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Pricing is one of those tricky topics especially for new coaches. This is because, apart from their own confidence, there is a really broad range of pricing for coaching, and coaches don’t often put their prices on their websites, so you can’t go out and do a bit of research online and see what everyone’s charging.
One thing we would say is… If you’re a newly qualified coach – charge something!
It will boost your confidence and get you into the practice of talking about and asking for money.
It can be difficult because newly trained coaches come out of a training programme and have to complete some practise hours in order to finalise their qualification. These tend to be offered for free. But from the point that you’re qualified, there has to be some way of recompensing you for your time. If you’re unsure where to start or are uncomfortable charging, you could:
- Ask for a donation to a charity of your choice,
- Exchange services with someone – providing of course that it’s something you really want,
- Have a gift list set up – a coaching colleague of ours suggested this, she had an amazon wish list with a range of different priced items that she wanted, and she sent the link to people allowing them to choose the item, and therefore what they paid for the coaching
- Charge a minimal amount – there’s always the national living wage which makes for a good starting point (£11.44 in 2024).
We’re not advocating you just charging the living wage, but it’s a way of getting you out of the mindset of giving away free coaching.
For our doctors who are coming to the end of their training with us, they may be starting to have to get their head around the idea of actually charging people. What they offer in their day job is not charged for at the point of contact with patients, so, they have to move in their mind, from being available for free, effectively in a GP surgery, for example. That can be quite difficult.
Even if they’re providing other services that are not patient directed, if they are an appraiser, a trainer, a mentor, they’re probably being paid by an organisation rather than the individual. They may well have to submit timesheets or some way of acknowledging that they’ve done the work, but they’re probably not submitting an invoice to an individual, and they’re not having those conversations around how much they charge.
What Should You Consider When It Comes To Pricing?
What are your costs?
You will have some costs to running your coaching business, costs that you’re going to have to pay for whether you are doing any coaching or not. We don’t advocate starting out in your business with lots of expenses. You can start out with really low outgoings, but there will be some. The first thing to consider is that, at the very least, you’re going to be paying for professional indemnity insurance.
Other possible costs include:
- A website: Purchase and hosting
- Zoom account: although there are other free video conferencing facilities
- Business cards: If you’re going out to meet people
1. You’ve got to think about what your costs will be for the year, whether you do any coaching or not.
What Is Your Availability?
Many of the doctors that come through our training programme have no intention of coaching full time. They just want to have a portfolio career where coaching is maybe one day a week for them, which is absolutely fine. Recognising that that’s the time you have available and probably all of your coaching activity is going to fit into that one day, not just seeing clients, but all of the preparation, work and invoicing and things like that, everything is probably going to fit into that one day that you’ve allocated because you’re busy on other days doing other parts of your portfolio. Be realistic about how much coaching you can actually squeeze into your life and how much then you want to charge, because that’s all the time you have.
You’ve got to factor that into your pricing. Whatever your business is going to cost you to run for a year has to be covered by that 1 day a week. If there’s just one hour of coaching in that day, that’s maybe 48 hours a year, depending on how many weeks holiday you take. That’s 48 hours a year to cover your costs and then obviously if you are looking for it to contribute to your income, you’re going to want to add in more than just your costs. You’ll also need to factor in any taxes and national insurance that you have to pay. Of course, you should be able to do more than one hour in a day, but everyone’s situation is different.
2. You’ve got to know how many hours a year you have available to provide coaching
You build it up like this:
Then calculate your approximate hourly rate given the time you have available:
3.This gives you a rough idea of how much you should be charging for coaching given the factors you’ve taken in to account.
You might come up with a figure that you either think is cheap or is expensive. Sit with it while you look at some other factors.
You have to consider the marketplace and the way you feel about offering that to people.
Coaching can range between approximately £50 to, I think it’s £550 pounds an hour in the UK.
At the think top end, some organisations will charge / pay for more.
You’ve got to be pragmatic about it, even if you feel comfortable asking for £600 a session, if you can’t find anyone willing to pay you £600 a session, then you’ve got to rethink it.
You’ve got to think, who am I aiming my coaching at and what are they prepared to pay for coaching?
It’s also quite interesting to consider what you are prepared to pay for coaching.
That’s quite an interesting question because when we’re training in coaching, we’re very privileged that we have access to free coaching because we all practise on each other. But if we were going to go out into the marketplace and finding ourselves a coach, knowing the power of coaching, how much would you be prepared to pay for that?
And that will help inform how much you’re prepared to charge for it. It will also mean that when you are telling someone, how much you charge, you come from a place of authenticity.
Starting Out
Most coaches probably need to be a bit braver than you want to be to start. You can always negotiate down, but you can’t negotiate up!
What you don’t want to be doing, is starting work with a client for free when you are first need to build up your coaching hours, and then to continue to do so ad infinitum. And that comes down to contracting. That’s especially key when you have practise clients, and we do tell all of our students this, you must contract around how many sessions you are going to offer for free. And that doesn’t mean they can’t become paid-for clients later. In fact, they are probably a nice transition for new coaches when moving from free to paid for. But the contracting at the beginning will set things in place to allow this to happen.It’s possible at the beginning to say
“the first three sessions are going to be free. After that, you can, of course continue, and there will be a charge, and we’ll talk about that as we come towards the end of our time together.”
Once you start to charge and earn money from coaching, then your confidence will increase and you will naturally start to push your prices up over time until they find that level that you’re comfortable with.
The joy of coaching would quickly go out the window if you were coaching at a level where you felt taken advantage of; that the power of coaching wasn’t being appreciated in the recompense you were receiving. So, keep an eye on your pricing and don’t think about keeping it the same forever.
Something Else To Consider
If you are charging an hour and a half, so let’s say 100 pound for an hour and a half, what are you going to be doing above and beyond that? That you’re not getting paid for. Be very clear in your contract about what service you are providing and what you’re going to be doing in between sessions, if anything.
We’ve said to be brave and pragmatic.
But be brave first and then pragmatic!
Alongside our coaching diploma we offer training on the fundamentals of starting up in business for yourself as a coach if that’s something that you would like to do.
To find out more about our Doctors’ Transformational Coaching Diploma click through here
