Marcos Rivera | Pricing on Purpose, Intentional Perseverance, & A Ladder Mindset

“Do it on purpose.” - Marcos Rivera

EPISODE OVERVIEW: 

From a boy in the Bronx, to growing up in San Diego, today’s guest not only shares with us his journey of discovering his passion, but the intentional perseverance it takes to do “it” on purpose and achieve our goals. Watch or listen now to this great episode and discover what it means to have a Ladder Mindset, the importance of pricing our products and services on purpose, and how to take regular “gut-checks” in our lives. Listen now to experience what our guest learned the hard way, and apply it to your own life for accelerated success. Ladies & Gentlemen, welcome to the Marcos Rivera story!

GUEST BIO:

Marcos Rivera is the founder and CEO of Pricing I/O, a pricing boutique helping SaaS leaders around the world capture value by refining their monetization models. After his years at Vista Equity Partners as a pricing and product management executive, Marcos decided to start his own company zeroing in on monetizing value and unlocking growth. SaaS companies spend an average of 6 hours per year discussing pricing strategy and Marcos aims to evolve that culture by shifting pricing from guesswork to framework.

SHOW NOTES:

Guest Contact Info:

• Website: www.pricingio.com
• LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/MarcosLRivera
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/pricingio

Remarkable People Podcast Listener Special Offer(s):

• Exclusive “Street Pricing” book offer for RPP listeners! Email info@pricingio.com for 20% off of your order.

Transcript

Marcos Rivera | Pricing on Purpose, Intentional Perseverance, & A Ladder Mindset 

From the Bronx to San Diego, intentional perseverance and real world gut checks. All this and more right now.

 Hello, my Remarkable friend. Welcome to this week's episode of the Remarkable People Podcast. This week you're going to hear from a professional sales and product pricer entrepreneur, leader, and author, Marcos Rivera. Author of Street [00:01:00] Pricing, he's going to share with us today his journey through life. We're going to go brief, concise, and to the point.

He's going to talk about how important time is and how, like we always say on the podcast, it's the most valuable asset God gives us, right? He's gonna talk about perseverance, saying focused on a vision, finding the vision, and then making sure. That you're living on purpose in your decision making. He's gonna break down how he had his success, so you can too.

So please get your note, paper and pen ready. Make sure you share this episode with your friends and family. Reach out to Marcos and myself if it's helped you, if you have any questions. And if you're like, Dave, you're ugly. The podcast stinks. Why don't you do this differently? Write me at my website, david Pasqualone dot com.

Reach out through the contact us page and let me know how I can be better for you. Our whole purpose with the [00:02:00] Remarkable People Podcast is to glorify God and help you grow. We love to hear the positive comments, but negative comments are just as important cuz it's just gonna make us better as iron sharpen his iron.

So the man, the countenance of his friend. So again, Please like the podcast, subscribe to the podcast, join our mailing list on the website. Tell your friends about it. You know what to do. But right now I want you to focus on God, you and Marcos, and enjoy this episode on purpose on time right now.

[00:02:34] Copy of INTERVIEW RPP Marcos Rivera 6June2023: Hey Marcos, how are you today, brother? Dude, I'm terrific. Loving life, man. That's great. You and I spoke literally months ago, and I've been pumped for this episode. I got your copy of street pricing in the mail, and I know we're gonna talk about that in the show.

But for listeners who are serial part of our community, they listen to every episode or to the person who's new. This is [00:03:00] their first episode of the Remarkable People Podcast. If they commit to sitting down and listening to this episode or running at the gym while they listen to this episode, what is one thing you guarantee they're gonna take away to benefit their life?

I think the one thing that I'll guarantee they'll take away is how to persevere. They always tell you that they don't tell you actually how to do it. So we're gonna cover a little bit of that today. Beautiful. And you know, the, the saying, the best ability is dependability, right? Perseverance, sticking to it.

So this is something I need, this is something most people need, and I'm excited to share your story. So at this time, Marcos, you know who you are today was made up of your life. The good, the bad, the pretty, the ugly, the pretty ugly, right? So what we're gonna do is we're gonna have you start from your birth, just work chronologically through your life and we'll dialogue along the way to see where and how you became the man you are.

