohr admits that she swallowed hard in raising her prices by so much, but, after reading “ The Great Game of Business ” and making a visit to SRC to see the game in action, she realized that if she opened her books to everyone in her company, they would all understand why they were raising their prices so much. “If my employees didn’t buy why we needed to do it,” she said, “our customers wouldn’t either.”
