Leroy Hite Founded the World’s First Luxury Firewood Company. Here’s How Premium Pricing Shaped the Brand, the Customer Experience, and the Exit. (The Price and Value Journey, Episode 163)
Leroy Hite joins host John Ray on The Price and Value Journey to share one of the most counterintuitive pricing stories you’ll hear. Leroy founded Cutting Edge Firewood in 2013 with one truck and maxed-out credit cards, took a commodity that most people thought was worth nothing, and turned it into a premium brand serving more than 30,000 customers nationwide. In August 2024, he sold the company to a family office in Atlanta. The unifying theme throughout all this was pricing. Pricing was not an afterthought but a deliberate tool that shaped everything.
Leroy walks through the evolution of his pricing strategy, from the early days of raising prices when he was about to run out of inventory and watching demand remain steady, to doubling his price while cutting quantity in half and finding his customers happier than before. He talks about what he learned from the “cherry firewood math”: selling a fraction of the volume at double the price and coming out ahead. He also explains why most businesses are losing money by resorting to discounts, which simultaneously undermine brand value and margins.
For professional service providers, the lessons here go beyond firewood. Leroy explains why low prices send a confusing signal to buyers, how adding value through small details like a handwritten card, a personalized delivery note, or a proactive apology generates more loyalty than a discount ever will, and why premium pricing ultimately shaped the exit multiple he realized when he sold. If you’ve ever wondered whether your price is holding your business back, this episode will change how you think about that question.
The Price and Value Journey is presented by John Ray and produced by North Fulton Business Radio, LLC, an affiliate of the Business RadioX® podcast network.
Key Takeaways You Can Use from This Episode
- Price is a quality signal. When your price is too low relative to your branding and positioning, you’re telling conflicting stories, and confused buyers don’t convert.
- Raising prices can increase demand. Leroy repeatedly raised prices when inventory was tight and watched demand hold or grow, including gaining a customer who found Cutting Edge specifically because someone said they were too expensive.
- Discounting is a brand-destroying cycle. A 20% discount on 50% margins costs you 40% of your profit, and once customers expect sales, they wait for the next one, making the damage worse over time.
- Adding value beats refunding money. When mistakes happened, Leroy sent premium product with a handwritten apology rather than offering a discount. Customers ended up happier, and the lifetime value of those relationships went up.
- Higher margins give you competitive power. Better margins mean you can outspend competitors on customer acquisition and still be profitable, a structural advantage most small businesses don’t recognize they’re giving up when they underprice.
- Premium pricing shaped the exit. Higher margins meant higher EBITDA, and a differentiated premium brand attracted a buyer. Leroy’s eleven-year pricing decisions directly contributed to the value he realized upon sale.
Leroy Hite, Founder, Cutting Edge Firewood
Leroy Hite founded Cutting Edge Firewood, the world’s first luxury firewood company, in 2013. He built the business from a single truck in 2013, financing it with $250,000 in credit card debt, and over the next decade turned what most people considered a low-level commodity into a premium brand that national media couldn’t ignore. His firewood burned in the White House Oval Office during two presidencies, and the company earned coverage in Fortune, Southern Living, Food & Wine, Robb Report, and Garden & Gun, along with features on the Today Show, Netflix, Fox & Friends, and Hulu. Hundreds of imitators followed.
In 2024, Leroy successfully exited Cutting Edge Firewood after eleven years of building the category he created. That same year he received the Berry College Distinguished Alumni Award for Entrepreneurial Spirit and delivered a keynote at Clemson University’s Launchpad program.
Leroy is now a keynote speaker and fireside chat host for colleges, universities, and business groups, sharing the frameworks behind category creation, luxury positioning, and building a company with the exit in mind from day one. He co-hosted a fireside chat with Horst Schulze, co-founder and former president of the Ritz-Carlton. His speaking topics include brand building, customer experience, resilience, and the mindset shift from competing in a market to creating one.
John Ray, Host of The Price and Value Journey
John Ray is the host of The Price and Value Journey.
John owns Ray Business Advisors, a business advisory practice. John’s services include business coaching and advisory work, as well as advising solopreneurs and small professional services firms on their pricing. John is passionate about the power of pricing for business owners, as changing pricing is the fastest way to change the profitability of a business. His clients are professionals who are selling their expertise, such as attorneys, CPAs, accountants and bookkeepers, consultants, coaches, marketing professionals, and other professional services practitioners.
John is a podcast show host and the owner of North Fulton Business Radio, LLC, an affiliate of Business RadioX®. John and his team work with B2B professionals to create and conduct their podcast using The Generosity Mindset® Method: building and deepening relationships in a non-salesy way that translates into revenue for their business.
John is also the host of North Fulton Business Radio. With over 900 shows and having featured over 1,300 guests, North Fulton Business Radio is the longest-running podcast in the North Fulton area, covering business in its region like no one else.
John’s book, The Generosity Mindset: A Journey to Business Success by Raising Your Confidence, Value, and Prices
John Ray is the author of the five-star rated book The Generosity Mindset: A Journey to Business Success by Raising Your Confidence, Value, and Prices, praised by readers for its practical insights on raising confidence, value, and prices.
If you are a professional services provider, your goal is to do transformative work for clients you love working with and get paid commensurate with the value you deliver to them. While negative mindsets can inhibit your growth, adopting a different mindset, The Generosity Mindset®, can replace those self-limiting beliefs. The Generosity Mindset enables you to diagnose and communicate the value you provide to clients, which allows you to price your services more effectively in order to receive a portion of that value.
Whether you’re a consultant, coach, marketing or branding professional, business advisor, attorney, CPA, or work in virtually any other professional services discipline, your content and technical expertise are not proprietary. What’s unique, though, is your experience and how you synthesize and deliver your knowledge. What’s special is your demeanor or the way you deal with your best-fit clients. What’s invaluable is how you deliver outstanding value by guiding people through massive changes in their personal lives and in their businesses that bring them to a place they never thought possible.
Your combination of these elements is unique in your industry. There lies your value, but it’s not the value you see. It’s the value your best-fit customers see in you.
If pricing your value feels uncomfortable or unfamiliar to you, this book will teach you why putting a price on the value your clients perceive and identify serves both them and you, and you’ll learn the factors involved in getting your price right.
The book is available at all major physical and online book retailers worldwide. Follow this link for further details.
