How to Charge for Your Services
Smart Dollars and Sense for Health Coaches
As a health coach, in a fairly new industry, it’s sometimes hard to know how to charge for our products and services.
Many of us have been told that $75 is the amount to charge. Fresh out of health coaching school, it may not feel so comfortable to charge that much. If you’re getting clients from another source, like your school or another company (us) who refer out customers, $25 is often what you can expect to get paid. You should expect to charge more if you’re finding the clients and have business expenses to build your health coaching practice up.
If you are running your own business, you must charge enough to pay for your time and expenses. You also should take into consideration your market. Health coaches on both coasts are able to justify and charge quite a bit more than many health coaches in the Midwest. It’s very important for you to do market research.
To take it one step further, you look at what you are offering compared to other businesses of your type. If you offer something special, you can qualify to charge more. If you don’t offer as much time or a lower quality product, you’ll charge less.
Cathy Sykora
Founder, The Health Coach Group
Programs
We haven’t set up retail price plans for our programs. You should price your programs like this: BASE VALUE + YOUR COSTS + YOUR EXPECT PROFIT In the costs, you should include:
- Time you spend preparing for your client
- How many times you meet x your hourly rate
- Total value for goods or services you include in the program
Online programs should help to keep the cost of preparation down. If you’re selling a six-month program, you may just want to figure up how many times you meet times your hourly rate. If your rate is $125 and you meet 12 times, then a good cost for your time is $1500.00. If you have additional giveaways, that total $600, then your total for a six-month program would be $2100.00. Sometimes there are other considerations. Your 12-day detox may be what we call a “loss leader” to pull in new 6 month clients. In that case, there have been many coaches who’ve done really well with a $99 introductory price point. Self-guided and one 15 minute meeting to move your client up to your 6-month program. In this case, you could charge more, but you would not and you can consider this as advertising.
Retention
As you become more experienced, and learn what to charge, you need to be careful not to put your existing clients off with price increases. As you raise your prices, you will want to consider grandfathering your faithful clients who were with you since the beginning into their original prices.
What You Don’t Learn in School
Health coaches often spend more time preparing for meetings than most occupations do. Plus, you need some time in the day to run your business. In my opinion, 40% is a little too forgiving. So, if you want to know how to affect the outcome of your income in a smarter way, here is a little spreadsheet to play with. Have fun and check out all the possibilities.
Share in the comments below and share with your friends and coworkers.
Do you have any tips for charging for services and programs?
What has worked for you?
What are you struggling with?
A very informative article. Thank you for the spread sheets, too.
Bummer it wont let me download the spread sheets, says its no longer taking submissions.
Interesting if you click the links they don’t work but if you sign up for the news letter you can get the spread sheets