For PE investors and
operating partners.
You underwrote the deal assuming 12–25% ARR uplift from pricing. We turn that assumption into a measurable operating plan with real customer-level economics, not consulting slide decks.
SPP converts pricing theses into operating plans. Pre-LOI, that’s an expert diligence diagnostic accelerated by LevelSetter — a credible uplift range, the architecture moves that drive it, and downside cases the IC can defend. Post-close, that’s a pricing-architecture and sprint plan the portfolio team executes at their pace, sequenced against renewal cycles and sales-team capacity.
Across the hold, the portfolio team operates the implementation through LevelSetter. Portfolio performance rolls up to a central control panel so sponsors see pricing health across every portco in one view. Pricing stops being a once-per-hold conversation and becomes continuous value creation.
Former B2B software CEO — built an angel-backed company ($13M raised) recognized as an Intuit Top 10 Developer. Business of Software keynote speaker. Hired SPP as a client in 2008. Joined the firm in 2014 and built LevelSetter from the problems he’d lived firsthand.
by LevelSetter ingestion.
paced to your timeline.
in PE underwriting.
The IC deck assumes 22% pricing uplift. Nobody can show you the math. The CEO inherits the number on day one and has to defend it for five years. An underwriting number is not a plan.
When PE engages SPP.
IC deck has a pricing-uplift
line you cannot defend yet
Underwriting assumes 12-25% ARR lift from pricing. The target’s pricing page looks conventional. You need a credible answer before the committee vote. That is a pre-LOI read on the target’s own won and lost record, run inside the deal window.
The 100-day plan includes
“pricing” with no detail
Portfolio operating team inherits the thesis with three sentences of support. Nobody is sure what the number means or how to ship it. The CEO wants direction, not vague aspirations. A portco’s Pricing Ground Truth read turns that line item into specifics the same day its deal records land.
Year 2 of the hold and
the thesis has stalled
Pricing uplift was supposed to ship in year 1. It did not. CEO is defensive. You need objective diagnostics on why, and a credible recovery path.
Exit prep needs a
compounding-NRR story
Buyers will pay multiples for an NRR narrative that looks compounding, not one-time. You need pricing architecture that reads like an asset, not a discount policy.
A thesis is not
an operating plan.
Most B2B software PE theses include pricing uplift. That assumption gets written into the underwriting model and hands off to the portfolio-operations team with three sentences of support. The operating team reverse-engineers what the assumption actually meant and builds an implementation plan from scratch. By year two, the thesis has drifted and nobody remembers how the number was set.
The fix is a real diagnostic at diligence, not a thesis footnote. Which architecture changes actually drive the uplift? Which 5-10% of customers anchor the margin story? Which packaging boundary is the structural lever? That diagnostic converts directly into a pricing-architecture and sprint plan the portfolio team executes at their pace, not a strategy deck that sits on the CEO’s shelf.
Three modes,
calibrated to hold stage.
Diligence, implementation, and ongoing operation. Each mode below is calibrated against where in the hold you are.
Pre-LOI: Pricing Ground Truth for Diligence
Pricing Ground Truth for Diligence runs inside your deal process, on the target’s own record of what it won and what it lost. A pricing architect reads the licensing grant, the packaging, and the price level in that order, so the value metric the target binds its customers to gets tested before the number in your model does. What the data room opens sets the grade: data-room grade where deal-level and billing records are present, architecture grade where they are not, and you are told which at intake rather than at the end. LevelSetter ingests the record in the formats a data room actually carries, so the window goes to reading the evidence rather than building a pipeline to it. We sit in the committee if you want us to.
Hand off the pricing architecture for sprint-based rollout
Pricing-architecture changes sequenced against renewal cycles, CPQ constraints, and sales-team capacity. Sprints can run in parallel; the portfolio team paces rollout against operational reality. SPP guides; the portco team executes. Modeled customer-by-customer so the install base is not surprised.
Hold-period operation through LevelSetter
Pricebook, approval governance, deal analytics, monthly uplift pacing. The portfolio team operates the architecture day-to-day; SPP stays on call for renewal sprints and architecture refreshes when market conditions shift.
The objection to pricing diligence has never really been the price of the read. It is paying for reads on processes that go nowhere, which for an active firm is most of them. So a read counts only when the deal goes through.
A lost LOI, a withdrawn process, a deal that never signs: none of them count against you. Firms with deal flow hold reads in a pack and draw one down as transactions close, and a read can be handed to a portfolio company that wants a Pricing Ground Truth on its own product.
Across the portfolio.
In one view.
Pricing signal from every portco rolls up to one sponsor dashboard. Patterns surface before they show up in financial reporting, and operating-partner attention deploys where the value at stake is biggest.
Pricing health, rolled up.
Every portco’s pricing signal aggregates to one sponsor dashboard — list-to-net realization, discount governance, packaging adoption, expansion velocity. Refreshed continuously, not at quarter-end.
Pattern recognition across the book.
Discount drift showing up in three portcos at once. A packaging shift one portco found that two more should run. A consumption approach trending in the wrong direction. The pattern lands before the rear-view metric does.
Action queue for operating partners.
Where to deploy operating-partner attention this quarter, with the diagnostic underneath each item. Specific actions routed to specific portcos, scoped against value at stake. The board-pack number stops being a surprise.
A pattern library that compounds.
Every tuning iteration across the book (packaging shifts, metric pivots, discount-policy resets) adds to a cross-sector library of cause-and-effect. Portcos learn from each other’s experiments without the cost of running them. Sponsors carry the library into deal flow as a differentiator no other firm offers their portfolio.
BDNA: $5M added to the bottom line, and a 20% premium at exit.
Hear Walker White, President of BDNA, on how an empirical demand-curve model SPP built during the hold drove $5M to the bottom line — and how the same architecture transferred to Flexera at exit.
Read the case study →BDNA exited Flexera
at a 20% premium.
Every pricing change during the hold leaves a signal: which packages buyers chose, how realized price moved against list, where pressure landed at renewal. LevelSetter compounds those signals into margin-calibrated discounting — discount authority tied to per-deal margin impact, not policy.
At exit, the architecture and the discipline transfer with the asset.
BDNA’s exit to Flexera cleared a 20% premium attributable to the margin-calibrated discounting SPP built during the hold. New buyers pay more for businesses they can model forward.
Frequently asked questions
Bring the problem. A pricing expert replies.
If you are inside an LOI window, the 100-day clock just started, or a hold-period thesis is stalled, say which clock you are on: diligence reads run inside the deal window, and hold-period work gets sequenced to the value-creation plan.