The business that publishes its prices wins.
Marcus Sheridan, co-founder of Priceguide, on the one change that nearly everyone told him was impossible — and what it did to his own franchise. Filmed live at the Franchise Development Leadership Conference.
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“Your job is to make everyone that comes in contact with your brand feel safe. That’s your job.”
Marcus Sheridan · FDLC 2026
What he covers in these eleven minutes.
This is an eleven-minute cut from a longer keynote. The short version is below — tap any timestamp to jump straight to that moment in the video.
“I used to be a pool guy.”
River Pools started in 2001 out of the back of a pickup truck, straight out of college, with a couple of friends. For seven years it did fine.
Then Lehman Brothers collapsed.
Within 48 hours the company lost a quarter of a million dollars in deposits. Nobody had the confidence to buy a pool. By January 2009 the business was going over the edge.
The bet that saved it: answer the questions everyone else dodges.
Obsess over the buyer — their questions, their worries, their fears — and put the answers online where they are already looking. That became the book They Ask, You Answer. The test Marcus gives any business: can you be faster, remove more friction, and remove more fear than anyone else in your category?
Every hand in the room goes up.
He asks who has researched what something costs online in the last year. Everyone. He asks what you feel when you cannot find it: frustration — “the F-word of the internet”. And you last about ten seconds before you leave and go and find somebody who will tell you.
It is not the price that loses you the sale. It is the silence.
The reason a missing price stings is that the buyer knows you know the answer. The moment they sense you are holding something back, the word the room reaches for is “scamming” — and trust is gone before you have spoken to them once.
The restaurant with no prices on the menu.
Before you try a new restaurant you do two things: read the reviews, and look at the menu. If the menu has no prices, 80% of people will not go — not because they cannot afford it, but because a blank space planted a seed of doubt. And when the lobster says “market price”, you order the chicken. Not because it is cheap. Because it is safe.
One article. Thirty-five million dollars.
River Pools became the first pool company in the world to publish cost and price information. Tracked from first click through to closed sale, that single article generated $35 million for the Virginia location alone. It never gave an exact number.
Google is already sending people to estimators.
Search anything in home services now and an “online estimate” option appears. Google surfaces it because that is what the person searching actually wants — and the businesses that have one are the ones it can send them to.
What the estimator actually does.
It does not give an exact price. It gives a range. It walks the buyer through the options the way a good salesperson would in the living room — here is what the base package includes, here is what each upgrade does — and lets them choose. The form comes at the end, after the value, not before it.
And then the result lands in their inbox.
A range — $112,000 to $160,000 in the example on screen — plus the average monthly payment if they finance it. Between 100 and 200 leads a day go straight into the database. “Of all the things I have ever done as a franchisor, this one little addition that everyone said we could not do made the biggest impact.”
Why this stops being optional.
Self-service is a mega trend, and Marcus’s call from the stage is that within 18 to 24 months a pricing estimator will simply be expected — starting in home services, then spreading to everything else, B2C first and B2B behind it. And it will decide whether an AI assistant can recommend you at all.
The three reasons we tell ourselves we can’t.
Marcus takes all three apart from the stage, in about forty seconds. They are the same three we hear on every franchisor call.
“It depends.”
Every job is different, every franchise is different. True. But could you explain what it depends on, if you wanted to? Of course you could. You do it on every sales call.
“Our competitors will see it.”
Ask any operator in the room whether they know what their competitors charge. They all do. And their competitors already know what they charge.
“The price will scare them off.”
The room had agreed the opposite two minutes earlier. What scares a buyer away is not being educated. It is being told nothing.
What it did, and what it keeps doing.
In tracked sales from one article about cost, for a single location in Virginia.
Leads a day into the database once the estimator was live.
Average increase in organic web leads for a franchise that adds an estimator.
Average increase in paid ad conversions, against a landing page converting at 7%.
These are the figures Marcus gives on stage, drawn from River Pools and from the franchise networks he has worked with. Your own numbers will depend on your traffic, your trade and how well the estimator is built.
Three things the talk doesn’t have time to say.
The excerpt makes the case. These are the parts that decide whether it actually works across a hundred locations.
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