Introducing a More Equitable Way to Charge for Coaching
I’ve been running my own coaching and consulting business for nearly five years now.
One thing that has bothered me this entire time is my pricing. Namely, how to charge fairly and how to communicate and negotiate that in partnership with a person I want to work with.
This is tricker than you might think. Here’s what the unpleasant parts have looked like:
Being rejected by people that I really wanted to work with solely because they couldn’t pay my rates (and I couldn’t justify lowering them that far).
Underselling myself to high-earners and C-suite leaders so that my published rate would still be amenable to the rest.
Presenting a price range, then leading us both to a stuck place with no metric for deciding what’s fair.
I think I found a clearer way through all of that nonsense.
Why pricing matters (it’s about more than making money)
If there’s somebody I’m keen to work with, I want to find a way for us to do that.
I can’t afford to only focus on those who don’t have financial means. Or who live in less prosperous economies. And I don’t want to solely cater to rich people to keep business going.
I also don’t want the direction of my business to be primarily led by concerns about money.
Because aside from negotiations with people about rates, this gets into issues of messaging, marketing, and positioning, too.
As a strategic business owner, you need to be targeted about who you serve (and who you don’t).
You need to be transparent about why you do things the way you do and be able to explain and justify those decisions with confidence.
All of that is challenging if it doesn’t make sense.
And it’s hard to talk about this stuff if you’re balancing a desire to push back against capitalist thinking and a need to survive under the very system that relentlessly promotes that mindset.
Not to mention all the hustler-coaches who want to sell me a course to “fix my broken money mindset once and for all”.
Sick of this money mindset slop. Photo by Kirduun
As someone who strives to run a more* ethical business, I can’t just leave this mess on the floor.
*I say more here because there is no such thing as “an ethical business”. The same way there is no such thing as “sustainable fabric”. Like Zeno’s paradox, you’ll never get there. There is only more (or less).
Advice from my unofficial board
I love the concept of a “Personal Board of Directors” — a set of people who I turn to for inspiration, guidance, encouragement, and mentorship. Some of them don’t even know they’re on my board, quietly influencing my decisions, shaping my thinking, and whispering words of wisdom.
Case in point. I’ve been following many discussions about pricing over the years, including recent LinkedIn posts by Claire Pedrick and Mark Bixter sharing perspectives on fair pricing. These conversations led me to discovering a more equitable way forward.
In How much should you charge for coaching? by Dr Gary Crotaz in Forbes, he describes a model which allocates points across tiers, with the lower tiers and corresponding prices as a percentage of the top tier.
Inspired by this, I had a go at democratising my own pricing, based on who I want to work with, how much I was currently charging, and how I want to allocate my coaching time:
A more equitable way forward? We’ll see when we put it in practice.
Quick note on session time: Like my pricing, the length of session is flexible! People typically opt for 60-minute sessions with me, but I have some people who prefer more time to think and others (like myself) who want to go deep quickly, then wander off to reflect on your own. What matters is what’s most useful to you.
Here’s what I like about this model:
It offers pricing based on factors that align with tangible realities. If I’m going to offer a range (like I’ve done previously), it needs to be explainable; complexity should never be added without reason.
This model also allows me to offer coaching to people who I want to work with but can’t afford it, for whatever reasons.
I say this because not being able to afford someone’s services is never purely financial. There are always be contextual factors such as geography, job, hardships or other circumstances that result in someone not having the funds to receive coaching.
I’d love to coach them!
To keep this financially viable for myself, I am offering 10–20% of my time to people in these contexts.
This model also gives me a way to justify my prices at the highest-earning tiers. That’s not solely based on a income, but other factors too, such as:
Current market rates. £500/session for C-Suite and higher is still at the lower end of the market here in the UK. It’s a rate that enables me to be taken seriously and remain competitive whilst offering what I personally feel comfortable saying out loud (and basing my entire points model on).
As leaders of teams, functions, and entire organisations, people in these positions create staggering amounts of capital — financial, human, social, and otherwise. This is integral to their role and they are expected to do this at scale. A higher coaching session rate recognises this and matches my creator capital with theirs. Which leads me to the elephant in the room:
This is what my session time is “worth”. I use quotes here because time and worthiness have become a grand cliché in the coaching industry (see what the cat did to the floor, above). Regardless, in a capitalist system, my time and expertise have quantifiable value, and, if I’m honest about that, I’m probably still underselling myself.
I’ve still spent far too many words in the areas I’m trying to focus on less. Again, I don’t want my business to be primarily led by money matters, much less capitalist thinking.
Which leads me to my last point about why I’m enthusiastic about this model:
It allows me to focus the majority of my time and efforts (at least 60%) on the creatives, tech, and product people who are thinking through thorny challenges. The business owners and solopreneurs who are finding their way, building success on their own terms, and figuring out what that means for their own positioning and pricing.
I’ve worked hard to reach this tier myself; this is who I am right now.
The message is clear
This time and effort focus is also great for my business positioning and marketing messaging.
When I was less sure about who I am, who I wanted to serve and why — and how to charge for all that — it was a hard slog to put myself out there.
It’s impossible to write words with universal appeal. But we’re not static characters, either. We need room to grow, change, try things, and iterate.
In theory and in practice
My hope is that this new model gives me (and other service-providers) a way to more easily address inequities across an entire spectrum of diverse thinkers.
I hope people who want to work, think, and grow with me will be able to identify the tier (or tiers) that align with their career and financial realities — and that the corresponding price I offer for coaching matches that fairly.
That said, with anything new and untested, I’m bound to discover new challenges as I put this into practice. That’s to be expected.
Addressing those challenges will always be a process of iterating toward better outcomes. The point is to keep going. And the more we do it, the better we can align our business practices with our being practices.
That speaks to the heart of what it means to me to be a coach and how to run a more ethical coaching business.
I’d love to know what you think! Please leave me a comment through my contact form.
If you’d like to work with me, I offer a free 30-minute Discovery Call to see if we’re a good fit to do some great thinking together. You can book here or use the calendar below to pick a time that suits:
