“Joe Pine on Creating Transformational Value”
My online discussion with Jon Berghoff of xchange
In March I posted about xchange, a terrific exemplar of the Transformation Economy, where “meetings become platforms for genuine change rather than containers for content delivery”. In the post I wrote about how this coaching company (network, really) guides transformations at four levels:
Meetings,
Participants,
Those on stage (hosts, leaders, planners, experts, and anyone else up front), and
Transformation guiders themselves.
If you missed it, I encourage you to check it out, especially if you have anything to do with meetings, conferences, or other similar events. Or if you are any kind of guide – not just coach, but expert, counselor, advisor, curator, wizard, facilitator, navigator, advocate, mentor, genius, guru, sherpa, or alchemist. Since that pretty much covers everyone in the transformation business (with additional titles appreciated!), I do recommend reading it, even rereading it.
See Our Discussion
I also announced in that post that Jon and I would be doing an online discussion to the xchange community – over 200 Certified xchange Guides joined, with about that same number of views afterward – and invited my subscribers here to come online as well.
I encourage you to watch the video of my discussion with Jon
If you missed it, please feel welcome to watch it here. You will see me in action, but this was not the usual Q&A. Jon and I had a real discussion – which he wonderfully illustrated by writing on slides of my frameworks. You will not only learn more on my thinking on transformations, but understand a lot about xchange and how it guides such transformations (plus a terrific technique Jon uses in coaching kids in baseball).
One more thing
Something I learned from our discussion is that xchange charges for outcomes in its certifications! (See us talking about charging for outcomes at the end, around the 54-minute mark.) I certainly wasn’t surprised given how great a transformation guider the company is, but it’s wonderful to see that it embraced this step, a core step, by aligning its offerings with what its coach aspirants truly sought. Not the tick-mark of a certification, but what that certification merely represents: a transformed individual.
xchange took the core step of charging for outcomes
You can see its transformation guarantee on xchange’s website, which I’ve reproduced here:
Note that this guarantee is for 100% of the fees, and is entirely qualitative, not quantitative. Anyone could simply say “Thank you very much” for all the knowledge, principles, tools, materials, and everything else they gained from it and ask for a complete refund. So how many do? Jon told me that out of the 450 or so people certified in the past two years, only one person ever evoked the guarantee. That’s 99.8% that paid it in full.
Too many companies remain afraid of charging for outcomes, but it is the catalytic mechanism for ensuring that transformations take hold. Done right, it doesn’t lower your margins; it increases your revenue and profits.
Charging for outcomes is the catalytic mechanism for ensuring that transformations take hold
I’ve encouraged you to do several things in this post, but I cannot encourage you enough to take this step in your own transformation offerings. You won’t regret it.
Joe
© 2026 B. Joseph Pine II