Why coaches need to charge more, like, immediately

Hello and welcome to The Real Coach Convo. I'm Mary Schiller, your host and the founder of the 5K Coach Club, an affordable group program for coaches who want to reach those $5,000 months without all the complexity and with a lot more fun. Here on The Real Coach Convo, we get real about what it means to be an entrepreneur coach, as I like to call us. So let's get into today's Real Coach Convo now. Let's talk about pricing. Pricing, oh my gosh, this is seriously one of the most fraught topics, I think personally, in the whole coaching conversation. I understand why it's so fraught. I've been around coaches a long time now. I started as a coach myself back in 2016, And I will tell you, if I haven't already, that I didn't get any coach training. I simply knew that I had a way that I could help people, and I just went for it. I didn't bother getting trained. I didn't need to. I knew that I could work with people in a way that was really compelling, and I had no doubt at all that I would succeed. Right out of the gate, I charged prices that would get me to my income goal at the time, which was $5,000 a month. For two reasons. One, I needed the money, and two, I already knew the value of coaching because a coach had literally changed my life, literally had transformed my life. And I remember thinking at the time, I would have paid pretty much anything at that stage of my life to get that particular problem solved, which was, for me, symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. I had tried everything under the sun for decades. Literally, I had seen dozens of professionals and had tried all kinds of things. Nothing had worked. And it wasn't until I came across a coach and what he was sharing and writing about that I was able to finally change my life. So I already knew the value of coaching when I started, and that was one of the reasons I decided to become a coach and change my career completely. A lot of people over the years have asked me, well, how did you feel so confident in charging upwards of $1,500, $2,000, $2,400 in your first couple of months as a coach with no training, no real reputation, a very teeny weeny audience? And really it came down to the truth, which to me is coaching is one of the most incredible professions on earth. It fills a gap. That is so needed. I remember even back then I was seeing a therapist at the time for something completely unrelated to PTSD. And at one point she said, you know, I have a client who I think would actually benefit more from what you're doing than what I'm doing. Now, I'm not bashing therapy. It was just an interesting moment for me where I saw, yes, coaching can be a great alternative for some people who have tried other things that haven't worked for them, that haven't helped them. So why is it that coaches are so reluctant to charge higher prices, especially for one-to-one coaching? You may want to charge less for something like an online course, but goodness gracious, if it is our actual life that we are giving to people, which I don't know about you, if you're a coach, when you're working with people, it is a real investment of yourself. Yes, I am able to turn it off when I'm not talking with someone. But at the same time, if you're committing 3 months to someone, 6 months to someone, a year to someone, that is your life and that's not coming back. You know, that's time that you're not gonna be able to retrieve. So why on earth, even for a 4-week personalized, customized one-on-one coaching program, why would we ever charge something like $500 for something like that, or even less. If I am going to devote 6 months of my life to someone, that's going to be in the 5 figures, period. Like, well into the 5 figures, because that is me committing that amount of time to supporting an individual in a very bespoke— is that the word— way that involves a lot of what I have learned and embodied in myself that's really not quantifiable. And I also know that during that time, I'm going to be setting the stage for someone to have a massive transformation in their life. So why is it that so many coaches are reluctant to charge prices that reflect their value? And there's also this question. What is your capacity as a coach? We've got to start thinking about this. For example, if you know that over a course of a year, or let's say 10 months to give yourself 2 months off, if you know that over a course of 10 months you can really only support 4 people and you want to make $100,000 a year, well then your coaching one-to-one needs to be $25,000 for 10 months, which is literally nothing compared to the value that you are providing. That's $2,500 a month for a coach who is 100% there for someone. Depending on what your setup is, you may be quite available to the person. You might have more strict boundaries around how often they can talk to you and such. It doesn't matter. That's up to you. But that isn't the point. It's not the time spent on Zoom or the time spent on WhatsApp or Voxer if you use an app like that. It's more about 6 months, 10 months of your life, even 1 month of your life. We need to stop seeing coaching as something other than the high-level gift that it is for the people we support. We have to start taking this industry and our profession more seriously. And I don't mean like we can't have fun, of course, because I'm all about the fun, but we simply have to start to recognize the actual value that we provide. Now, I know a lot of coaches who say to me, well, Mary, I can't promise a result. So what do I do? You know, someone could work with me for a month, 3 months, 6 months, 10 months, 12 months, whatever it is, and still not achieve the result that they want. So I don't feel good about asking for a lot of money for that because I can't guarantee that. My answer is very simple. You are promising a space, an environment, the support that someone needs in order to achieve that result. You are giving them a completely different way of approaching whatever it is. It doesn't matter what topic you're coaching people in. You are providing the environment for them to succeed in a way that they have never experienced before. As I said at the start of this chat, I would have paid almost anything if someone came to me and said, I can set the stage for you to rid yourself of these PTSD symptoms. I probably would have given them my house. I mean, literally, that's how desperate I was to get an answer. You know in yourself what you can do. You know the specialized skills and power and persona that you bring to clients. You know how valuable it is. In my view, if we keep undercharging for coaching, we are demeaning this entire profession. We're absolutely demeaning this profession. There's no two ways about that. That's the result. I don't want that because I love the coaching profession. I love coaches. I love anyone who wants to do this as their professional career. So when it comes to pricing, I really would love for you to think about what the value is that you are bringing to people, both tangible and intangible value. I want you to think about what it is that you are investing when you sign on a client for whatever length of time it is, even if it's just a 1-day VIP session. That is still a day out of your life that you have prepared for, for years, literally, through living and learning and doing all the things that you have done to get to point. And then of course, you take great care to offer that person everything that they could possibly need for success in whatever the topic or question is. I mean, isn't that worth more than just a few dollars? Of course it is. It's different if you're offering something like a one-time group class or an online course or something like that. In those instances, yes, you can have a lower price. But for anything that is you one-to-one, where you are showing up even in a group coaching setup, I don't think that group programs need to be significantly cheaper than one-to-one programs. Frankly, I really want you to reassess your pricing and ask yourself, is this reflecting my value? Is it reflecting my own financial goals, my own financial needs? Is it taking into account my capacity for working with people and how many people I want to support over the course of a quarter or half a year or a year, whatever segment of time you want to look at? These are important questions. Let's not ignore them just because we don't like thinking about money and pricing and stuff. Let's confront these questions head on and be honest and start charging more. Thanks for listening. I hope you're having an amazing day.