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“It’s not personal—it’s business.”

It’s a line that lands with cold certainty in The Godfather. But I always think of it in You’ve Got Mail, when Joe Fox (Tom Hanks) uses it to justify why his big-box bookstore put the charming Shop Around the Corner out of business.

What sticks with me more than the line itself is Kathleen Kelly’s (Meg Ryan) response: “It was personal to me.”

Because let’s be honest, business is personal. Especially when it comes to profit. That’s the metric most tied to your team, your time, and your decisions. And when projects go over budget or margins slip, it doesn’t just hit the bottom line—it hits the people doing the work.

I can still remember my agency resourcing days: logging into our resource tracker to find our staff writer booked for 32 hours of work… in a single 24-hour day. And our most affordable freelancer? He’d just emailed that morning to say he had a family emergency. Our margins were about to take a hit. Or the time when our CEO jumped on a team call and opened with: “How’d our project margin go from 70% to 40% in just over a week?”

In these scenarios, feelings are unavoidable. But here’s the twist: while profit may feel personal, emotions can get in the way of protecting it.

Instead, you need process.

You need math.

You need frameworks.

…and frankly, you probably need .

As the CEO and Founder of , Marcel has spent years helping agencies get their margins in the green—not through guesswork or good vibes, but with structure and clarity.

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Marcel Petitpas

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CEO and Founder of Parakeeto

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"The important thing [in business] is just knowing what your margin is. And it’s shocking how often there’s no math—just vibes, or vibe pricing."

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PS 🎥 Marcel Petitpas shares a lot of smart things about agency profitability—this article is the highlight reel. Watch the full episode here →

The problem: feelings sneak in where process should lead

Pricing often becomes the soft underbelly of an otherwise sharp professional services business. It’s emotional, high-stakes, and more-than-occasionally rushed. You want to land the client. You want to be fair. You want to say yes. And so, instead of asking “What’s the right model for this work?” or “Will this hit our margin target?,” most teams ask something far blurrier: “What feels right?”

You can both be afraid of losing the client and not know what you’re worth. And actually, those things are often linked together in an interesting cocktail of insecurity and fear.

Fear fuels hesitation: don’t price too high, don’t push back on scope, don’t lose the deal. The result? Projects get greenlit with incomplete estimates, unrealistic budgets, or rates that no one has sanity-checked against actual delivery costs.

From the outside, it might look like an operations issue. But at its core, it’s emotional. Feelings sneak into pricing decisions when there’s no process to block them.

That’s why Marcel’s first step to understanding profitability isn’t about changing your mindset. It’s about changing your model.

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💡Pro tip: (and shameless ����ɫ��Ƭ plug)

Estimates help you build budgets, align resourcing, and track scope changes to deliver profitable projects.

<tip-button>Learn more →</tip-button>

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The fix: from feelings to frameworks

This “cocktail of insecurity or fear” is what leads teams to undercharge, over-service, or both. And if you don’t have the tools to catch those behaviors before they happen, you end up pricing on instinct—and regretting it later.

“The most common reason I see that agencies are undercharging is because they don’t actually know what a good price looks like to begin with. They don’t know what margins they’re expecting.”

Petitpas isn’t the only one who’s seen the fallout from vibe-based pricing. Jason Fisher, Executive Studio Director at , has lived this experience. He recently shared during a , how pricing on gut instinct works—until it doesn’t (). Margins get muddy, scope balloons, and profit become harder to track.

That’s why Flight Story has adopted a pilot-first mindset: instead of committing to full delivery on day one, every project kicks off with a lightweight launch. The goal? Gather just enough real data to validate the plan before scaling it.

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Jason Fisher

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CEO and Founder of Parakeeto

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"If you don’t estimate and go the vibes approach but it doesn’t lead to profitability, your agency will live or die on that decision."

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When Flight Story moved from instinct to insight, they became 50% more efficient

By replacing guesswork with real-time learning, Flight Story tightened their pricing—and became 50% more efficient with ����ɫ��Ƭ.

<tip-button> Read Jason’s story →</tip-button>

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A framework for pricing with clarity

Flight Story’s discipline is exactly what Marcel’s ™ helps teams achieve. It’s a simple, powerful framework that has you answering two key questions about profitability:

1. How valuable is this work to the client?
2. How risky is it for us to deliver?

When you know the answers, you can manage your profit by matching your agency’s pricing model to the job, and choose the right way to price projects before work begins.

Simply plot your project on that grid, and you get a clear path toward the pricing model that protects both client trust and your margins:

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Value | Risk | Recommended pricing model | Why it works~

Low | High | Time & materials (sell hours) | You can’t predict the work, so you bill for time to stay profitable.~

High | High | Abstracted T&M (sell days, sprints, or team chunks) | Flexible for complex work, while keeping margins tight through efficient delivery.~

Low | Low | Flat fee / productized | Efficient and scalable—fixed scope, predictable costs, and consistent profit.~

High | High | Value-based pricing (outcome-focused) | High client value with low delivery risk lets you charge for results.

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And while every agency’s needs are different, Marcel offers one universal rule of thumb: aim for a minimum 70% delivery margin. In plain terms? If it costs you $3,000 to deliver a project, you should be charging at least $10,000 for it.

“Figure out how risky it is, figure out how valuable it is—and then you should be able to get a better sense of what an appropriate pricing model is to share that risk and capitalize on that value with a client.”

Where process leads, profit follows

If there’s one thing Marcel makes clear, it’s this: professional service orgs don’t miss margin targets because the people behind the work don’t care. They care deeply.

They miss them because emotional decisions sneak into places where operational clarity should lead.

The good news? That’s fixable—with the right frameworks, a little more structure, and a team that’s ready to replace guesswork with grounded thinking.

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Ready to get your people and your profit on track?

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