Can you imagine feeling easy and confident stating your fees? Without money confidence fees are a nightmare. Get it right though, and you earn your worth
Ginny Baillie
Have you ever had that thing where you are talking to a potential new client on the phone and you start analysing their ability to pay your fees? Or is that just me?
I have slid all over the place in what I am going to charge while on the chemistry call. It’s exhausting and not in service of the potential client. I end up either sounding unconfident of my value, undercharging (infuriating) or patronising the client’s ability to make decisions.
In short, handle this as fast as you can. Get coached on it, get therapy on it (addiction to under-earning is a real thing, by the way), and commit to nailing it. Love the business of coaching as much as the coaching itself.
A fundamental mistake many coaches make is to equate their value with their experience. You can ask my second client ever what impact I had on her life – she’ll tell you it was essential and changed things fundamentally for her – that was my second client ever!
You are not some ingénue who knows nothing: you are adding formal coaching skills to your existing value and should behave accordingly. You are likely to need experience if you want to do associate work, but for direct work you’re negotiating personally with the client.
How to price your coaching
Here are some ideas to work out your value if you want help from others.
- Find what the market values are, ie, regular associate rates, hourly coaching rates, project coaching rates, training and facilitation rates (if you do that), so you know what’s going on. The latest Sherpa executive report is out and it can give you guidelines (see News this issue).
- Call other coaches and ask about their ‘rate card’: what are their fees?
- Build a ‘rate card’ yourself – you can choose to negotiate off it, but be clear on what the rates are
- Work out what you are really comfortable to work at, then add 25%
- Ask a coach friend what you should charge – I have put up rates when told by my coach network I’m charging too little. It’s a good barometer.
What are the hidden costs?
There are two main hidden costs that I think get overlooked:
The first is taking on a client that is wrong for you because you need a new client.
You know it’s not right; you have a niggle, but you ignore it. The only advice I have for this is ‘don’t’. It will cost you far more in emotional capital than the money you make. You’ll probably spend hours talking about them in supervision, and to your coach friends, and it will bleed your confidence to work with the right clients.
The second is project slide.
This is where you’ve negotiated the price and the client starts to change their mind, need more of your time, fiddle with schedules and generally erode your margins by changing the spec.
It’s insidious. What starts as a ‘yes, of course I can quickly do that for you’, can rapidly descend into more of your time, which the client takes for granted. It’s very hard to come back from that without a hard full stop.
As with many things, coaching this comes back to contracting. Talk about the potential for it when you are contracting, whether directly with a coaching client or an associate partner. For one-to-one work you can be very clear on your boundaries.
For project work, asking questions like: “Talk to me about your policy if we need more time on this project?” You might need to be specific about what you will do as part of the project and what becomes chargeable.
These are relatively easy conversations to have if you know to have them. The hard part can be enforcing the boundary. I have had situations where clients have moved the goalposts only very slightly in real time, but that has crossed over a time boundary that I have had to uphold.
It was hard, it felt like a hammer to crack a walnut and I was worried they would be annoyed! However it did two things: one, it told them I valued my time and two, when they did it several more times we all knew the score and it was very professionally handled.
It would have been easy for resentment to come into that if I hadn’t dealt with it early on.
The more you have these conversations with clients and colleagues the easier it will become. I had a peer group just to talk about fee setting and contracting and its impact on us. We learnt from each other, challenged each other and explored what our value was to the client, and how to be of more value.
I recommend you do the same if it is an area you want to become confident and relaxed in.
- Next issue: Higher value coaching – ideas to move to the top level of fees
- Ginny Baillie specialises in what happens to leaders in everyday leadership, outside courses and coaching
- www.ginnybaillie.com
- She also helps coaches build their businesses through a strong associate portfolio
- www.theprofitableassociate.com