In my last article, I laid out the math problem at the heart of our industry. Once I saw it clearly, I knew I had to take apart almost everything I had built. This article is about what that actually looked like.

It went on for two years. I want to say up front that it was the hardest stretch of my career. Harder than starting the business. Harder than downsizing in the early years to survive. Harder than anything I'd done before. And by the end of it, I learned that raising prices alone was never going to be enough.

The First Round of Changes

The math told me what I had to do. If I wanted material cost down where Jim said it had to be, I needed to charge full MSRP on any product where my cost factor was 0.25 or higher. I needed to charge separately for shipping and installation. If a discount was required, I had to charge for it elsewhere. No exceptions.

We made the changes in stages. We didn't have a choice. Doing it all at once would have been too violent for the business and for the team. Each layer was its own conversation, its own training, its own pricing update, its own customer-facing explanation.

And even with all of that, even after every single change, the math still wasn't where Jim said it had to be. Material cost was lower than it had been, but it wasn't 20 percent. It wasn't even 30 percent. We were getting closer, but the target kept feeling like it was on the other side of a wall I couldn't get through.

So we'd identify the next layer, make the next adjustment, and raise the prices again. The increases came almost weekly. It felt like we were pushing a giant boulder up a steep hill, and at any moment, we could be crushed by it.

The Gap Widened

We were already more expensive than most of our competitors before any of this started. As we made the changes, the gap got wider. We weren't a little more expensive. We were noticeably more expensive. Sometimes a lot more expensive.

Some people on my team thought I was being greedy. Others thought I was crazy. Others thought I was ruining the business.

I understood why. From the outside, the only thing they could see was the price going up and the customers walking out the door. They couldn't see what I had seen in the P&L. They couldn't see what was coming if we didn't change.

But I knew. Every year, our profits were shrinking. Our costs were rising. The future opportunities for everyone in the organization were getting smaller. Salaries, raises, bonuses, benefits, growth, the ability to invest in new locations or new technology. All of it was slowly being squeezed out of the business by a math problem nobody on the outside could see.

This was not going to be a place to win. It was going to be a place to survive and stay small. That's the part I couldn't accept. The team thought I was raising prices to make more money. I was raising prices because if I didn't, there wasn't going to be much of a company left for any of us to grow inside of.

My Top Closer

The biggest resistor on the team was the rep with the highest close rate in the company. They were one of my top reps, and being able to close deals consistently is a real skill. But the highest close rate isn't the same thing as the best rep, and the difference between those two things is part of what made this whole situation so hard.

The reason their close rate was so high was that being competitive on price was a requirement for how they sold. Their whole model worked when the customer felt like they were getting a deal. As we raised prices and the gap with our competitors widened, that model stopped working. Their close rate dropped harder and faster than anyone else's, because the thing they had been winning on wasn't there anymore.

They didn't take it well. They started trying to cheat the system. Tricking the software. Finding workarounds. Quoting prices the company hadn't authorized. I caught it. I addressed it directly. They didn't comply.

I had to fire them.

And then I had to fire another one after that.

Letting one of the top closers go in the middle of a rebuild that was already shaking the team was one of the hardest decisions I've ever made in this business. But the alternative was worse. If I let one rep operate outside the new structure, the whole thing was a lie. The other reps would see it. The new pricing would unravel. Everything we had been building for a year would come apart.

Accountability had to be held. Even when it was painful. Especially when it was painful.

Where the Doubt Lived

I'd be lying if I told you I held the line without flinching.

Every time a rep walked into my office and said they had lost another sale, or that we were twice the price of a competitor, a part of me shrunk. Every time. Not once. Every time.

I started to wonder if Jim's model was impossible in this industry. Maybe what he had built in remodeling didn't translate to window coverings. Maybe our material costs were structurally different. Maybe the only way to get ahead in this business was to shrink. Get small. Run lean. Stop trying to scale.

That doubt followed me home. It sat with me at night. It was there at the dinner table. It was there when I woke up.

The thing about pushing a boulder up a hill is that the longer you push, the more you start to wonder if you should just let it roll back down.

What kept me going was the P&L. Every time the doubt got loud, I'd go back to the numbers. The numbers hadn't changed. The math was still the math. Whatever I felt didn't change what was true. The old model was killing the company slowly, and feeling worried about it wasn't going to fix that.

So I kept pushing.

The Chaos Was Constant

Even with everything we were doing, our material costs in the P&L still weren't down near Jim's recommendations.

We had remakes and reworks eating margin. We had discounts going to customers when issues came up. We had reps still trying to find creative ways to drop prices and close deals. Every line of the P&L had a leak, and every time we plugged one, another one would open.

It was chaos. Real, daily, exhausting chaos. The kind that doesn't show up on a slide deck but lives in every conversation, every quote, every weekly meeting, every rep who walked in with a face that told you the deal didn't close.

Two years of it.

The Breaking Point

After two years of pushing, I finally hit the wall.

Prices had gone up. Discipline was tighter. The team that was left had bought in. We had moved the needle on every line we could move. And we still weren't where Jim said we had to be.

That's when I understood the truth I had been circling for two years without seeing.

Raising prices alone was never going to fix the problem.

The pricing work is the floor, not the ceiling. Once it's solid, the real rebuild is structural. There are four things that have to be true for the math to work, and pricing is only one of them.

The other three →

The pricing model was broken, yes. We had to fix that. But underneath the pricing model, there was a deeper problem. The supply chain itself. The cost of material as a percentage of revenue can only come down so far on the revenue side. At some point, you have to attack the cost side. And the cost side, for most dealers in our industry, is set by the supply chain we accepted when we started the business.

If I wanted material cost where Jim said it had to be, I was going to have to go upstream. Past pricing. Past discounting. Past discipline on the sales floor. I was going to have to go deep into my supply chain and rebuild that too.

That's where the next chapter of this story starts.

What I'd Tell You If You're Doing This Right Now

If you're in the middle of a rebuild like this in your own business, I want to tell you a few things I wish someone had told me.

It's going to take longer than you think. I assumed I could fix this in months. It took years, and I'm still not done.

You will lose people. Some of them will be people you thought you couldn't run the business without. The business will be okay. You will be surprised how okay.

The doubt is normal. It doesn't mean you're wrong. Go back to the numbers when the doubt gets loud, and let the math tell you whether to keep pushing.

And don't expect the changes you make in the first round to be enough. They won't be. The first round gets you part of the way. The second round, the one after the breaking point, is where the real transformation happens.

That's the article I'm writing next. The day I sat down to plan the supply chain change and realized the thing I had been proudest of building was the thing that had me trapped. Read it here: A Crushing Blow.