Pricing financial coaching services is something that I really struggled with for a long time because at my full time teaching job, I was paid $10/hr after taxes and at my yearly reviews I was told over and over that this is what my time and my service was worth.
When I started my own business my mindset around pricing and charging money was severely broken. I had to spend a significant amount of time rewiring my BRAIN when it came to what my services and what my time is worth.
This blog is really a follow up to my Full Review of Dave Ramsey’s Financial Coach Master Training video that I did.
If you haven’t seen that video, I go into a little bit about my philosophy when it comes to coaching and pricing and why pricing is so important.
Wrong pricing is the #1 reason why coaches quit
I believe that getting pricing wrong is the number one thing that makes coaches want to quit. Many coaches follow me on Instagram, and I see them get burnt out and quit, time after time after time.
Your pricing is more important than you think - but for different reasons than you probably realize. Pricing is most likely NOT the reason why someone decides to buy your services. I’ll say it again - pricing is most likely NOT the deciding factor ESPECIALLY on mid-level investments under $3000.
Pricing and income are important BECAUSE they indicate how many people you’re helping and, more importantly, your CAPACITY to help more. Pricing is pivotal for so many reasons, which is why I want to break down precisely what NOT to base your prices on. By the way, I’ve made all of these mistakes to some degree. This isn’t just what I think or my theory.
Unfortunately, I’ve learned ALL these lessons that hard way.
This blog is going to cover pricing MISTAKES and what NOT to base your pricing on. If you want a full tutorial on HOW TO confidently and correctly price your services, I’ve put together an hour long, free Pricing Workshop specifically for aspiring financial coaches. I get very little pushback about my prices, and I share with YOU how I do it inside this workshop. You’ll find the link for it here.
[I’ll also add it to the bottom of this blog post, so you can check it out once you’ve finished reading!]
#1: Do NOT price your services on what you think your audience can afford
I see many coaches do this and it is almost always coming from a place of fear. First of all, it’s really belittling your ideal client. Do you not think they’re capable of working overtime? Or running a side hustle? Or getting scrappy and figuring out a way to invest in themselves?
OR are you afraid that you won’t be able to deliver results, so you don’t want to stretch your clients very far? Deep down, you don’t want them to be all in because that means you have to take the lead and truly guide them through this.
I’ve seen coaches use ‘sliding scale prices’ to help people who ‘cannot afford their coaching.’ This doesn’t sit well with me at ALL. It feels very out of integrity to charge someone more just because they’re willing to work, put more effort in, and make more money.
It’s JUST NOT the coach’s job to decide who can and can’t afford their services.
This is so backward and is a huge disservice to the client. You’re taking away their ability to self advocate and level up.
If you TRULY believe that your client can’t make a couple of hundred dollars a month to START coaching with you and figure out the rest together - you either have huge money blocks when it comes to earning more money, or you simply don’t fully believe in your coaching - or maybe both!
If the client isn’t going to get creative and put in some effort to make a few hundred dollars to start coaching, which by the way, is VERY EASY TO DO: waiting for a 3 paycheck month, using a tax return, selling stuff around their house on Facebook Marketplace, selling clothes on Poshmark... I could go on and on! There are literally so many ways - so what makes you think they’re going to put effort into coaching at all?
It’s important that you hold your clients accountable right from the get-go, and that means empowering them to take responsibility for their financial future.
Another angle of this pricing issue is that maybe your messaging and audience are incorrect. For example, if you’re selling a program to high school students on how to graduate college debt-free. You might think you need to get on Tik Tok and make some viral videos to get in front of more high school students.
I would NOT go this route. I would get into Facebook groups or make my own Facebook group for PARENTS of high school students who are truly feeling the pain points of the college price tags. See the difference here? The program didn’t change too much, but the messaging and delivery and PRICE will make so much more sense this way.