Sound good? Yeah, that sounds terrific. Let's get into it. Awesome, [00:04:00] brother. So where were you born? I can tell from your complexion, Ireland. Right? I, I get that a lot. Very common. Yeah. No, man, I'm, if you're listening to the podcast, that is total sarcasm. If you're watching, you know exactly what we just did. If you're not looking Exactly, man.

No, listen, I I'm a skinny kid from the Bronx. Like I grew up in New York City, Puerto Rican family and single parent household. My mom raised us all and one of the key things growing up there is a couple of of very common paths you can take, right? You can go down and join a gang or if you can get into a bunch of trouble, good thing.

My mom kept really close eye on me and kept me out of all that stuff. But one of the other things, Is that I'm the oldest of three, and so I felt this natural responsibility to watch over my younger brother, younger sister, and so that also kept my head on straight, kept me out of trouble, avoided a few close calls with You know, going down the wrong path in my early days and [00:05:00] kept it straight overall because I felt like so many people were depending on me, my mom, who was all by herself and my, my two younger siblings.

So that was the beginning of my personality, how that started to develop. Right? So fast forward out of the Bronx and moving all the way to San Diego. Think about this, right? Think about going from. You know, hard living on the streets, you know, surviving there I was on, you know, public welfare. We didn't have much money, you know, barely make ends meet.

Moving out to San Diego. Pretty expensive city in its own right, but very different vibe. Right? I came out here. People were making fun of my accent. They say, Hey, say coffee again. Say coffee again. They make fun of me. It was hard to fit in as a kid and that also made things really difficult for me expanding socially and trying to get a new group of friends out in a whole unfamiliar place.

Right? So what did I do is I slowly began to adapt. As I started making my way through high school learning, you know, how people tick, [00:06:00] what ways I could fit into different groups, I also made a couple really close good friends. And what that did for me was made me realize that you are in complete control of how people perceive you.

Okay. And that was a, a big lesson for me growing up as a kid, as a teenager, I didn't realize I went from being, you know, some outcast to, to being, you know, somewhat in the middle, fairly popular. Not the most popular, but a lot of people knew who I was. And I realized like, man, I just changed the way I, I, I spoke or I didn't speak and changed the way I acted around.

People started making me realize there's something. Really worthwhile learning more about in that psychology and, and how people work. And that's, that's gonna come into my life a little bit later. So, blasted through that got to high school graduated pretty well and moved into U C S D. Now I'm moving into a college campus where there's a lot of affluent people and I'm just trying to get my groove on trying to figure out, all right, how do I navigate this whole environment?

Okay. There's so many people from different [00:07:00] backgrounds, cultures, people driving, you know, Mercedes and, and nice cars. And here I come with my clunker beat up Toyota Corolla that I had, my pullout stereo, not to date myself a little bit. Right. And I was really proud of that. Yeah. So nobody could steal it, right?

The pullout scenarios. No, I pull that sucker out every time. And in closed closed up shop. So that was, that was to me like the, the beauty of where technology was going, right? It went from, you know, your eight tracks and cassettes into these pullouts. I had my beeper. I thought I was really cool, right?

Yeah. And that keeps, that keeps on moving forward. I love tech since the very beginning, like my parents were like, Hey, that blinking 12 on the vcr for those of you who know what a VCR is can you reset that? Can you fix that? And I was, I was always game for that stuff, so, so now you're seeing the underpinnings of my background, right?

Loving technology, figuring out how people tick and all that, and sort of working through some tough scenarios, right? All that comes into play as I moved [00:08:00] outta college and I was actually now working for like banks and financial institutions. I thought I was gonna be a finance guy. And that's where I jumped into my career.

I'm like, great. I love numbers, numbers make the world go around. There's always a right answer to a number of problem. I hated writing papers. I love math problems giving me all day long. So that drove me. That's a third ingredient. I'm also dropping in here as well. So as I went through that, Finished up, got some jobs at financial institutions.

Worked my way up and then found myself at an interesting crossroads. I got introduced to this thing called product management, and I'm like, okay, so I can get outta numbers in that, that damn monthly close. That always just drove me crazy for like two weeks. And moved into something called product management.

