As of 2024, I have been a professional pricer for eighteen years. My current job is as the Vice President of Global Pricing for Hyperion Materials and Technologies, a industrial hard materials company. I report to Hyperion’s CFO and am responsible for forming and executing the company’s pricing strategy based on the goals set by the leadership team.
In prior roles, I was the head of pricing at the Scotts Miracle-Gro company, the corporate pricing manager for Wendy’s, and led various pricing teams within Dell Technologies. If you remember when the Jr. Bacon Cheeseburger at Wendy’s came off the $0.99 Menu and increased in price to around $1.49, you’ve seen the results of my work.
How to you get that kind of job? Do you study Finance? Marketing? Data Science?
Sometimes people are surprised to hear that I never took a single business, finance, marketing or math class at the college level. In fact, I studied Classics: the ancient Greek and Latin languages combined with Ancient History.
It’s a course of study which was common in 1900, but by 2001 had become extremely niche. Now it is even more so.
I relate this not to suggest there is some sort of golden path that others should follow from Greek and Latin to Pricing VP, but rather that there are many paths to pricing, all of them unique.
While courses in economics, business, or marketing will touch on pricing in various ways, there is no undergraduate program in pricing that I am aware of, and only a few MBA programs which offer a pricing focus.
The result is that each of us got here in our own way. I think this is appropriate for a discipline in which curiosity and problem solving play such a large part in success.
Here’s how the path worked for me, with emphasis on those stages which may be useful to others.
What To Do with a Humanities Degree
My theory of college was that if I was going to spend four years studying, it should be something which I enjoyed and considered important in some deeper human sense. Always fascinated by cultures of the past, I began as a history major. But since the foreign language I’d taken in high school was Latin, when I tested into upper division Latin classes I found myself in a seminar with four other students, all Classics upperclassmen.
I was hooked. There was something fascinating about understanding the world of people who lived two thousand years ago through the words they wrote themselves. So, I switched my major to Classics.
However, I knew from the beginning that I did not want to pursue a career in academia. While a life of study and writing was attractive, the process of trying to get a stable job sounded miserable. So, my senior year, when I had enough credits that I only needed to take classes part time, I got a full-time job as a sales research assistant for a web hosting company.
It was 2000 and the midst of the Dot-com Boom. Each day I and a dozen other college students would head into the sales office and spend our day researching and calling leads looking for companies that might need web hosting servers.
Unfortunately, our Dot-com experience soon ran into the bust. Our company took a year to make a profit after selling a server, so when they hit a cash crunch, they fired the sales team.
I had a lease and nine months to go before graduation, so I took the job I was able to get quickest based on my minimal experience: as a shift manager at an outbound sales call center.
Cold calling fifteen people an hour to pitch credit cards or the fundraiser of the week is no one’s idea of fun, though it has left me with a determination to be polite to phone salespeople. So as soon as I finished classes, I gave my notice.
My fiancé and I had had scheduled our wedding for five weeks after graduation, out in the Los Angeles are where I’d grown up. During the week between the end of classes and graduation, we flew out to find an apartment, and I went around and filled out applications at a couple temp agencies. In a few days I had a start date as a sales office assistant at a family-owned chemical distribution company.
Within a month, I’d gone from temp to permanent. Most of my work was pulling documentation for the chemicals we sold (spec sheets, studies, sample formulas) and either faxing them to a customer or Xeroxing them and mailing them along with a product sample. The documentation was all on paper, in big file cabinets out in the warehouse.
After a while, I went to my boss and said this was a waste of time. If we scanned all those documents and put them in a database, the salesmen could email the studies to the customer while they were still on the phone with them.
“I’m not going to pay someone to build us a database, but if you want to build one, I’ll give you the AmEx so you can go buy a book on making databases,” he told me.
I took the offer, and after a few months of scanning and building, I delivered a Microsoft Access database which contained product information and links to all the appropriate scanned documents. At the click of a button, salesmen could email the documents to their customers.
The process landed me a raise and a lot of experience that would be valuable in the years to come. I had started out with no specialized job skills other than the ability to type fast and use Microsoft Office, but I had brought the conviction that if I could sit down and learn ancient Greek out of a book, I could learn anything else out of a book as well. The willingness to pick up important new skills and apply them to problems I had identified on the job without having someone show me how to do so in step-by-step fashion was essential to these early career steps.
Getting a Job by Helping Out
I spent two and a half years at the chemical distribution company where I’d built by first database, and during that time I learned a lot about the industry and about using Excel and Access. However, the cost of living in California became too much for our growing family. Shortly after our second child was born, we moved out to Round Rock, Texas where we could buy a house with a lower monthly payment that the rent on our California one bedroom apartment had been.
