The people who told Allan Ling he was underpriced never looked at his campaign results. They asked him to write down everything he had ever done, the whole decade of it, and then read the list back to him. His account of the verdict runs to four words: “you’re seriously undervaluing yourself.”
Ling trades as The Leads PathFinder out of Singapore, and his own shopfront describes the business he is trying to leave. Lead generation, appointment booking, follow-up systems, sold to service-based companies in the one-to-ten-million-dollar revenue band across some sixty industries, with Farrer Park Hospital and Manulife among the past clients.[^1]
He is good at this.
It is the problem he has been circling since roughly 2017, when one or two clients at the small performance agency where he learned the trade got results they liked, told him to start his own and said they would follow.
He did, twice, once alone and once with a partner. Both sold execution, and execution is what broke him.
He puts his fees over those years at eight hundred to two thousand dollars, and says the top of that range still bought him delivery work plus calls that came in the middle of the night. What it did not buy him was the work he wanted: “not as much strategy work as I would have hoped.”
He was charging for hours, and the hours were the part that scaled. He says the same experience could bill thousands more on marketing advisory and governance.
The exit came as an offer rather than a plan. A client asked him to come in on strategy a few days a week, and he took it.
Asked what else he weighed, he does not dress it up: “I didn’t consider any other alternatives.” He describes the company he built afterwards as less doing, “more of orchestration, working with people on strategy.”
Then the useful part.
Put to him that he could not simultaneously hold that the market does not value what he offers and that seasoned people had told him the market would pay more, he declined the premise flatly: “I don’t see the contradiction leh.”
The question was put again, sharpened. This time he took it: “I was in the wrong market and headspace, there’s a high chance the market actually exists but I haven’t been putting myself into it nor asking it to pay properly.”
That exchange is the read.
A partner who does that is worth more than one who agrees on contact, because the second kind agrees with the next person too.
He resists a correction once, on instinct, and then restates it more exactly than the question managed. A partner who does that is worth more than one who agrees on contact, because the second kind agrees with the next person too.
Against it sits a decider who is genuinely opportunity-led, who has three times let the next move arrive rather than choosing it, the repricing included, which is a habit that works until the year nothing arrives.
On his peers he is unsentimental. Founders who discover they are in the wrong market, he says, “will continue pushing and trying hard inside it, thinking somehow they can forge a way out even if it’s quite impossible, wasting lots of time and energy instead of pivoting.”
He was describing other people. He had just given the same decade in the first person, and across all of it he never once put the underpricing on a client, a platform, an algorithm or the market. The cause stayed where he had put it at the start, which was on himself.