How Much to Charge for Your Coaching Program?

Here’s a question that I get asked a lot, and that is how to set your prices as a coach or as a consultant. Now, here’s what you don’t want to do. You almost never want to price what you do per hour because people are not paying for your time. They’re paying for an outcome, they’re paying for a result. So, the way that you would price your program and how much you would charge is largely depending on how painful the problem it is for your prospects.

I’ll give you an example. Here’s a bottle of water. If I was to sell you this bottle of water right now, how much would you pay? Maybe you would say, “Well, I’ll pay 50 cents. I’ll pay a buck.” Whatever it might be for a bottle of water. But what if you are in a desert? What if you have not drank for three days. You are dying from thirst. And what if you have US$200 on you? That’s all the money that you got. And someone wants to offer you a bottle of water. The same bottle of water that you were only willing to pay $1 for. And that person says to you, “I want $200 for it and I’ll sell this bottle of water.” What would you say? You would say, “Yes, I need water, man. I’m dying from thirst,” right? You give the 200 bucks. Why? Because how painful the problem is. In this case, it’s life and death. It’s life and death.

So, think about it. And most thought leaders and experts, they spend so much time thinking about what to sell, and yet they don’t spend enough time thinking about when to sell it, where to sell it, and who they sell to. When those three other impacts have a greater impact on price than what you sell. When to sell it. In this case, when you are thirsty. Where to sell it? You’re in a desert. You have no other options, right? Who to sell to? Someone who is very, very thirsty. We have not changed the intrinsic value of a bottle of water. What we have changed is the timing, the place, and the avatar that we sell this bottle of water to.

Pricing Your Coaching Program

Now, for someone who’s not thirsty, someone on the street, I could not even give this away. People would be like, “I don’t want it. Why I want it? I don’t want… What do you want from me?” I can’t even give it away. We changed the scenario. I could sell this for 100 bucks, 200 bucks, even $1,000. So I want you to think about this when you’re pricing what you do. Don’t focus so much on just the what. Think about the when, think about where, right. And think about the who. Those three factors are huge.

Experts and CEOs, they pay me six figure a year for an hour of my time. Why would they pay me that kind of money? I always say I don’t charge by the hour. I charge by the year. They’re not paying for my time. Whenever you are offering your value, whenever you are offering your expertise, you want to think in terms of a magnitude of 10. That’s what I do. Someone pays me $10,000. How do I deliver at least $100,000 worth of value? Someone pays me a $100,000. How do I deliver at least $1 million worth of value? Someone pays me $1 million. How do I deliver at least $10 million worth of value? And that’s how you want to think about it.

Another thing that you want to do is you want to think in terms of systems. How to save yourself time. Example. Let’s say someone contacts my office 833-432-6565. And let’s say they want my help to structure their high ticket events, right. They want to be able to generate a million dollar payday from the upcoming events. And we do that for a lot of people. They come to us. Now, it’s one thing to say, “Hey, I want an hour [inaudible 00:04:49] time or I want him to consult with me.” But we already have systems in place. We have checklists. We have templates that are proven to work. So, easily, we could offer those systems first so that they could go through that because chances are 80%-90% of the questions that they have on how to structure their million dollar payday is within the system. We have developed and designed those systems and they are proven to work for so many people. Let’s have them go through that first, so they don’t have to reinvent the wheel. Maybe the system would already give them all the answers that they need. Great. It’s more affordable for them. It’s more affordable for me. It saves us both time.

And let’s say they go through the entire system and everything that we’ve got and they still have a little bit of questions. Now they could book the time with me and we don’t have to waste time. That hour that we are going to spend to get on the phone will be super productive because they already know the basics. Now we can just focus on, “Hey, what are the little tweaks that we need to make that’s custom tailored to your upcoming event?” And that’s it.

So, how do you set prices as a coach and consultant? Don’t charge by the hour. Think about the results. Aim to provide 10 times more value and think about how you could deliver the same results without your time. So when you do charge for your time, it is high ticket and the clients they appreciative because you’ve already provide them with a step by step system. Until next time, go high ticket.