Round Rock was home to Dell Technologies. Indeed, our new house was within walking distance of the main Dell campus. It seemed obvious to get a job there. Since I was in a hurry, I looked at the temp agencies that were staffing a lot of roles at Dell and applied to one of those. Within a couple weeks I was auditing tech support calls for off-shore call centers — and building an Access database to keep all our call scores.
I was working late one night when the only other person in my row of cubicles was a marketing manager in the Small and Medium Business team. He was having a frustrating time with a database problem which I was able to help him solve. A few weeks later, when the team needed someone to pick up a complicated set of reporting, he recommended me for the job, and I was able to make the transition from temp to perm a second time.
He became a mentor, even as we moved around on different teams, and a couple years later, when he was given responsibility for setting up a team to price 100,000+ software and peripheral items weekly against competitive prices from sites like NewEgg and OfficeDepot, he brought me in to build a database which would automate the process enough to make the task manageable to by a team of five.
That was how I first learned about pricing: on the job while building tools for the rest of the team to use.
The fast-paced environment of ecommerce in the mid 2000s was a great environment to learn about the power of price elasticity and price position. When after several years I moved to a laptop pricing team, I had the chance to learn about value-based pricing in the context of configurable products. And then managing pricing for the retail channel, I got to learn about how manufacturers and retails interact through wholesale pricing, marketing funds, and promotions.
When I’d come to Dell, I had some solid skills in databases and Excel, and an eagerness to learn. But the way I made several moves, from temp to perm and then from one team to another with Dell, was by applying the skills I had to help out people (on my own team or other nearby ones) with projects that were giving them trouble.
Pricing at Dell sat within the Marketing organization, and there were a lot of people within marketing who wanted reports or tools built that were slightly outside their own ability to build, but not extensive enough to justify bringing in IT to build a formal solution. Helping out with those projects repeatedly provided me with access to new opportunities. It also helped me learn a lot more about our products and our business processes than if I’d stuck to my strictly defined responsibilities. Doing extra bits of work to help people and being curious about the broader business is what opened the door for career advancement.
I Was Frustrated to Discover I Had a Career
In 2010 our family was going from four to five children, and we realized it was time to move near one of our families. California real estate was still expensive, despite the housing crash, and so when I got a call from a recruiter looking for a pricing manager to join the newly created pricing team at Wendy’s, headquartered in Ohio a couple hours from my wife’s family, we were open to the opportunity.
As a West Coast native, I had never been to a Wendy’s, so I went to the drive thru and bought my first square hamburger, taking pictures of the menu board so that I’d be able to study the prices and talk intelligently about their offerings. My second Wendy’s meal was when they flew me up to Ohio for in-person interviews, and by the end of the trip I had a job offer.
Managing pricing for the nearly two thousand company stores that Wendy’s had at the time was a huge learning opportunity. I had everything to learn about the quick service restaurant business. I was grateful that Wendy’s assigned me to go behind the counter in a local store for two days out of my first week. They believed no one should work in Wendy’s corporate without understanding what happens back among the grill and friers.
Still, I was pricing for consumers and managing ecommerce pricing had given me a lot of experience in how customers respond to prices. It was a great example of how you can apply pricing knowledge across industries so long as you are willing to dive in and learn the business.
At Wendy’s, like Dell, pricing resided within the Marketing department. I reported to the Director of Price Value. He brought prior food industry experience to the team, while I brought prior pricing experience. Together we worked through a number of projects: segmenting stores into a few basic profiles that could be priced similarly throughout the country and optimizing the menu pricing for each profile of store.
After a couple of years, my boss was looking at moving on to another director role within the Marketing organization. I put out feelers to find out if I would be considered to succeed him in his role as pricing director. The answer I got back was firmly negative. And so, when I got a call from a recruiter looking for a Director of Pricing to start a pricing team at Scotts Miracle-Gro, I was open to the opportunity.
At Scotts, as at Wendy’s, part of my job was to take the start which had been made by a team of consultants, and turn it into the daily, quarterly, and annual tasks of a permanent pricing team. By now, I had experience both with pricing and with turning a folder full of PowerPoints and Excel files from a consulting team into a functioning team.
What was new was the experience of dealing with the two-step sales process of a consumer packaged goods manufacturer selling to large retailers like Home Depot and Walmart and then, through those retailers, to the end consumer. I also had a chance to learn a whole range of new product categories, from fertilizers and potting soil to insect killers and weed controls.
Over the following few years, I built a pricing team that successfully managed both our wholesale prices and the trade programs that we used to support promotions and merchandising activities with the retailers. In the process I worked every day with product marketing managers, directors, and VPs and with their counterparts in the Sales organization.
At Scotts Miracle-Gro, pricing sat within the Finance organization. I reported to the Finance SVP of North Americas. But Pricing was a unique group within Finance, and my background as a pricing leader was different from other Finance directors. As I approached five years in my role and started to think about what my next steps might be, I realized I faced some obstacles which had grown up around my career without my noticing.
