Alex Hayes

Alex Hayes is the president and part-owner of Boost Pricing, a training company based in Columbus, Ohio, that works with B2B sales teams to win deals at higher prices and stop the margin erosion that comes from reflexive discounting. Her route there is unusual: she started selling fireworks door to door at eight years old in the family's small business, spent roughly two decades in sales and sales leadership, and then hired Boost Pricing as a client after hearing founder Casey Brown speak. The half-day workshop lifted her team's net margin from 6 to 8 per cent within a year and, just as importantly to her, made the team proud of the work again.

She crossed over to the company during COVID, applying for the Integrator (second-in-command) role through a formal hiring process before becoming president and part-owner. Her diagnosis is simple and hard to hear: most discounting is fear, not strategy, and scope creep is a need for approval wearing a different mask. For a practice of one, the fix is a handful of questions you can answer confidently, a written scope, and a pay-myself number kept front and centre. She speaks directly to independent professionals who hate selling because it is the part of the job nobody trained them for — and the part that pays for everything else.