Some coaches genuinely believe that low pricing is noble, that keeping coaching accessible is more important than making a good living. There’s a conversation to be had with those coaches, but that’s not the purpose of this article.
Many of us who underprice aren’t doing it out of ethical conviction. We’re doing it because we tried to charge more and couldn’t make the sale, and after enough failed conversations, we concluded the problem was our price and dropped it until someone said yes. The trouble is, this conclusion is usually wrong because the problem wasn’t the price but our inability to demonstrate value in a way the potential client could understand and connect with.
This matters because underpricing creates real problems for the coach, for their clients, and for the profession as a whole, and it doesn’t solve the underlying issue. A coach who can’t articulate the value of working with them at £150 per session won’t magically learn how to do it at £50, they’ll just be working harder for less money while the real problem goes unaddressed.
What Happens When We Can’t Afford to Keep Coaching
Those of us who underprice don’t always realise we’re doing it, or how significantly we’re doing it, because we’re measuring the wrong thing. We look at what they charge per session and think it sounds reasonable, but we’re not factoring in the hours of work that surround each coaching hour – the marketing, the preparation, the notes after the session, the supervision, the CPD, the admin. When all of that gets folded in, many of us are working for not much more than minimum wage without ever recognising it.
This is why selling coaching by the hour can be a trap. It frames the value of coaching as time spent in conversation, which invites the client to compare our hourly rate with other things they pay for by the hour, which almost certainly don’t carry the same overhead or require the same level of skill. When we sell packages or programmes instead of by the hour, the conversation shifts from “how much per hour” to “what’s this transformation worth”, and that’s a conversation where proper pricing makes sense to both parties.
Of course, we can’t have that conversation unless we’re crystal clear on who will get the transformation. A coach who works with anyone who wants to be happier (for example) can’t articulate specific value because the value is different for every person who we might coach. A coach who works with new managers in Pharma struggling to delegate can describe exactly what their clients gain and why it matters, and that specificity is what makes proper pricing possible.
The coaches who sustain their businesses long-term aren’t the ones who found clients willing to pay rock-bottom rates. They’re the ones who learned to price in a way that reflects the full reality of what coaching requires and to sell in a way that communicates real value rather than time.
Clients Don’t Benefit From a Bargain
When clients pay a professional fee, they have skin in the game. They want to get value from their purchase, which creates an element of commitment that coaches charging reduced rates don’t often see. This shows up in practical ways – clients who’ve invested properly keep their appointments, show up prepared, and follow through on the actions they created in the previous session. Clients who paid very little, or nothing at all, have more of a tendency to chop and change appointments or arrive having taken little or none of the actions they committed to.
There’s also the question of how the client perceives the coaching itself. Cut-price signals low quality, even when it isn’t, because clients naturally assume that if we were good, we’d charge a proper rate. This is especially true when selling to organisations, where cheap coaching raises suspicion rather than interest. Those who procure coaching have seen enough to know that quality costs money, and a coach who undercuts the market looks like someone who can’t compete at professional rates.
Many of us convince ourselves that coaching for free or for low prices will pay off through referrals. It’s certainly possible to generate referrals like this, but referrals from pro bono or ‘low bono’ clients are for others who also want free or cheap coaching. We attract more of whatever we’ve been offering, so if we want clients who pay properly, we need to start by working with clients who pay properly.
The Ripple Effect on the Coaching Profession
Our pricing decisions don’t exist in isolation. When we consistently underprice our services, the consequences spread far beyond our own businesses.
There’s an associate company in the UK that sells coaching to clients “for less than the cost of a pizza” according to their marketing, while expecting their coaches to deliver those sessions pro bono. Coaches agree to this because they’re struggling to find clients who pay and they need the hours for their credentials. I think that this is exploitation dressed up as opportunity, and it’s made acceptable because our professional bodies count these hours as “paid” for logging purposes. The undervaluation of coaching is being legitimised from the top down.
The broader consequence is that coaches who can’t make the business side work give up, regardless of how good they are at coaching. The profession doesn’t lose its weakest coaches and keep its strongest; it loses those of us who couldn’t price properly while keeping coaches who could, and there’s no correlation between those two skills. Every time a talented coach walks away because they couldn’t sustain their practice, the profession becomes a little poorer for it.
A healthier profession needs coaches who can afford to stay in it. That requires proper pricing to become the norm rather than the exception, and it requires us to stop accepting arrangements that undervalue what we do, no matter how desperate we are for hours.
What Ethical Pricing Requires
Ethical pricing starts with transparency. By the time a potential client lands in your diary, they should already know who you are, what you do, who you do it for, and what it costs. This matters because the alternative, which is how many coaches are taught to find clients, is essentially an ambush.
Common advice to new coaches is to offer a strategy session, make it fabulous so that we “demonstrate the value of coaching”, and then reveal our fee at the end. This approach relies on the potential client being so impressed that they’ll say yes to a price they almost certainly weren’t expecting, and there’s nothing ethical about that. It puts the coach in the position of hoping the client won’t ask about money until they’re emotionally committed, which is manipulation masquerading as sales technique.
Ethical client acquisition means being clear about pricing before the conversation happens, so that the people who book calls with us have already decided they can afford to work with us. This means that we should display our pricing clearly, on our websites, on our LinkedIn profiles and in our marketing material to give potential clients enough information to self-select. The ones who can’t afford us don’t waste their time or ours, and the ones who can afford us arrive ready to talk about whether we’re the right fit rather than whether they can stretch to our fee.
This isn’t about saying that people who can’t pay professional fees don’t deserve coaching, because of course they do. However the truth is that we can’t build financially viable coaching businesses by working with clients who can’t afford to pay, and a coaching business that isn’t financially viable helps nobody for very long.
Proper pricing isn’t about charging as much as we can get away with. It’s about charging what allows us to sustain our practice, serve our clients well, and contribute to a profession that values what coaches do. That’s not greed – that’s integrity.
An Opportunity
If you’d like to more help with this, why don’t you book a call to discuss how The Coaching Revolution can support you on your journey to building a coaching business that thrives.
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