Expert guide: Effectively price your coaching services

Pricing for coaching services is one of the most challenging conversations that you can have with clients and members of our community. It’s hard to have an actual frame point that you can use to understand an “average rate” without guidelines. The truth is, pricing will be unique to the individual. However, we wanted to give you two different methods to understand how to price your coaching services better.

The price is right

Depending on what you offer, you can combine these two methods. You can think of pricing based on

• The level of experience you have and how much time you spent refining your craft
• The amount of time you’re going to spend on a specific client or a specific package you’re offering

Remember, your pricing will also need to reflect your overall financial goals. And this is where your methods will need to match your individual needs.

Ponder your past experiences 

First of all, we’ll talk about experience. Experience can be the basis of your pricing on any given day. We know many people who price based on the number of hours:

• spent working within a specific field
• studying a particular subject

As a marketer without a degree in marketing, I relate to this. It took me a while to reframe my beliefs around my worth. I now have ten years of experience, working with startups and big companies alike, teaching marketing and business for schools, colleges, and professional courses. That’s a lot of time dedicated to my craft—a lot of hours spent doing courses, watching seminars, running campaigns.

Looking at experience this way allows you to look at the number of years you’ve spent on the work and the amount of time you’ve dedicated to the craft. This will help you start adjusting how to price your coaching services.

Far too often, creators get stunted because they think about how many months or even weeks they’ve spent running a coaching business. If you are new to coaching, you may feel like you can’t charge what you’re worth because you objectively have little experience actually coaching. However, you might have spent four years learning, studying, practicing, and researching your area of expertise. So, don’t ignore the experience that you have around the actual topic itself.

Set the bar

Your base price will reflect the hours or years of experience you have in your field. Period. When you’re starting, looking at the hours can be helpful to put things in perspective. But, after ten years, you may struggle to quantify the individual hours after all.

To set a base price, you will have to pick a number. The best way to do this is to think about how much would you charge for one hour of your time. If even that comes as a struggle, look at how much people in a similar field would be paid per hour from a company (go to a job board and calculate that based on the per annum salary).

Add time into the mix

Next up is the second pricing method—the amount of time you’ll spend coaching. Begin by adding in the time “around” your coaching hour to your actual price. Look at the time you might be spending writing a recap, doing a check-in weekly, writing a worksheet, or looking for resources to recommend. More often than not, this will quickly amount to a considerate amount of time (over two or three extra hours of work for most clients). 

Ultimately, make sure that you’re counting the time you’re spending creating the material and running the show, as well as the time spent coaching. Far too often, creators will think about a price as just the hour spent talking to a client. However, there’s so much more that goes into it. 

Prep work is real work

Take your price base price for the one hour of coaching, and then start adding the rest of the time that you’re spending preparing for that client each month to run their package. 

If a package offers three coaching sessions, all at $100 each, you would be looking at a price of $300. Count in the extra three hours you’re going to be spending every month creating the materials for their the next session—this makes the total coaching package $600.  You can even add a course in the mix and adapt your prices with bundles. We recommend looking at coaching as a package as much as possible so you can turn it into a digital-product style experience if possible. Instead of creating single sessions, you can optimize your time and the time you want to spend with individual clients.

What’s more, consider combining the first two pricing methods—experience and time—to come up with an even more accurate representation of your coaching services’ value.