It was fairly newer at the time, right? This is in the mid nineties. And I thought, okay, well great. What do I do? How do I figure this out? And I fortunately had really great mentors at that stage to teach me about responsibility, about driving a profitable product, figuring out [00:09:00] what customers want, tying all these things together.

Right. And I thought, okay, this is actually really cool and it's starting to pull in all the things I love. I love technology, I love figuring out how people tick, and I love numbers. And it just really started coming together for me at that stage. So everything I ever built from a software integration product perspective, I kept working up the ranks.

Soon fast forward, I was a leader, a product executive. I had teams and products and portfolios underneath me. And guess what? Everything I ever had to build, I had to put a price tag on it. And I always found that to be actually harder than building the product. But I also found it more rewarding, like, what are people gonna pay for this thing that I just spent months and months with a whole team trying to build?

And that took me down a, a whole nother path that made me figure out, okay, how do you understand and articulate value to someone? How do you make someone understand why is this worth paying for than some other [00:10:00] alternative? How do you frame it? How do you position it? Right? And it pulls into all those things I talked about into what we call pricing and monetization today.

And that's how the muscles started getting built. And man, oh man, I did that product after product year after year. And next thing you know, I've, I started developing more pattern recognition. I could look at a problem and he start breaking down where the pricing starts to be ineffective and figure out, okay, here's how you make it more effective, because this is how people work, or this is how the value is, is framed, or this is how you can become more profitable.

And as I kept doing that, just kept getting better and better. Like anything else fast forward, I went into a private equity firm as their head of pricing and packaging. And then from there, I'm doing this across all sorts of companies and products all over the world. Now, the, the engine is on overdrive, like it's it's really for me getting easier and easier to see where the opportunities are and where they're not.

Did [00:11:00] that over 62 companies, I. Tech companies that we owned. And then after that started on my own, said, you know what? It's time for me to take control of my time. I can't be on a plane 24 7, especially with me being a new dad, expanding my family, and frankly, I love San Diego so much. I don't wanna live anywhere else.

So started on my, on my own all by myself. Now we're about 15 people and growing as a boutique firm, and I love what I do. I, I look forward to it every single day. Yeah, and like you said, 62 companies and growing. What do you think you were, you know, you had a position, you took the opportunity, you had the growth and the success, and then you moved to the next opportunity, and you did that 62 times.

That's not by coincidence. What is it? How you're wired, or whether it was natural or learned. What did you learn that was a common thread of [00:12:00] success that wove through those opportunities that our listeners can apply? I would say the number one thing is having a latter mindset. I always build on the previous thing I learned.

Always. And so the idea here is if you, if, if you go back to the, the background at the bank, the background as a, an early product manager, the background at the private equity firm, I'm always taking steps up to what I learned previously. And so it's not about making a, a complete divergence and pivot away from what I knew.

I was like, how can I build. On what I knew, and that made every next step very intentional for me. Every other company that I looked at, I just learned about a concept in packaging. How can I build on that with the next company? I just learned another concept about, you know, how do you discount the right way?

How do I build on that for the next company? So if for me it was always additive, and if you have that mindset, then I think it helps clarify. Some of the paths you can take and why you make decisions [00:13:00] and and how you plow forward and what drives you to succeed and persevere, like I mentioned in the beginning.

And for those who are starting out or maybe have been stuck in their position for years, do you recommend taking any opportunity you're given to just prove your worth or were you selective in your opportunities? I was selective, and the reason why is somebody like me, my personality type, I'll tell you right now, I am a big fat introvert, all right?

I don't have anything wrong. Like there's nothing wrong with people. I don't have anything against them, but man, I am exhausted after talking to a, a. People in a group, which is funny for someone like me who talks to tons of people every day. But that also means I'm very introspective and I'm always thinking about why I'm doing something and the next step.

So I always recommend, just like you said, right? If you're looking at different opportunities to take, I would do it on purpose. Okay. If I had to leave with one liner, do it on purpose, right? And so if you have those opportunities, three or four, and you [00:14:00] look across them and say, okay, what can help me build on what I already know or what I've learned, or take me forward to where I want to go?

Choose those opportunities on purpose. It's gonna help you have a lot more drive and wherewithal and persevere through. Sometimes a decision's gonna feel kind of crappy. You're gonna be like, man, I really want to go down this way. But if you're really clear on why you did it, That often helps push you through the other end, which is the key.

Yeah. And so that brings up a great point. The perseverance is great and the seizing opportunity is great, but you needed that vision, that direction. When did you get the vision and direction for your life? Yeah, that's a really great question For the vision and direction for my life, I think is, it really boils down to.

Knowing what I want and don't want. And that happened early on when you don't have a lot. So if I go back to my upbringing right in, you know, single like 450 square foot apartment in the Bronx, right? Not having [00:15:00] a lot to go on and moving forward and being a, a good role model for my younger siblings, being a dependable like, you know, lieutenant and right hand for my mom.

Like, what do I really want? And a lot of people. Tend to let others answer that question for them. And as I moved into my teens and started again learning more about how people tick by the time I graduated high school I realized what I really want is control of my time. Cuz I think time is more valuable than money.

And I learned that when I lost my mom as a kid and I wished I would've spent more time with her. Right? Mm-hmm. Just flat out being real with you. Okay. Yeah. When I, when I lost my mom, it's like, you know, there's, you can't get that back. And so early on when you have, you know, things that happened to you and everybody's had their story of, of.

Of loss and of, of losing someone or some something or someone very close to them. I, I use that [00:16:00] as fuel to be very deliberate in what I do because I don't wanna be in that position again of wishing I had more time. So that was my guiding light throughout high school and then moving into college, I sat down and I said, you know what?

I'm not gonna be you know, very. Let, let's just say exploratory. In my college studies, I know that I want to be in business and I want to be in economics because those are the kind of things that, that, that fuel me. Those are the classes I excelled at. Again, people, technology numbers. I love that stuff.

So with all that in my head and what I know, That's where I was very clear on my major. Never changed, my major, never changed. My minor went right through as I planned because of all those things. I was clear about what I wanted right at the end of high school. Beautiful. And then once you got through and you're evaluating these opportunities, you're taking them, you're season them, you're moving closer to the vision, what you have [00:17:00] intentionally in mind, where does that bring you in your life?

Marcos, you know, There's an, there's another part of it that makes me wonder, like, what if I would've done this? Or what if I would've done that? Right? And there's people out there who probably wonder like, man, I can go so many different directions, but where do I go? What do I pick? I always look at decisions as two-way doors in many cases.

Right? I. I always feel like if I make a decision one way, I can adapt and modify and go another path if I really wanted to. And I think that allows me the freedom to make these choices with such conviction. Right? I think that's where the perseverance falls down is cuz you don't have conviction and you conviction comes from having the confidence that you're going the right way.

But also that safety net to know, look, if, if this isn't working out for me because I'm learning about it as I go through it. I can change course. And I think what that leads me today is someone who is not afraid to commit [00:18:00] and not afraid to push hard and push through in anything that I do. And it's, again, accumulated over again, learning passions pain, everything that's come together and what makes me me.

And so that's, that's, that's how kind of I see it right now. So for the people, you know, everybody has challenges in their life and some are more. Intense. Some are more lengthy, you know, some people have a bad month, some people have a bad decade. Right? Yeah. It's, it's just how life plays out and sometimes our mindset gets us in our rhythm and a rut, good or bad, right.

We started off this conversation talking about the importance of perseverance and the importance of, you know, moving towards that vision and sticking to it. What advice do you have to the listeners to keep themselves motivated, even in the most difficult circumstances and times? Man, I, I'm gonna use a term that I don't like and that I'm gonna [00:19:00] break it down.

Okay. Because, What I, what I really lean on is that mental dexterity, right? The ability for your mind to see what's happening in the future, but know that you're not there yet. And it's gonna take some work to get there, to keep the vision in focus, but also be able to see the reality of what's going on right now and change that reality or address it head on.

