MBA2085 Q&A Wednesday: How Much Should I Charge for Group Coaching?
2 Feb 2026 · 4 min
Omar Zenhom answers Nigel's question about pricing group coaching for hobbyist photographers. He recommends value-based pricing at roughly 10x perceived value, comparing coaching to alternatives like books and courses, and suggests testing prices and raising them over time.
Chapters
Let me tell you about Intuit QuickBooks. When I was starting out my business, I remember sitting at my desk late at night not working on my business but cleaning up numbers, tracking and reconciling payments and wondering how this became my life. But once I automated the admin side of things of my finances, those nights had disappeared and I felt a whole lot better. Outdo it with intuit QuickBooks QuickBooks is the trusted end to end solution that businesses rely on for getting paid, managing finances, paying employees, finding new customers, and more. QuickBooks provides a team of AI agents and trusted experts, so doing it yourself no longer means doing it alone. Their payment agent gets you paid faster, their customer agent finds leads, follows up and secures more sales, and the accounting agent automates and categorizes transactions. Get your critical business jobs done with QuickBooks on the Intuit platform. Ready to save on new Tech? It's time for Dell Tech Day's annual sales event celebrating our customers with fantastic deals and benefits. Product perks include Dell Rewards, free shipping, premium Support and more. PCs like the Dell 14 with Intel Core Ultra processors will help you do more faster and with a premium suite of monitors and accessories, you can upgrade your whole setup with amazing savings. Visit Dell.com deals. Hey oh welcome to the hundred dollar RMBA show. Powerful business lessons you can count on every single day with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of Webinar Ninja and today's episode is Q and A Wednesday. On Q and A Wednesdays we answer a question from one of you, one of our listeners. If you got a question you want to ask, just go ahead and email me over@omar mba.net and I'll make sure to answer it right here on Q and A Wednesday. Today's question is from Nigel and and Nigel asks, hey Omar, would love to ask you a pricing question. I offer group coaching to my photography students. I teach photography to hobbyists and not necessarily professional photographers, so I'm not really sure how to price my group coaching given the fact that there's no real monetary value to the actual training, meaning they're not going to use the skills to make money. Most of my students take my coaching or my classes so they can just get better at their favorite hobby photography. Would love your tips or insights on how I can price my group coaching so that it's a good value but at the same time it's not too low. Thank you so much for this awesome podcast and the opportunity to ask a question. Well, you're welcome Nigel. We are happy to help you out and help everybody who's listening who is thinking about their own pricing of their own products or services. In today's episode, I'm going to break down how you can use value based pricing. I've talked about this before on the show in many of my webinars by training, but basically what it boils down to is making sure you're giving 10x the value of your price. I'm going to show you how to break down and extract what the value is of your actual training course, group coaching in your case, so that you can come up with a great price even if your training is not like business training, where they're going to make money, where they see it as an investment. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business.
You love what you do. You also love the idea of not doing it one day. But it's getting harder to know the best way to move into the future towards retirement. We hear about inflation, rate hikes, the changing market, gotta get the kids through college, build an emergency fund, and then there's retirement. Here's where Fidelity comes in. Fidelity can help you find clarity in saving for the future, even as your path and priorities evolve.
How?
Well, they'll help you create a free, personalized plan that adapts as your priorities change. They'll also show you what's called timely insights, small tips on ways to save and invest to help meet your goals. And you can monitor your plan so you stay on target. The future's coming and so's retirement. Fidelity can help you take it on your way. Learn more@fidelity.com future expenses charged by your investments and other costs and fees associated with trading or transacting in your account. Apply Fidelity Brokerage Services Member NYSE SIPC.