#2: Do NOT price your services based on an hourly wage
Another mistake I see when pricing services is that coaches ask, "Well, how much do you value your time?" or "What is your time worth?" When you look at the service market as a whole, time really has nothing to do with how things are priced.
I think this gets confused with hourly wages often, but we aren’t 16-year-olds working at a fast-food restaurant. An "hourly wage" is pretty irrelevant as a business owner.
Here is the big caveat with this mistake. When a coach is just starting, they should take on what are called beta clients. Now, I could do a WHOLE different blog on the process of working with beta clients and how it should be done, BUT this is more of an acceptable time to look at the amount of time and results you’re going to achieve together because you will only be working together for a very small, limited amount of time.
Like I said, working with beta clients, if DONE CORRECTLY, can really propel your business forward, and that’s something that we cover from start to finish in my Become a Coach program.
Let’s go back to the "How much is your time worth?" philosophy and why it doesn’t work in the service industry. I am very against the standard 40 hour work week and, really, hourly work in general because it doesn’t reward efficient, skilled labor.
One of the big arguments against the 40 hour work week is that when people get done, they are given more work to do to meet the 40-hour minimum quota. This is a GREAT way to ensure that they never work efficiently and get done early ever again!
Let’s bring this down to a very practical level. Locksmiths. Invaluable work, right? When you are locked out of something valuable, the value of the service is not found in the TIME that it takes to unlock whatever it is, right? That would be minutes? The value and what is charged is the VALUE of being able to get into the thing that is locked.
I heard a story to further prove this point of a billion-dollar company with many machines running consistently and interwoven together. All of a sudden, the process broke, and the owner had to call a specialist after trying everything that he could think of.
The machinery specialist arrived, walked up to the machines, inspected them for a few minutes and then moved one thing to replace a screw that had come loose. The whole process took 15 minutes because the specialist knew exactly what to look for and knew exactly how to fix it. He hands the $1000 bill to the owner, and it says "tightened screw" and the owner freaks out!
"What?? It only took you 15 min, and you just had to tighten one screw!!"
The specialist says, "Yeah, you’re right." He takes the invoice back and makes some changes before giving it back to the owner. Now it says, "Tightened one screw: $1. Experience on what to look for, evaluating what was broken and how to fix it, and knowing what would and wouldn’t work: $999."
I love that goofy story because it illustrates perfectly that we JUST CAN’T look at service-based businesses in terms of hourly wage.
#3: Do NOT lower your price because you hear ‘I can’t afford it’
Another mistake I have made and also see a lot of coaches make is lowering their prices after x number of prospects say they cannot afford the coaching. They get discouraged, and because of imposter syndrome and doubts, they think: "it must be the price. If the price is lower, then people will say yes."
IT’S NOT THE PRICE! If someone isn’t going to pay full price for your program - they are most likely NOT going to pay a discounted price either.
I’ll never forget this story from back in January of 2020 when I was preparing for my money challenge in February. I was following up with many people who had said that they "couldn’t afford" my coaching package at the time, but were still very interested. I messaged one lady in particular, personally inviting her to the challenge because the entry price for the challenge was $55.
IF price was truly the hold-up, she would’ve jumped on this, right? An opportunity to work with me in a slightly different capacity for LITERALLY ONLY $55!???!!
Her response: "I just can’t afford it."
I was SPEECHLESS. This is an extremely valuable lesson: it’s not about the price. If we were selling 10k coaching packages or 25k coaching packages, then yes, perhaps it would be about the price, but we aren’t.
Most financial coaches are selling 1-2k coaching packages, and I am here to tell you: it’s not about the price. Don’t get me wrong, the objection will be probably every single time: I can’t afford it, BUT it’s not about the price.
Write that down on a sticky note and put it on your monitor so that you can stare at it every time you get on a sales call. Trust me, the faster you understand that, the more confident you will be in selling your services and inviting others into a huge transformation.
It’s not about the price.
