It can be hard to know how to price your coaching services when you’re just starting out. You want to get as many coaching clients as possible, so you don’t want to price them too high, but you also need to pay your bills. It can be difficult to find the pricing sweet spot.
In this article, we will look at how to create a pricing system that works for you and how to create pricing that expands your reach.
5 Factors To Consider When Pricing Your Coaching Services
It is really easy to overlook how much work, time, and effort goes into creating and launching a new coaching service. It is easy to forget how much effort you put into becoming a great coach.
There are a lot of ways you can approach your pricing, and the choice is ultimately yours, but we want to get you thinking about how much of your blood, sweat, and tears went into this product. That will help you not to underestimate yourself when pricing your coaching course.
Here are some things to consider.
Ongoing Time-Commitment
Before you start creating your pricing, you need to sit down and calculate how much time your coaching programme requires. At the bare minimum, you need to make sure you are compensated for:
- Time spent on coaching calls
- Time preparing for coaching calls
- Time spent on extras like accountability or messaging services
Calculating the time spent on coaching calls is easy. You will likely have a schedule set up for how long and how often you will speak to your clients.
Estimate approximately an hour preparing for each coaching call if this is a new coaching programme. You will likely have to put some work into preparing extra support materials during your first coaching programme and doing some research. The great thing is, you will have these materials ready for the next time you run your coaching course. You can standardise them or turn them into a workbook for your next cohort.
We recommend using a free time-tracking software like Clockify during your course so you can track how long you spend on various tasks. This will give you a great overview of how long you spend preparing or providing extras so you can make sure the course price compensates you for your time.
Why Should I Track My Time As a Coach?
When you run a coaching business, it is really easy to underestimate the amount of time you put in. Being a coach is not a 9-5, and many people put in way more than 40 hours per week without realising it. Clients in the past have been surprised when they tracked their time to see that they were earning less than minimum wage.
Now many people don’t see a huge problem in hustling for their own business to the point of burnout. But not properly compensating yourself for your time becomes an even bigger problem when you start to scale your coaching business. If you are paying yourself at least £50 per hour for all the time you put into your course, then you can hire someone to help with some of the admin for £30 per hour and still make money. But if you are averaging £5-15 per hour, then you are operating at a loss when you need to hire someone.
Course Creation Time
Don’t forget to factor in the time it took you to create the course when setting your prices. Coaching programmes are not as easy as coming up with an idea, selling it, and then showing up and hoping for the best. There is a lot of work that goes in behind the scenes to create a course, and you need to make sure you are compensated for the time and work you put in.
Depending on your business structure, there are a few ways you can approach this:
- Structure your business in “seasons” where 3 months or more per year you are not coaching. This time is used to increase your following through podcasting, guest posts, or collaborations. More importantly, this is the time when you create new coaching courses or coaching products. In this business model, you need to price your coaching programs to cover your expenses in the off months as well as during your coaching course.
- Keep track of the time spent creating the course and bake it into your course price. Set an hourly rate for this preparation time and make sure your price covers it in addition to the other costs.
- Price all courses higher to give yourself a “buffer” so you can create or update courses while you are working. The cost of your time creating new coaching products and services is spread out over everything you do. This is a great option to make sure you are still making money on all the behind-the-scenes work you do to keep your coaching business running.
Launch Costs
There are a lot of hidden costs involved in launching a new coaching service. Make sure these costs don’t eat into the profits of your coaching course. Here are some things to consider:
- Landing page hosting
- Payment processing fees
- Paid ads
- Service providers like copywriters, video editors, web developers, graphic designers, and launch specialists
- Team wages
- Onboarding costs
You could also calculate a percentage of your ongoing costs for tools that make your launch run smoothly, like email systems, productivity tools, and web hosting, if you wanted.
Expertise
It is really easy to underestimate how much you bring to the table. We have met coaches who set their hourly rate ridiculously low, and it’s upsetting because they are undervaluing their skills.
Think about it. You have spent time and money getting accredited. You probably read books, attend seminars, and read articles about your niche so you can keep up with advancements. You might even have a coach yourself. Why should you be charging the hourly rate of an office worker?
If you still feel a little bit weird about setting a high hourly rate for everything, then we recommend setting two hourly rates. One hourly rate for admin work (at least £50 per hour to give you room to outsource) and another hourly rate for anything that requires your expertise. Your hourly expertise rate needs to be more than £100. Don’t charge any lower than that, or you will send your clients clear signals that you don’t value what you bring to the table. And if that’s the case, why should they?
Your expertise rate should be applied to EVERYTHING that requires your expertise. That includes creating course outlines, consultations, speaking events, etc. That is the minimum you will charge per hour for your expert opinion.
Low Sales
The cost of creating a coaching course and keeping your business running is often spread out across a number of purchases. That is fine; the price would be extremely high if you had to cover all those costs in one coaching client.
What this means is you need to be aware of how many coaching clients you need to onboard to profit. This number should be as small as possible because you don’t want to run a course at a loss. You also don’t want to create a terrible customer experience for the people who do book if you need to cancel because you didn’t sell enough.
Make sure your pricing can work well for a small course intake.
What If No-One Buys My Course Because the Price Is Too High?
When you add up all of the costs we covered above and add your profit, you may get a very big number. It may even be a number that you feel you could never ask your coaching clients to spend.
Things cost money. That is how society works. The more value something provides, the more it will cost. You are panicking over the price because you would never pay that much for your course. And why would you? You already know the material. Your clients are not experts in your niche. Your course solves a problem for them. How much is it worth to them to solve this problem?
The secret to getting people to pay high prices is to create a product that covers all possible things that might hamper their transformation. Think about celebrity fitness coaches; they can charge insane prices because they create a fool-proof plan, show up to make sure they’re doing the workouts, and create a diet plan to send to their team. The celebrity would have to put some serious effort in to not succeed.
If you’re nervous about the price of your coaching course, look for ways to add value for very little time or cost on your part. You could create a guide to a common issue that you can send to all your coaching clients. You can add a twice-weekly accountability check-in where you text your client and assess their progress.
How Can I Price My Coaching Services So They Are Inclusive?
With high prices comes the unfortunate fact that you cannot help people who are not from a privileged background. That is why many coaches often hang on to lower price points, wanting to make sure their product is accessible to as many types of people as possible.
The thing is, if you want to subsidise a number of places on your coaching course, you need to set your coaching prices to hire so you can afford to do so. So if you want to be inclusive, you need to raise your rates.
We could write a whole separate article on how to be inclusive when offering coaching services because it is really tricky to do well. Once you start talking about providing access to people from lower-income backgrounds, it raises the questions:
- How do you define low-income?
- How can you prove low-income status?
Eman Ismail wrote a great email a while back about her thoughts on providing scholarships. In it, she said that it was harmful to assume people from certain countries or situations are low-income. So while you could offer “scholarships” to your coaching programme, how would you determine suitability in a way that doesn’t infringe on someone’s privacy and dignity?
Payment plans are a great start to making your course more accessible. This gives the coaching client a chance to spread payments out over the duration of the course. If you launch in advance, you could even extend the duration of the payment plan.
Referral discounts are also a great option to reduce the price of the course. You could provide a 10% referral discount for successful referrals. Depending on your finances, you could allow people to collect multiple referral discounts for multiple referrals.
Competitions are also a great way to provide discounts and get to know your coaching clients a little better. You can run a competition for a set number of discounted spots and ask entrants to tell you a little bit about themselves and why they need your help.
Can I Copy My Competitors’ Course Price?
It is good to see what other prices are out there, but do not copy your competitor’s pricing structure. For starters, you have no idea what those prices are based on. They may have a much leaner business model, or the price may be set based on 20 guaranteed coaching clients. If you run those courses, you might end up running at a loss because they don’t count for your expenses, or you operate with smaller groups.
Your price needs to be set based on your coaching course and your coaching business. If you really can’t be bothered doing the math, then work out what you want to make for the duration of your coaching course (gross) and divide it by the number of coaching clients you know you can get. Don’t forget to factor in taxes and payment processing fees; that is the gross figure, not your profit. You need to be really confident that you will get at least that many coaching clients, and any extras will be a bonus.