In this instructional talk, Lisa Murphy explains a systematic approach for coaches to set profitable prices. She argues that the true value of coaching lies in the identity shift a client experiences, not the price or delivery format. Coaches must account for all time spent—including pre‑ and post‑session work—and all overhead (electricity, internet, etc.) when calculating costs. Market reality is another pillar: understand a client’s ability to pay and where competitors price, aiming for a middle‑to‑top range if quality justifies it. Murphy illustrates the concept with a client case (Steve) where a brief strategy session led to a five‑fold increase in partnering relationships, showing that value comes from clarifying and systematizing existing strengths. She warns against building offers around the coach’s excitement rather than market demand, and recommends using AI for keyword and long‑tail research to uncover what ideal clients are searching for, guiding product positioning. Common pricing errors include underpricing due to fear, imposter syndrome, or basing prices on personal affordability rather than market value. Finally, she emphasizes that businesses should aim for profit—not break‑even—to enable greater impact.
Chapters
Your pricing is going to reflect three factors. Well, that's funny. That's out of order value. The identity shift you create is the value, not the price, the delivery. It's the time and resources required from you. You must count your time when you are pricing. My time in coaching isn't just the hour, 90 minutes I spend coaching you. It includes all the time before I go to coach you in researching what you need and all the time after I coach you in putting together what I help you follow through with. Right. So we have to consider all of our time and all of our resources. What percentage of the electric bill is going towards that? What percentage of the Internet bill is going towards that? All of that are things that go into your cost of pine acquisition and your margins. Does this make sense? And then market reality. You have to look at your client's ability and willingness to pay. You have to look at what your competitors are charging. Don't be at the bottom. You can be at the top. I don't know. But my range is usually middle of the top because I know the quality that I'm delivering and how it's different than what other coaches are delivering. Does that make sense? So we'll take Steve, for example. Steve actually has a marketing company, and I wouldn't say marketing is my strong suit, but he really knows his stuff with marketing. Except his strategy was inconsistent. I only spent 15 minutes with him going over how to clarify his partnering strategy so that he could grow his business. He implemented immediately and he put. He gave me a testimonial without me even asking him, and it said that his partnering, partnering relationships grew by five times in one week. It's not because I gave him a magic framework. It's because I helped him see what was already working for him and then put a system behind it. That is what you're doing when you're coming up with your pricing offers and your pricing strategy. Everybody get that? Go back to your clients who have been the happiest, find out what you did for them and then put the value to it. The common mistakes we make are building offers around what we want to sell because we're super excited about our product. We've got to know what the market is looking for. It's so much easier now than it used to be with AI can do a lot of research for us. You want to do keyword and long tail research with AI to find out what your ideal clients are searching for on the Internet. That will tell you how your product is going to sell or how you might need to reinvent the vision of the transformation that you're giving people. Does that make sense? We price too low because we have fear or imposter syndrome or we don't think people can pay. Or in insurance, they used to tell me, don't be selling out of your wallet. That means we usually try to price things based around what we think we can afford. If we are our ideal client, then we need to make sure what we're pricing out of our wallet is still hitting a margin. That gives us a profit. Does that make sense? Well, none of us are in business to break even, right? Who's in business to break even here? Nobody. I see. No, everybody's shaking heads. No, we want to make great profits so we can do greater good, right?