Here’s the flip side, let’s say you lower your prices still get objections, so keep lowering it until you get some yesses. Here’s what follows: no shows, lack of follow-through, limiting mindsets, missed payments, negative energy, no testimonials, no skin in the game...
ALSO, your ideal client is NOWHERE TO BE FOUND.
That sounds terrible! And that’s why coaches QUIT!! You’ve done a huge disservice to your clients and yourself.
You are so much better off keeping boundaries with this type of client and making them wait until they’re in a place where they want to invest in themselves and will find a way to make it happen.
I mentioned the caveat with beta clients earlier, and that applies here too. This is why we don’t work with beta clients forever, and when we work with them, we have strict boundaries, expectations, and processes.
Another note here to the coach that lowers prices out of guilt or wanting to help people - when you don’t hold your clients accountable by having skin in the game, you aren’t actually helping anyone; you are enabling cheap behavior.
You know these people, the people that always say they’re getting ripped off, the bargain hunters who have never invested in themselves or their future before, the complainers who are known as ‘cheapskates’ who only buy stuff based on price and not on value.
I know this sounds crazy and counterintuitive, BUT your prices will determine the type of clients that you will attract.
I want to reiterate that this isn’t theory; this isn’t something I heard or read in a blog. These are the mistakes I made and pitfalls that coaches I’ve invested in have helped me navigate.
This is the toughest truth that I‘ve had to learn as a coach: I can’t help everyone. You can’t help everyone.
BUT the good news is you CAN help a target market with specific problems that you’re uniquely qualified to guide and foster transformation in a sustainable way.
I won’t say that all of my business problems were solved when I raised my prices, but raising my prices empowered me to grow my business sustainably, AND it’s allowed me to get even bigger transformations for my clients. And honestly, it DID solve a lot of my business problems
#4: HAVE a payment plan available
Another mistake that I see coaches making (and this one is for some reason more controversial) is not having payment plans available. I’ve mentioned before to tother coaches that I have a payment plan for my programs, and you would’ve thought that I robbed a bank based on the reactions I’ve gotten!
This simply makes the program more accessible to people throughout the year and not just on 3 paycheck months or tax season when people get their tax returns.
I’m very aware and sensitive to the fact that investing money into a program about money is REALLY stretching some people and will be scary.
I totally get that. I never have my payment plans exceed the program length itself, but I do make it more accessible by working the payments into the budget that we create together throughout the program.
For someone who wants to pay off debt, learn about investing, increase their credit score, the payment plan option really makes my program a no brainer for them, and in full transparency, I rarely get pushback on my price anymore.
Not having a payment plan to me is like saying, "Get your money together and then pay me so that I can help you get your money together." That’s just not very accessible to a lot of people and honestly doesn’t make a lot of sense.
What do I do when someone is a great fit for the program, but the timing may be off? I can sleep well at night knowing that I’m never turning someone away empty-handed because of the abundance of free content that I provide and is always available.
Want more info on xyz? Perfect, here’s a YouTube video. Want to see what my goals are and the behind the scenes of my business? Follow me on Instagram.
If someone truly isn’t ready, I can very easily direct them to all those things, and if they’re really serious, they can use that to get themselves to a point where they can invest.
I love this feedback I received from someone I met through Instagram: she says, "I can’t imagine the progress of your 1-1 coaching compared to only utilizing resources that you offer freely. You’ve single-handedly put $2k+ in my pocket just from adhering to your general public advice."
My free content is STUPID valuable. Like she said, if my free stuff is this good, imagine how good my paid offers are!
I have SO MUCH MORE to say about pricing for coaches, so I decided to create a free Pricing Workshop especially for YOU on this topic. If you’re an aspiring coach, you can use this link to watch the hour-long training that I’ve put together for you for FREE. I’ll see you guys in the training!
[Disclaimer: This blog may contain affiliate links. If you purchase a product or service with the links that I provide, I may receive a small commission with no additional charge to you. Thank you for supporting me so I can continue to provide you with valuable content!]