I want to begin today's lesson by just reminding everybody when it comes to pricing, your products, your service, your courses, your training, whatever it is, they're not written in stone. Prices change, Prices fluctuate. And you can see this as a set of experiments. We've changed our pricing over at Webinar Ninja, our software company, several times over the last eight years. And the reason why we change it so often is so that we can learn what works best for our customer. We don't only change the pricing, but we change the packaging, what we offer for what price. At the end of the day, we want to bring in and help as many customers as possible. But at the same time, make enough revenue so that we can fulfill that promise, fulfill that service, that product, in a way that gets people results. Like I mentioned at the top of the episode, our goal here is to know what is the value of our offer, of our product, of our service. In your case, Nigel, you have group coaching for photographers so they can learn how to be better at their craft as photographers, so they can enjoy their hobby, so they could just take better pictures and maybe post them on Instagram for fun. Now, yes, a lot of people will price their product based on hey, if you spend X amount of money on this training course coaching, you're going to make X back. And this is not the case in many B2C type of businesses. But it still has value, especially when it comes to your case coaching. The reason why people get coaching, whether it's group coaching or one on one coaching, is because they want to get a result, some sort of result quickly. It's faster than learning on their own or learning from a book or learning from even an on demand course or even in person at their local community college. So the student is a part of your group coaching is actually getting some good, good value and you have other ways they can get that value in less time for different prices. You have some benchmarks, you have some competitors really in the marketplace that you can look at. When I say competitors, I'm not talking about other coaches, I'm talking about the other options your students have to learn this skill. For example, a few years ago I got into snowboarding. I used to be a skier, became a snowboarder. I had a lot of options. I could have read books, I could have watched YouTube videos, I could have took an online course. I could have taken coaching online like you're doing. I could have bought some lessons at the ski resort. It could have been group lessons, it could have been one on one lessons. These are all options. Now every skill has different levels. So there's like beginner, proficient, intermediate, intermediate, advanced, advanced and everybody has these milestones they're trying to reach and it's going to take some money, it's going to take some time, it's going to take some effort to actually get to those goals. Now there's another aspect here people forget when it comes to selling skills. There's also this factor, the likelihood of success. If you have a coach, whether it's in a group setting or a one on one setting, you are far more likely to be successful at achieving the results you're looking for, reaching the level of proficiency you're looking for in that skill, then reading a book on your own, taking a course on your own. So that in itself has value. The increased likelihood of them actually following through and being motivated enough because they're in a group context that they have accountability to reach their goal. So in Nigel's example, they have options, just like in that snowboarding example, to get to a certain level of proficiency, to a certain level of maybe being intermediate or advanced or whatever it is. So look at the options they have to get to the level you take them with your coaching. Let's say, for example, your group coaching package is one year. In one year, if somebody took their money and spent it elsewhere, would they get the same results? If so, how much did it cost them? What do they have to do? We're talking about total cost. We're not talking only about the cost of the actual training. We're talking about the cost of the time, the effort, the commute, the energy, all that stuff. Okay? And compare that to your online coaching. What you'll find is you're probably pricing your coaching pretty low compared to the value they're getting. And if you want to know the sweet spot, in my opinion, it's ten times more value. So let me give you an example. Let's say your group coaching is 12 months. And within the 12 months, they're going to reach a level of photography skills that is equal to, to maybe a university or community college fourth level class, which means four semesters, which means two years. How much would that cost at the community college? Somewhere around $4,000 a semester. That's $16,000 for two years. Mind you, it's taking them two years. You're going to allow them to reach that level in one year. So you're going to save them a whole year. Think about all the fun they can have with their new photography skills. Think about all the photos that will be much better in versus the two years they would have to wait or that year that they wasted at a community college learning at that pace. Plus it's $16,000. Plus you got the commute, plus you got the fuel that they have to pay to get there. Right. Other costs that they probably don't include, like books and materials, the money they waste on lunches and all the stuff they do when they get to the university. If you tally it up, it's probably close to $20,000. So if you charge $2,000 for a year to get to the same level in two years, that would cost you a total of $20,000. It's a no brainer. It's an easy way to convince somebody because you have all the calculations right there of how much value you're giving them compared to their other options. Now if you're listening and wondering, why is group coaching so popular? Well, it's just for this reason. You can give incredible value and charge $2,000 a year, which is a no brainer price for the value they're getting, the result they're getting. And it could scale to as many students as they like because with group coaching you can have many people on the coaching calls or webinars. You could do things asynchronously with message or email or slack. And with just 100 students, you have a $200,000 business. You have the potential to make surgeon money here, right? So it's really a viable business for a lot of people. So make sure you know the value of your course, how you compare to the options that your customers have and then layout those options on your sales page on your website so that the value of your coaching is a no brainer, they could see it flat out. These are my options. This is what I can pay. If I go down this route. This is how much I will pay with this person. This makes total sense. I'm going with your coaching guys. It's no use putting it off. The best time for an underwear refresh is now. Tommy Don underwear is designed for a perfect fit that stays put all day. There's zero chafe thanks to four times more stretch than competing brands. And their innovative horizontal quick draw fly is a game changer. With over 30 million pairs sold, there are thousands of men out there more comfortable than you. Don't settle for less. Go to tommyjohn.com today for 25% off your first order with code comfort. That's tommyjohn.com comfort Tommy John comfort perfected Today, Nigel asked a dynamite question on Q and a Wednesday. How does he price his group coaching? And specifically in his case, he's not selling business coaching or marketing where people pay money as an investment to make it back as an roi. He's teaching photographers who are doing photography as a hobby. Hobbyists who are just trying to increase their level of skill so they can enjoy their hobby even more. But when you teach anybody anything for any reason, even for fun, they have options and they have different ways they can get to that level. To go back to my snowboarding example, if anybody asked me, hey, how can I learn snowboarding as quickly as possible because I can enjoy my time every time I go to the mountain so I don't spend my time falling over and over and over. My tip to them, my suggestion would be spend two days and do a bunch of group lessons at your, you know, ski resort that you're going to on your first trip to go skiing or snowboarding. I would highly recommend you plan to be there like maybe a week. That way you can have two full days of lessons and then you could spend the rest of your days kind of learning and practicing what you learned. I did one group lesson right. It was two hours long and it took my skill level to another level and I, I was able to really enjoy myself. I just wish I did more of it earlier on because that coaching, that helping, that intensive small group kind of situation allows you to learn very quickly and course correct. And this goes with any kind of skill. Invest the time and the money to just get the fundamentals down so you can practice what you learn and improve on your own. Thanks so much for listening to the $100 NBA show. If you love what you hear, hit, subscribe, hit follow on your favorite podcast app right now. Do it right now as you're listening. And while you're at it, leave us a rating and review. It'd be super, super helpful to support the show because I read every single review. I'd love to hear what you love about the show so we can keep on doing it. And don't forget, if you have a question you want to ask, go ahead and email me over@omar100mba.net just like Nigel did today, and we'll answer it right here on Q and A Wednesday. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. I'm not one of those people that teach, raise your prices and charge more, price your product using the strategies I taught today. And if for any reason you feel like maybe that's too high, you want to lower the price a little bit because you want to earn credibility when you first get started, go ahead and do that. There's nothing wrong with that. Okay? You can raise your prices slowly over time. And by the way, that makes more sense because the more time that goes by, the more experience you have, the more value you're going to be adding to your product, your service, and therefore, it justifies you raising the price because the product's better. So get comfortable with the price just to get started and revisit it every six months to see, hey, maybe I can increase the price a little bit, see how it goes. I'm adding more value to the product or service now. Thanks so much for listening and I'll check you in tomorrow's episode. I'll see you then. Take care.
For adults with Crohn's disease or ulcerative colitis symptoms, every choice matters. Tremphya offers self injection or intravenous infusion from the start. Tremphya is administered as injections under the skin or infusions through a vein every four weeks, followed by injections under the skin every four or eight weeks. If your doctor decides that you can self inject Tremphya, proper training is required. Tremphya is a prescription medicine used to treat adults with moderately to severely active Crohn's disease and adults with moderately to severely active ulcerative colitis. Serious allergic reactions and increased risk of infections and liver problems may occur. Before treatment, your doctor should check you for infections and tuberculosis. Tell your doctor if you have an infection, flu like symptoms or if you need a vaccine. Explore what's possible. Ask your doctor about tremphya today. Call 1-800-526-7736 to learn more or visit tremphyaradio.com.
