Coaching Fees

Being older means that you have been a part of history whether you like it or not.

For me, it’s been interesting to watch America change from a manufacturing society to a service society.

Legal services have been around since pre-Roman days, but not even Marcus Aurelius had a Certified Financial Planner.

With the breakdown of feudal society and the growth of nations, diplomats proliferated, but only recently did mediation become a recognizable occupation.

Before Freud, you may have found a shaman, a guru, or a priest, but psychologists and LPCs had yet to exist.

Now, we have professional coaches who do more than just teach blocking and tackling and pushing the ball across the goal line on weekends.

As I watched the mediation business start and grow, I now watch the coaching business start and grow, noting similarities.

Like incipient mediation, coaching currently suffers from an unresolved tension between those who see it as a helping profession and those who see it as a business.

Most coaches, I suspect, fall somewhere along this continuum.

How much should a coach charge? How much should a client pay?

Experienced coaches have various theories about this.

Some employ a pyramid structure where they are willing to take a certain number of clients for $100 per hour, half of that number for $200, half still for $400, etc.

I’m not sure what they do if the demand for their services indicates that the consumer sees their pyramid as more of a rectangle.

Let’s say that a coach says that he only has so many “slots” available at $100 per hour, he fills those spots, no one is willing to take a $200 slot, and he keeps getting those pesky calls from the lesser middle class folks.

And, just for fun, let’s say the rent is due, the cupboard is bare, and the baby needs shoes. What to do?

That reminds me of a John Prine song:

To believe in this living is just a hard way to go.

Back to business: then, there is the “market approach”, which goes something like this: go to the Internet, see what coaches with comparable credentials are charging and charge that.

Or, for the competitive personality types, undercut the prices of the competition.

This presumes that you can find someone with comparable credentials.

Am I the only one who is not that impressed with “credentials”?

I have a few myself, so this argument may be adverse to my self-interest, which usually means that it must be true.

There is also the “progressive approach”, which will appeal to those on the helping side of the continuum.

The progressive approach says that you charge what the client can afford.

Every client needs some skin in the game, except, perhaps, the skinless, so you adjust the rates to fit the client, but you should charge something unless you are so progressive that you, as a coach, need a therapist.

Does a coach always know what a client can or cannot afford?

There is also the “economic approach”.

This approach presumes that supply and demand meet at some sort of equilibrium point sooner or later.

Using this approach, the coach starts low, culls out the slow-payers and the low-payers and gradually increases his fees until supply exceeds demand.

Every fee agreement for personal services is a negotiable contract.

It should be flexible and dynamic.

Paying too much or charging too much is always relative.

Something else that you learn when you get older: it’s only money, and

rigidity is the enemy.