I did not have the accounting background to rotate into one of the other Finance director roles, much less up into one of the very few Finance VP roles. Indeed, I worked with peers in Sales and Marketing more than I worked with other Finance teams.
Since I had a strong reputation with the Sales and Marketing leaders I worked with, at first I thought that I might be able to move into one of those departments and have the chance to move higher. But once I sat down to discuss the possibility with VPs in Sales and Marketing, I realized that they had their own talent pipelines and did not think that my pricing expertise would transfer as well into their roles.
I had reached a dead end, and I was frustrated. I was in my late 30s, and the idea of having topped out at that age was depressing for an ambitious person. My job was interesting. But if it was frustrating to be taking VPs I’d first known when they were managers through the annual price review, it was going to be a lot more frustrating if the day came when it was VPs who’d still been in business school when I started my role.
Looking back at my career, I saw how I had made an opportunistic decision to get first into analytics generally, and then into pricing specifically. I had done this, not because I wanted a specialized career in one of these fields, but because my particular skills allowed me to stand out by doing tasks which others found hard. However, by the time I had taken several jobs (and promotions) in this specialized field where I had found the ability to thrive, I had become in the eyes of others a specialist.
I now had very significant strengths if I wanted to get other pricing jobs. With more than ten years of pricing experience, including standing up two teams, I had more experience than most people in pricing except those fully dedicated to a career as a specialist. But I had also put myself into a niche that would have costs to escape if I wanted to become a standard track marketer or finance professional.
Specializing had been a good way to win several key career advancements early on, but it had not put me on a path towards a role as a Finance VP or a Business Unit General Manager, the people who were one step up in teams around me. Even though I routinely got very high performance ratings in my current role, this didn’t necessarily mean I was well positioned to take others.
Expertise
Nearing 40, and having realized that without really intending to, I had become a career pricer, I tried to invert my questions by where my career should go next.
Instead of thinking in terms of “what do I need to do in order to get a VP or General Manager role?” — the question which had left me struggling as I looked around an organization in which I had already held the highest pricing role for more than five years — I asked myself: What do I need to do next in order to become a more fully rounded and valuable pricing professional?
I had priced technology in a transactional B2B environment. I’d priced fast food sold directly to consumers. I’d priced consumer packaged goods sold through the retail channel.
What was missing?
The most obvious gap was some sort of very Business-to-Business focused industrial pricing. The next most obvious gap was product-as-a-service pricing.
I began looking for a next career step which would allow me to fill in one of these gaps, and when a recruiter contacted me with an opportunity to lead pricing for an industrial hard materials company which was under private equity ownership, that allowed me to not only address the B2B industrial gap, but also gain experience in using pricing to increase the profitability of a company under PE ownership, a growing area of demand for pricing professionals.
I had to convince the hiring team that despite the fact I had never priced for an industrial company before, I could provide the pricing leadership they needed based on my thirteen years of pricing experience up to that point. Once I did, the results I was able to deliver during my first five years at Hyperion finally got me the VP title which I had been wanting.
To a great extent, this success came because I had stopped thinking hierarchically. Since starting out at Dell, which was a large company with very clear career pathing, I had thought about career success in terms of working up through the series of job titles towards greater responsibility. To a certain level, this could work, because each step up the ladder involved dealing with a similar but more strategic set of responsibilities. But as I recognized that I had become a specific type of specialized resource for a company, in order to reach the highest levels I needed to think about how to shape myself as an expert resource and fill in gaps.
Four Career Lessons from Classics to VP of Global Pricing
If you are coming to a career without job-specific skills, demonstrating the ability to learn new skills yourself, whether from reading around online or from a book, without needing someone to show you exactly what to do, will make you stand out. Taking those new skills and successfully applying them to problems you or others identify on the job will also make you stand out.
Your opportunities do not only come from within your own narrow job description. Learning about the problems that others face and helping to solve those problems will open doors for you in the long run. It’s hard to predict how, and you will not know how long it may take for one of these seeds sown to sprout and bear fruit, but helping others can be a key way of expanding your job opportunities over time.
Finding a niche in which you have an ability to do something that many other people find hard can allow you to grow your responsibilities and get promoted faster than if you focus on a broad discipline in which you remain in competition with many others with similar skills. However, if you pursue this niche advantage through several roles, while it can gain you faster promotion, you will be increasingly seen as a specialist. This is not necessarily bad, but don’t be surprised when you are not able to switch back onto the main path without losing ground.
At a certain point, your value proposition moves from “here’s a high performer with some experience in the following areas” to “this is a well-rounded expert in a particular discipline who can apply that expertise appropriately to your company.” As you make that transition, you need to think consciously about what it will take to become a more fully rounded expert in your discipline. This may mean seeking out roles which fill in the gaps that you have had until now.