Jonathan Stark needs no introduction in the value pricing world. Many years ago, Jonathan came to the realization that hourly billing was not a workable solution for him and his software development clients. He eventually ditched the billable hour in favor of value pricing.

Flash forward to the present, and he's recorded more than 500 episodes on his podcast, Ditching Hourly, and he's impacted well into the thousands of people he's coached, mentored, and spoken to as they have transformed their billing practices as Jonathan once did.

On this show, we discuss Jonathan's short and impactful book, Hourly Billing is Nuts. Even if you do not work in professional services, you'll learn much from this conversation.

At the end, Mark has a surprise as he retells one of his favorite stories of all time, which is about hourly billing that winds up having a positive ending.

The subtitle of Ehsan Ehsani's new book Finding Value in Numbers is The Essential Investing Toolkit to Win on Wall Street.

If I may, I'm adding my subtitle too, which is Learn a Handful of Key Financial Concepts for Your Small and Growing Enterprise. Accordingly, this book is not just for Buffett-like value investors but for CEOs, finance directors, operating managers, and board members.

In this conversation we hit on some new ways to approach ROIC, which goes far beyond some of the conventional thinking and math found in finance textbooks. We also bust a few sacred cows, such as discounted cash flow analysis.

Finding Value in Numbers is far from a finance book for value investors with repackaged recycled content found in other similar books. The content is fresh, interesting, and even entertaining at times.

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They called him 'Chainsaw Al.' In 1996, Al Dunlap took over a struggling Sunbeam and did what he did best: he cut. He let go 6,000 employees and closed 18 factories. The stock price? It nearly quadrupled in less than two years. To Wall Street, he was a superstar. But the 'turnaround' was a house of cards.

To meet impossible targets, Dunlap used 'cookie-jar' accounting and 'channel stuffing'—basically booking future sales today to hide massive losses.

By 1998, the board fired him, the SEC banned him for life, and Sunbeam was headed for bankruptcy. So, was he a genius who saved companies, or a corporate 'psychopath' who destroyed them for a quick buck?

In this episode, I bring back my friend Gordon Graham, the author of The Intrepid Brotherhood, who knows what it's like to work for a psychopathic leader. We explore this topic as we go through some of the key ideas in John Byrne's book, Chainsaw.

Welcome to the Fresh Patch Podcast where we talk about everything, from dog...

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