So what I worry about is, is very broad strokes when it comes to you. And your future and how you act and how you get it. And what I mean by that is it's okay to be in step one of a thousand, right? It's okay to keep one foot in front of the other and plowing towards that, that end goal. But sometimes it's, it's easy to mix up in your mind like what's not working now?

Could mean that that goal that you're striving for in the next couple years is also not gonna work. Like, no, I try to separate those things out. Like the way I look at it is you have a goal and you have steps to get [00:20:00] there. And what's happening now may not be ideal, may be crappy, you might be You know, in a scenario that is less than ideal, but it doesn't mean the goal is invalid or the, the thing you're trying to go for is, is any less worth it.

And so for me, I always try to separate those two things out and I can focus in on the detail of what's happening now and be brutally honest with myself saying, crap, you know what? This is not gonna work the way I'm doing it. While still maintaining that long-term vision of this is where I'm going, this is where I'm gonna get to.

It's that differentiation of the two. Keeping both of them in mind is key. I think that's where separates people who can long-term get to their goal and, and people who can't. Yeah, I'd agree completely. I think that's excellent advice and you've proved it with your life. You know, you're, you're your human Guinea pig.

It's working. Right. So where are you today, Marcos? You talked about how. You started your organization from scratch. You have 15 employees, now [00:21:00] you're growing. What's your life look like today? Where are you heading in the future? Man, right now it's, it's great to have options, let's put it that way, right? So when I first started this business, it was right before Covid hit.

It's about, you know, six months before Covid. Everybody thought it was crazy on paper. You're working for a really big private equity firm. You're getting FaceTime with the billionaire founder. You're, you're popular in the firm because of your skillset. You're, you know, lots of room to move up and grow and so on.

You're about to have a second kid. Why in the hell would you leave that to start your own business and then come later? A big fat pandemic smack you upside the head, like as you're building it up. Right? But again, those were the short-term things that. While less than ideal and frankly made me lur, made me nervous.

Like I wasn't, I ain't gonna lie here and saying I'm, you know, smiling all the way. Like there's some times where I had to really sit down and gut check like, this is something I really want to do. But the point of the matter is I saw, okay, look, I do want to keep going here because ultimately controlling my [00:22:00] time is most important and this pandemic is gonna real reveal other opportunities.

Even though it was locked down, there were folks that a lot of companies stopped spending cuz they weren't sure if they were gonna. You know, be in business. It also opened up new business models. It also drove a lot more towards remote work, remote engagements, things like that. So I decided to change my model that was a lot more remote, which today gives me a lot of freedom on serving a lot of different customers.

So right now the business is 15 strong. We're growing, we're very profitable, and I'm gonna continue to. Go deeper in my space. So this is not serving a bunch of other spaces that I don't know very well. It's just going deeper in the space that I know, which tends to be technology technology, services, marketplaces, things like that.

And so my, my biggest vision today is let's get deeper and let's scale out so that way the business becomes [00:23:00] it's easier to expand and do other things when you have that scale. So that's not where I am from a business perspective. Personally, I am very happy to be that dad that is home, seeing my kids go to school, having dinner with my wife.

You know, there's all the things that you take for granted, a lot of cases that are just put a smile on my face all the time. So I'm doing it my way and it feels good. Amen. Amen. So let's talk about street pricing. It's the book you wrote. I have actually a pre-screen copy, so the cover may be different if you're watching ladies and gentlemen, but it's still Marcos's book.

Talk about the expertise that you share in this book and with your company. We have listeners from all around the world. We have business owners, we have employees, we have middle class, we have upper class, we have every kind of demographic you can imagine, Marcos. But for the listeners, Who are hearing your story and they wanna learn more about you, [00:24:00] what do you and your team specialize in and what can they expect in street pricing?

So what we specialize in is really helping founders and entrepreneur build a confidence to price those products on purpose. I go back to what I said earlier, right? Doing it on purpose and we do advisory, research, coaching consulting for some of the biggest tech companies in the world, and we help them figure out their whole monetization strategy.

They build something new. Here's how you should price it. They buy another company. Here's how you need to bundle it. Like all the key things that are gonna unlock their growth. We focus on with those firms and we're very hands-on in what we do. Now, if, if you look at my firm and you look at even the book, you notice that Yes, I do focus in on the technology sector.

