Lykov Online · pricing & margin recovery
Three days reading your own quotes and order confirmations. One number at the end of it: what your orders actually earned, after the freight you absorbed, the commissioning days you threw in and the ninety-day terms you agreed to.
For machine builders and technical manufacturers · 50–250 people · Netherlands, Belgium, Nordics
Your 2027 price list is set in the next few weeks. It starts from this year's numbers.
The gap is not one big discount. It is nine small ones, and most of them never reach the invoice, which is why your accountant has never reported them. They are not hiding. They are just filed somewhere else.
This is the list I work through. Every one of them is recoverable from documents you already have.
Items seven, eight and nine are usually the fastest money in the room. They need no renegotiation, no difficult conversation, and no customer notices anything change — you simply start applying a policy you already wrote.
Indexed to list price = 100, so orders of different sizes sit on the same scale. The visible discounts take 13.5 points. A further 8.8 points disappear after the invoice, where nothing in the ledger is looking.
Across the market this is getting worse, not better. Simon-Kucher's 2025 Global Pricing Study — 2,200 business leaders across 28 countries — found average price realisation has fallen five percentage points in two years, and that 64% of companies now report rising pricing pressure, up from 57% in 2021.
Each question maps to one of the ten leaks. Answer honestly — the score is a diagnosis, not a grade.
Answer Yes only if you could give a number today, without going and looking.
Your score appears here as you answer. Ten yes answers means you already have a pricing function in all but name.
Or write to pavel@lykov.online with your score. I will tell you plainly whether a scan is worth doing, including when it is not.
One fixed-fee piece of work. No retainer, no discovery phase, no proposal process.
If the scan does not find recoverable margin worth more than the fee in the pile you can act on without speaking to a single customer, you pay nothing.
Not the total. Not a projection. The part you could implement next Monday with a policy memo, counted in euros. If it does not clear €3,900, there is no invoice.
The scan is cheap enough that people say yes to it when they should not. These are the cases where I decline the work, and I would rather say so here than after you have paid.
Pavel Lykov. Twenty-two years in enterprise B2B commercial roles — Hexagon, Seequent (later acquired by Bentley Systems), RPM Global, De La Rue and Experian. Industrial software, mining technology, geoscience software, authentication and risk analytics. BSc in applied mathematics, Six Sigma Black Belt. Based in Tilburg.
Referenceable from the employment record: revenue doubled at RPM Global, market share tripled in thirteen months at Seequent, market share grown 36% at Hexagon Mining.
I have spent most of my career on the other side of this problem: watching capable commercial teams give away price in ways nobody measured, because nothing in the reporting was built to show it.
This practice is new, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. I do not have a wall of client logos, and you should be suspicious of anyone at this size who does. What I have instead is a method that is fully built, a fixed fee agreed in advance, and a guarantee that puts the risk on me rather than on you until there is a track record to point at.
Two pieces of work, one practice. This page is the Pocket Price Scan — three days, fixed fee, one narrow question about price. The broader practice at lykov.online is the Commercial Decision Review: one commercial decision tested against the evidence over four weeks, for firms weighing a market, a channel or a pricing model before committing the budget. If you are not sure which one fits, write to me and I will tell you.
Possibly not, and if so the readout will be short and you will not pay for it. But before deciding: are you counting the freight you absorb, the commissioning days, the waived surcharges and the ninety-day terms? Those are all price, and none of them appear as a discount anywhere in your system.
They look at invoice price, because that is what the ledger records. Everything conceded after the invoice sits in other cost lines or in no account at all — a surcharge you did not apply leaves no trace. In the waterfall above that is roughly a third of the total gap. This is not carelessness; the accounting system is not built to show it.
No, and be careful with anyone who says they can without talking to your customers. What a buyer will actually pay lives in their head, not in your data. The scan tells you what you are earning today from your own records. Telling you what you could earn is a separate, larger piece of work that starts with eight conversations with your customers.
Signed NDA before anything moves. No access to your systems. Commercial documents only — no personal data beyond the contact name printed on a quotation. Everything deleted on completion, confirmed in writing.
It might. Discount depth varies more between salespeople than most owners expect. That cut comes to you alone, in a separate document, and what you do with it is your business. I have no interest in running a performance review.
Because most manufacturers set next year's list in Q4, and most set it as last year's list plus a percentage. Whatever was leaking is then locked in for another twelve months. A scan in October changes the January list. A scan in March cannot.
It takes ninety seconds, it costs nothing, and it tells you something true about your own business whether or not you ever speak to me. If the questions you cannot answer bother you, that is the signal — not my sales pitch.