David Anderson has spent his career on both sides of the pricing table. He was among the first hires charged with building a pricing function at two large companies, then spent a decade as the subject matter expert in the room with hundreds of distributors and manufacturers working to solve their margin problems. He has seen what works, what fails, and the distance between the two.
This month he joined ProfitOptics as Managing Director, Commercial Excellence Strategy, where he will work directly with customers on pricing, rebates, and quoting builds and help shape how the company shows up in the market. He lives outside Boston, holds undergraduate and graduate degrees in engineering and an MBA from Harvard, and claims two heroes: Rick Rubin and Vilfredo Pareto. We sat down with him in his first week.
I grew up in the Detroit area, on the Canadian side of the border, and am a citizen of both countries. Growing up around Detroit, you spend a lot of time in manufacturing. I started at General Motors, then moved to the Boston area for school, and shifted my path into technology/software, and pricing. I’ve worked at Ariba (SAP), then PTC, and Iron Mountain, and most recently at Vendavo.
That pricing touches everything and has many, many stakeholders. It plays at the seams of marketing, finance, and sales, and efforts to drive value with pricing and initiatives can look very different in different situations. In both cases, I was lucky enough to build the function from zero, and you quickly learn the problem is rarely the math. It's the process, the data, and getting people on board to adopt something new. It’s keeping an eye on how you add value for all stakeholders involved while driving awareness of the opportunity at the company level and for each team pricing touches.
I was the pricing subject matter expert alongside the sales rep. My job was to meet with a prospective customer, understand how their business worked, figure out their priorities, and recommend a solution. I worked with process manufacturers like paper and chemical companies, high-tech manufacturers, medtech, industrial goods, and distributors across all those channels. Hundreds of businesses over ten years. You get a very clear picture of what commercial teams actually need, and how and why what they buy often falls short of their goals.
Over the last few years, the majority of my conversations were with customers who already had investments in pricing technology but were looking for something new. Not one vendor. All of them. And it's not because the products are bad. Commercial processes are complex, and even within the same industry, they often differ substantially from company to company. It is nearly impossible to design an off-the-shelf solution that actually meets the needs of any business you meet.
"Commercial processes are complex. Even within the same industry, they often differ substantially from company to company. It is nearly impossible to design an off-the-shelf solution that actually meets the needs of any business you meet."
Well, you either buy that vendor's vision for your business, or you get a solution that's a starting point and needs heavy customization. If you need anything special, you're fighting for a slice of a product manager's time against 20 other customers to get the capabilities you need onto the roadmap. And data, which is the hardest part, gets put in the customer's lap to solve on their own. It just isn't part of what off-the-shelf software vendors are delivering.
"Data is the hardest part of solving the problem, and software vendors put it in the customer's lap to solve on their own. At ProfitOptics, it's part of the solution."
It was my context too. If you work in the software industry, you learn a long list of reasons why commercial software beats building. I like to say I learned history in a Canadian high school, from the British perspective, and then I moved to Boston, took the Freedom Trail tour and thought, “wait, the British were the bad guys?!”. That's where a lot of buyers are right now in their beliefs around commercial software. The world has changed, and beliefs haven't caught up.
AI. I started seeing companies that were ready to buy decide to build it themselves instead. And they could get to a pretty good demo, a minimum viable product. The trouble comes after. Now you've got a set of very specialized requirements that you either try to get from a software vendor, or you have to figure out how to support a vibe-coded app yourself. That's the real question now. It isn't build versus buy anymore. It's build versus build: build it in-house, or build it with people who have done it before.
"It isn't build versus buy anymore. It's build versus build: build it in-house, or build it with people who have done it before."
Because the model answers everything I just described. You start with a baseline technology platform, Catalyst Core. It's the catalyst, the starting point, roughly 70 percent of the way there on day one. You need data work or capabilities the team can deliver, if you need it. Then you work with the customer to build a solution to fit exactly what they need in their own business, on top of their existing ERP and IT stack. Nothing gets ripped out. And then you harden and industrialize it, so it's a proper, supported solution that can operate in the business over the long term. It's just a path to a better result that you build with an expert partner.
You have a dedicated team. They're thinking only about you. They can focus all of their time on building exactly what you need, which can be years faster than waiting on a product roadmap. And the people building it are the same people who know the platform, not a 3rd party who's learning it on your project. The effort of a custom build is shockingly similar to a big software project. The difference is that you own it when we’re done.
"You have a team. They're thinking only about you. That's years faster than waiting on a product roadmap."
Some of them have interesting technology, for sure. But if I were a pricing leader, the first thing I'd want to know is whether this is a real company that can deliver. ProfitOptics has been building for distribution and manufacturing for eighteen-plus years. Two hundred fifty people, all in-house, nothing outsourced, and a team with real tenure. Mid-size and enterprise customers who have seen real success. That separates it from the noise. We have the size and scale to work with sizeable businesses, and the scale to deliver.
Rick Rubin is the record producer behind some of the most important albums of the last 40 years, across every genre. He's famous for not touching the instruments. His method is to strip away what doesn't matter and help the artist realize their own vision. That's how I think about working with a client. Pricing involves a lot of process and data, and I love that; I'm an engineer. But the best solutions come down to taste and experience, and to helping the customer get to what they were trying to build all along. Pareto is the other half. Everything in pricing is 80/20. Most of what needs to be done is simple, and it isn't getting done because nobody's focused on it. Focus on what matters, and build that. Go for the last mile when that’s done.
Talking to customers. Their needs, their wants, what they've tried, what's still sitting in a spreadsheet. I didn't know about ProfitOptics until a few months ago, and I've spent a decade in this industry, so there's a whole community about to find out what this company does. Most of them already know their problem. What stops them is the fear that the fix will be the thing that fails. My job is to show them there's a way forward: build on top of what you already run, see value in months instead of years, and get the business case before you commit to anything. I get as much out of a customer conversation as they do, so that's where I want to spend my time.
When pricing leaders walk into a conversation with confidence instead of caution. Confident they can get exactly what their business needs without compromising, without settling for the closest thing off the shelf or needing to adopt someone else’s vision for their business, and without betting their career on it. For a long time, that wasn't a reasonable expectation. It should be. What ProfitOptics does shouldn't feel like the alternative. It should feel like the default, the way a modern business gets this done. When that's the starting assumption, I'll know it's working.
ProfitOptics builds custom software for pricing, rebates, and quoting for distributors and manufacturers.
We believe the people who run pricing, rebates, and quoting deserve software built for the way their business works. Not the closest thing off the shelf. Not a platform they rebuild around. Not a data problem handed back to them to solve on their own.
So we build it. On top of the systems you already run, by a team that is thinking only about you, with the data work done as part of the build. Value in months, not years. The technology and the expertise exist now to get this right the first time, and we think that should be the expectation.
Custom Software for Margin Improvement | Distribution & Manufacturing
Connect with Dave Anderson on LinkedIn.