“Sometimes the best results take time, and it’s OK to wait. As long as you don’t give up, it doesn’t matter if things take longer than you want them to take.” — Tracey Shirtcliff

We are excited to welcome Tracey Shirtcliff, Founder@ SCOPE Better. SCOPE Better is a pricing platform transforming how professional services businesses approach one of the most crucial aspects of profitability. With a proven track record in tech startups and professional services, Tracey has brought innovation, insight, and resilience to the industry. Her journey spans over 20 years, including leading Sonhar until its successful acquisition by Deltek. Now, with SCOPE Better, she is pioneering a smarter, deliverable-based approach to pricing in an AI-driven world.

Hi Tracey, we look forward to getting to know you. Please tell us a little about you and what you do?

I’m founder and CEO of SCOPE Better, and if I’m honest, a little bit of a nerd on the subject of pricing! I have a history in tech startups and have worked in the professional services space for over 20 years in various roles, including founder and CEO of Sonhar, until its successful acquisition by Deltek. During this time, I worked with endless clients all suffering from the same problems with pricing. SCOPE Better is my solution to those problems.

What does your business do and where is your company based?

SCOPE Better is a pricing platform developed to support professional services businesses. Pricing is pivotal to the profitability of a company, and there’s this amazing statistic, that many businesses only spend six hours on their pricing during their lifetime. That’s an almost negligible amount of time on a complex topic that spans pricing, fee proposals, and scopes of work. Consequently, the majority of professional services companies adopt time/effort-based pricing almost by default.

The problem there is that you then have a pricing structure that lacks both transparency and meaning from a customer point of view, and with the advent of AI, it’s likely to become even less relevant. At SCOPE Better, we’ve taken on the challenge of professionalising professional services pricing by primarily facilitating deliverable-based pricing. Also known as solution-based or output-based pricing, this pricing model allows businesses to provide a comprehensive pricing structure that customers can easily understand, while retaining the value of the services they offer, without concerns about the impact of changes such as the advent of AI.

What’s the story behind your success? What led to your aha moment? How did you get to where you are now?

The ‘aha’ moment came for me at my previous business, where we worked closely with different companies on their project management. During that period it became clear that professional services pricing simply wasn’t receiving the attention it needed. One business we worked with, had 50 teams working across multiple projects for one multi-national corporation and they had no formal way of formulating pricing. After using this deeply involved project management and product development system, pricing was simply added on at the end by each individual team, using spreadsheets. It just seemed like madness.

After that, I began noticing that the same scenario was going on in so many of the companies we worked with and there was nothing available on the market to help. It was basically a problem waiting to be solved and that’s something I enjoy doing. As for what helped us get here, we’ve had a lot of support from many different individuals and businesses. After bootstrapping for several years, Fuel Ventures recently backed the idea, giving us the initial support we needed to accelerate our recent growth phase.

We know that there are ups and downs in business. What’s been your biggest lesson so far?

In retrospect, there are two key areas where I may have done things differently. Firstly, we spent a lot of time building benchmarking into the platform before realising that it resulted in too much standardisation in pricing, it didn’t do much to make companies more profitable, so we pivoted into focusing on the facilitation of deliverable-based pricing.

Then, later on, we probably spent too long focusing our efforts on creative services as a vertical, when there are so many other professional services businesses that could also benefit from reliable pricing tools. So, I’d say that our vision was somewhat restricted in the early days, and it took greater market knowledge to build the necessary ambition to carry SCOPE Better to where we are today.

After selling my last company, I wish I had known to take a break instead of immediately starting a new software business from scratch. We got a huge amount done in the first two years of SCOPE Better, going from concept to onboarding customers, it was an incredible process. But I could have benefitted from some breathing space for sure – but as I often say – We move..

If you were to go back in time, what piece of advice would you give to your younger self?

It’s a little bit of a cliché, but probably the biggest piece of advice would be don’t sweat the small stuff. It’s really easy to be an overthinker and worry about every nuance of every project, but you get more done more quickly when you keep your eyes on the bigger picture. Details do matter, but you don’t have to handle them all NOW. Also, it doesn’t matter if some things take time.

I have an inherent drive to get everywhere faster and everything done yesterday. The problem is that it can bring unnecessary stress. Sometimes the best results take time, and it’s OK to wait. As long as you don’t give up, it doesn’t matter if things take longer than you want them to take. Do I ever think I shouldn’t have become an entrepreneur? No! Never. I don’t think that I could have done anything else.

We’re nearly halfway through our interview so it’s a great time to ask how does your business run. What three tools make your business run better?

• Amazon Web Services (AWS) — The most important tool, without it, we wouldn’t even have a platform.
• Zoom — Used for pretty much all forms of communication.
• Microsoft 365 — Essential for productivity and operations.
• Jira — As a product-first business, Jira helps us with everything product and dev-related.

What do you know now that you wished you had known before?

After selling my last company, I wish I had known to take a break instead of immediately starting a new software business from scratch. We got a huge amount done in the first two years of SCOPE Better, going from concept to onboarding customers, it was an incredible process. But I could have benefitted from some breathing space for sure – but as I often say – We move.

“Sometimes the best results take time, and it’s OK to wait.”

What future life goals do you want to achieve and why?

I want SCOPE Better to be the global pricing platform for professional services businesses. If we’re not the go-to in the industry, providing services that help to make our client’s businesses more profitable, and scalable, I’m going to feel like we’ve done something wrong. I didn’t have an exit strategy for my previous business. I was excited when a good partner came and made an offer for the business. It was the right move at the time, but I’ve always slightly regretted not taking it forward and seeing what it might have become. That’s not something I plan on doing with SCOPE Better.

To finish our inspire questions… If there was one positive thing you would say to someone to inspire and empower them what would it be and why?

Sometimes the best results take time, and it’s OK to wait. As long as you don’t give up, it doesn’t matter if things take longer than you want them to take.

Thank you Tracey, it has been great learning more about your founder story and SCOPE Better.

Want to connect with Tracey Shirtcliff or learn more about SCOPE Better?

Check out their channels below:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/scopebetter

Website: https://www.scopebetter.com

Company LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/scopebetter

Company X: https://twitter.com/scopebetter

Company Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/scopebetter

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