Three times a year, I run a free challenge called Nail Your Niche for qualified coaches who are struggling to find clients who can, and will, pay a professional rate for their coaching. One of the most honest conversations we have during that challenge is about affordability – specifically, whether the people we’ve decided we want to work with are actually in a financial position to hire a coach. It’s a conversation that makes a lot of coaches uncomfortable, but avoiding it doesn’t make the problem go away.
Talking About Money
When we decide who we want to work with, we tend to think about the people themselves: the problems they face, the transformation we can help them achieve, the work we find most meaningful. What most of us don’t factor in at that stage is whether those people have the disposable income to pay a professional rate. At the time of writing, a reasonable starting point for private coaching is somewhere in the region of £125 to £150 per session. That’s not an extravagant figure by professional services standards, but it’s not nothing either, and it rules out a significant proportion of the population.
The practical test isn’t complicated. What’s their salary band? Do the people you want to work with live what you’d describe as a nice life – regular holidays, a decent car, clothes they’ve chosen rather than settled for? If so, they almost certainly have disposable income, if not, the maths of building a private practice around them is going to be very difficult, and being honest about that early saves a lot of frustration later.
If The Numbers Don’t Work
This is where many coaches feel they’re facing an impossible choice. The people they most want to help are often not the people with the most disposable income, and filtering potential clients by their ability to pay can feel like a betrayal of the values that drew them to coaching in the first place.
I understand that discomfort, and I don’t think it should be dismissed. What I’d push back on is the assumption that it’s a binary choice. If the group you’re drawn to work with is in the right sector but at a level where coaching isn’t financially accessible, the answer isn’t necessarily to abandon the sector – it’s to look further up the pay scale within it. A frontline worker in the NHS and a senior NHS leader are in the same world, but in very different financial positions. Moving up within the sector you care about isn’t a compromise, it’s a sensible adjustment that keeps the work meaningful while making the business viable.
The other option some coaches consider is group programmes, which can make coaching accessible to people at lower price points. That’s a legitimate model, but it’s worth knowing that filling a group of people who are all ready to start at the same time is considerably harder than finding individual 1:1 clients. It’s not impossible, but it’s not the easier path, and it’s certainly not where I’d suggest starting.
A Business That Can Keep Going
A coaching practice that can’t sustain itself financially can’t help anyone for long. This isn’t a mercenary observation, it’s a practical one. The coaches who have built stable, well-paying practices are the ones who have the most freedom to take on pro bono work, offer reduced rates where it matters to them, and make choices based on values rather than desperation. The sustainable business is what creates the room for the vocational work, not the obstacle to it.
Choosing a WHO that can afford to pay you isn’t about valuing some people more than others. It’s about building something that lasts long enough for you to be able to make a real difference.
An Opportunity
If you’d like to have a robust conversation about pricing, or indeed anything else associated with starting a coaching business, may I offer you a way to learn a bit more for free? Why not join my next free challenge, Nail Your Niche?
We run it several times a year and there’s even an option to upgrade to a VIP version, which gives you 3 x 60-minute group mentoring sessions with me for just £99 (inc VAT) – that provides us with time for a lot of robust conversations about how ethical marketing works.
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