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How To Run A Profitable Business & Make Money

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Chris Do wants to know what you actually mean when you ask, “How much does this cost?”

In his whiteboard lecture “How To Run A Profitable Business & Make Money,” posted through his agency-education platform The Futur, Chris Do skips the usual checklist of business tips and goes straight for the confusion at the center of every sales conversation. Business owners and freelancers, he argues, routinely conflate three separate ideas — cost, price, and value — and that mix-up is why so many of them underprice their work and struggle to turn a real profit.

• Do breaks pricing into three distinct components — cost, price, and value — and argues most business owners never separate them clearly.
• He walks through a shampoo example: a bottle costing $2.50 to manufacture sells to a retailer for $5.00 (a 50% profit), then to the end consumer for $10.00.
• His core thesis: profitability comes from value-based pricing, not from competing on cost or billing by the hour.

The Question Behind the Question

Do treats “how much does this cost?” as a trap question that most sellers answer wrong by default. His fix is to separate the term into three buckets before ever quoting a number: cost, price, and value each mean something different, and businesses that blur them end up pricing to survive instead of pricing to profit.

Cost, Price and Value, Defined

Cost, in Do’s framework, is the baseline — materials plus labor, the raw expense of making a product or delivering a service. Price is cost plus profit, set by the seller according to their financial targets and how much risk they’re absorbing to bring that product or service to market. Value, on the other hand, is entirely subjective and belongs to the buyer alone. A transaction only happens, Do says, when the buyer believes what they’re getting is worth more than what they’re paying.

Price is what you pay. Value is what you get.

Do borrows that line directly from Warren Buffett to make the point stick, and it’s the hinge his entire lecture turns on. Anyone pricing a product or a freelance rate off cost alone, he argues, is ignoring the half of the equation the customer actually cares about.

The Shampoo Bottle Breakdown

To make the cost-versus-price gap concrete, Do runs through a bottle of shampoo. It costs $2.50 to manufacture. The manufacturer sells it to a retailer for $5.00 — a straight 50% profit of $2.50 on that transaction. The retailer then sells that same bottle to a shopper for $10.00. Nobody involved in that chain is lying or gouging; each markup reflects a different party accepting risk and demanding a return for it, layered on top of the same $2.50 of raw cost.

Value-Based Pricing Drives Business Success

Do’s closing argument is aimed squarely at creative professionals and agency owners who default to hourly billing: chasing cost efficiency or logging more billable hours caps how much a business can ever make, because both are tied to time and materials, not outcomes. Pricing against the financial upside and business impact a client actually gets — the value — is the only lever that scales independent of hours worked. That’s the shift Do pushes freelancers and agency owners toward throughout the lecture, using the shampoo example as the plain-language proof before applying it to service-based pricing.

Do’s framework echoes the same “price versus value” logic that’s turned Warren Buffett into one of the most quoted voices on money-making itself, and it lands squarely in the same territory as the pricing questions creators wrestle with when they try to figure out how to price a product they’ve built themselves. Whether a business ever gets past cost-plus thinking, in Do’s telling, comes down to whether it can convince a buyer the value on the table is worth more than the number on the invoice.