Why? Because I love it so damn much. The value changes so fast and I just think it's so fascinating. But a lot of the principles that we apply, you know, figuring out what your customers [00:25:00] want, tying that to the offer and pricing in a way that frames the value appropriately. Like all these things, they can apply to anything or anyone.

And so I really wanted to broaden the audience a bit with the book. And the book was really my. My effort to attack my biggest enemy, which is guesswork. Guesswork is my biggest enemy. People out there. Smart, accomplished. People are out there guessing on their pricing, all right? They'll, they'll be very well educated in their craft or they're, they're good at what they do, and then you ask 'em to price their products.

Many of them will say, yep, I actually just kind of guessed it. Saw a competitor, made some changes there, made it up. And so I. Think a lot of founders and entrepreneurs are doing themselves a disservice by guessing on the one thing that impacts a hundred percent of your revenue. And so by writing a book that is easy to read and puts a lot of real [00:26:00] examples, real interviews, real checklists in play, it's just a way for me to break through that guesswork and reach a lot of people.

Excellent. And if someone wanted to reach you, what's the best way for them to connect with you, Marcos? Yeah, so two ways to connect with me. Most common are gonna be just reach me in LinkedIn, Marcos Rivera. You'll see me in there and happy to, to accept a LinkedIn invitation. You can also just go to pricing io.com and you can submit a quick form that goes to my team.

Another way to get ahold of me as well. So those are the two best ways. All right, brother. Well, we covered a lot of ground fast, whether it's in your personal story from birth to today or whether it's lessons that like, you know, Dave, if I could talk to my 18 year old self or my 10 year old self, or my 35 year old self, this is something I think is really important for your listeners to grasp on and apply to their lives.

Do you have any messages like that or [00:27:00] parts of your story that we missed? You know something, if I were to think about what would I say to my 18 year old self, which my 18 year old self was still an idiot back then, I didn't know what I wanted, but at least I knew where the path I was going. One, I'll put it this way, I'll put it this way, because of me going from New York, which is very fast paced to San Diego, which is very laid back, and it's this constant balance between being a little pushy, but also being patient.

All right. And if you think about those two things, right, in life or in anything what I learned and then what I will tell myself and when you're 18 is like, look man, you can decide when you wanna be a little bit more pushy. To get something, to learn something, to go after something with conviction.

And you could also learn when to be patient, meaning maybe you need to be pushy over a long period of time before the thing pops or before it happens. And so for me it's being understanding that. It doesn't have to be a matter of being pushy or patient. [00:28:00] You can be pushy and patient. And that's something that as 18 year old as an 18 year old, I really didn't understand and get.

And so I would, I would say that to myself is be able to pull the both of those. Beautiful. I think that's excellent advice, man. It's been a pleasure having you on the show. And in our original show notes, you talked about a special on your book. Is that still available to our listeners? Yes, absolutely. So I'm gonna send you a coupon code for 20% off for any of your listeners today to this podcast, and you can post it and you can have that ready to go for the audience.

Awesome. So just check out the show notes as usual. Ladies and gentlemen, check out Marcos's website. Hit him up on LinkedIn or through his website. Contact us, Paige, continue the conversation. Maybe even partner up with him for some of your jobs and just grow together. So Marcos, it's been a true honor to become [00:29:00] friends and get to know one another, to hear about what you got going on, and to hear how you grew over the years and helping us do it too.

Thank you, my friend. It was a big pleasure being here today. Thanks for having me. Oh yeah. Anytime. And ladies and gentlemen, we love you. We know that we don't see you or get to talk face to face, so if you need anything, reach out to Marcos or myself or our team. You can connect to us through the website.

You can connect to us through social media as well. But just like our slogan for the show says, don't just listen to the great knowledge and content and truth that Marcos brought you. Do it. Repeat the parts you need to each day. So you have a great life in this world, but most importantly, so you're prepared for attorney to come.

So I'm David Pasqualone, and this was our friend Marcos Rivera. Marcos, thank you again, brother. No big pleasure, man. Thank you. All right, ladies and gentlemen, we love you. We'll see you in the next episode. [00:30:00] Ciao.