Nikita Khandheria is the Founder and CEO of ERIA, an events and hospitality company creating distinctive venues and experiences in the San Francisco Bay Area. A lifelong entrepreneur, Nikita began building organizations at a young age and later founded and sold a consumer packaged goods business before turning her focus to hospitality. At ERIA, she is deeply involved in the strategy behind the business, from sales and operations to pricing, customer experience, and growth. Her approach challenges the idea that growth should always mean doing more. Instead, she focuses on building exceptional businesses through thoughtful systems, strong unit economics, strategic experimentation, and an obsessive focus on the customer experience. Her broader philosophy is simple: pursue excellence rather than conventional definitions of success.
Company: ERIA
We are thrilled to have you join us today, welcome to ValiantCEO Magazine’s exclusive interview! Let’s start off with a little introduction. Tell our readers a bit about yourself and your company.
Nikita khandheria: I’m Nikita Khandheria, Founder and CEO of ERIA, an events and hospitality company built around a simple idea: making life an experience. We operate distinctive event spaces and create experiences for everything from corporate gatherings and brand activations to weddings and private celebrations.
I’ve been entrepreneurial for most of my life. Before ERIA, I built and sold a consumer packaged goods company, and one of the biggest lessons I carried into hospitality was that growth is not simply about selling more. You have to understand what your customer actually values, what it costs you to deliver that experience exceptionally well, and how to price accordingly.
That has become particularly important at ERIA because no two events are identical. We’ve had to build a pricing model that gives clients flexibility while still protecting the economics of the business. I’m constantly thinking about pricing, packaging, operational efficiency, and how we can create more value rather than simply charge more.
What was the pivotal pricing insight or experiment that most dramatically improved your company’s growth or profitability?
Nikita khandheria: The biggest shift was realizing that we shouldn’t price an event simply based on what it costs us to open the doors for a few hours. We needed to price the opportunity cost of the space.
In hospitality, a Saturday night in December is fundamentally different from a Tuesday afternoon in February. If I sell a prime date too cheaply, I haven’t just underpriced that event; I may have given away the opportunity to sell that same finite inventory to someone who valued it significantly more.
That changed how we approached pricing at ERIA. Instead of one rigid rate, we became much more thoughtful about day of the week, time of day, seasonality, demand, event type, and what parts of the experience a client actually values. At the same time, we became willing to be aggressive on pricing when a date would otherwise sit empty. That combination—protecting high-demand inventory while creatively monetizing lower-demand inventory—has been one of the most important lessons in building the business.
How do you determine the true value your product or service delivers to customers, and how does that shape your pricing strategy?
Nikita khandheria: I think the mistake is assuming value is synonymous with your cost. A customer doesn’t care what my rent is or what it costs me to turn the lights on. They care about what the experience is worth to them.
For an event, that value can be incredibly different depending on the customer. A company hosting its most important clients, a couple celebrating their wedding, and a nonprofit holding a fundraiser might use the exact same room but value completely different things.
So we try to understand what the customer is actually solving for first: exclusivity, convenience, flexibility, location, food and beverage, production support, or simply having an incredible space where they don’t need to coordinate ten different vendors themselves. Then we structure the proposal around that value.
Pricing became much easier once I stopped asking, “What should this room cost?” and started asking, “What is valuable to this particular customer, and how can we build the right experience around that?”
Can you share one pricing decision (such as packaging, tiering, or a bold price increase) that felt risky at the time but ultimately paid off significantly?
Nikita khandheria: One of the decisions that initially felt counterintuitive was becoming more flexible rather than more rigid with packaging.
There is a temptation as you grow to create one package, one minimum, and one set of rules because it makes operations easier. But we found that flexibility could actually become a competitive advantage. We could separate the venue fee from food and beverage, offer different bar structures, and build proposals around what the client actually needed instead of forcing every customer into the same package.
The risk was that flexibility could become discounting. We had to learn that those are two very different things. Flexibility means changing the structure while protecting the economics. Discounting means giving away value without receiving anything in return.
Once we understood that distinction, we could say yes to significantly more types of business without needing to become the cheapest option.
How do you continuously test and refine pricing without alienating existing customers or damaging brand perception?
Nikita khandheria: I don’t believe customers should feel like they’re part of an experiment. Instead, we look at where inquiries convert, where we lose business, which dates consistently sell, which dates remain empty, what customers repeatedly ask us to include, and where our team is spending more time or resources than we anticipated.
Then we adjust future proposals accordingly.
I also think grandfathering and transparency matter. If someone already has an agreement with us, we honor it. When our pricing evolves, it generally applies to new business rather than changing the rules on an existing customer.
The goal isn’t to discover the maximum amount someone will tolerate paying. It’s to find a price where the customer feels they received extraordinary value and we have enough margin to deliver that experience exceptionally well.
For other CEOs who still treat pricing as an afterthought, what’s the single most important mindset shift or first step you would recommend they take?
Nikita khandheria: Stop treating pricing as an accounting decision. Pricing is a strategy decision.
Your price determines which customers you attract, what expectations they have, how much you can invest in delivering the product, what kind of team you can afford to build, and ultimately what kind of company you are capable of becoming.
The first thing I would do is look at your last 20 sales. Look at the ones you won, the ones you lost, where customers negotiated, what they happily paid extra for, and what they didn’t seem to value at all. There is probably more useful pricing information sitting inside those conversations than there is in a complicated spreadsheet.
One of the most valuable questions a CEO can ask isn’t, “Can we charge more?” It’s, “What do our customers value enough that we should become exceptional at delivering it?”
That question turns pricing from something you do at the end into something that can actually shape the business.
