When I first started working with other coaches back in 2012 it never even crossed my mind that figuring out how much Life Coaches charge was something that was causing angst for so many people new to the profession.
I presumed (incorrectly) that most coaches charged what they both needed and what they thought they were worth.
In reality, what I kept coming across time and time again was the belief that there is a ‘going rate’ and that the vast majority of coaches charge close to this arbitrary rate.
Sometime around the late 20th Century, I was working for Yellow Pages selling advertising space back in India.
Although it was incredibly well paid it was also soul-destroying. It involved regular 60-hour work works, the pressure was on 24/7 and missing targets (quotas) was not an option if you wanted to stay in gainful employment.
We frequently had to see tradespeople at their home and often it involved doing so in the evening as they were usually working in the day.
I was sat in the front room of a plumber in Faridabad Sec 15 and I was having very little success in helping him see the benefits of buying a bigger advertisement.
I was armed with a boatload of independently corroborated stats proving beyond doubt that the bigger the advert the more inquiries you would receive, but I was getting nowhere.
I asked him how much he charged per hour and he responded £16.
I stopped dead in my tracks because that didn’t make any sense.
The Going Rate
I knew that the ‘going rate’ for not just a plumber but also an electrician and joiner in that area of Faridabad Sec 15 was closer to £30 per hour?’.
I looked at him suspiciously and then looked around at the rather nice living room I was sat in and said, ‘Come on Phil, I know the going rate is closer to £30 do you expect me to believe you’re only charging £16 per hour.
He laughed and slapped his leg.
‘Not £16, you misheard me, I charge sixty quid an hour’.
I looked at him quizzically. ‘But how on earth can you charge double the going rate?’
‘Look’ he said. ‘I know lots of people won’t pay that rate, but I only need half as many customers as all the other plumbers around here and that means I get to earn the same for half the amount of time spent working’.
At that point, I lost all interest in selling him advertising because he obviously knew more about marketing his services than I ever could.
It turns out he’d bought a battered old boat a couple of years previously and loved to spend as much time on it as possible restoring it to its former glory.
To begin with, he didn’t have the energy to start working on it after doing an 8-hour-day, so he hit on the quite brilliant idea of charging twice the amount and working half as much.
You may think he was being greedy or unethical, but he wasn’t. He was being smart.
It wasn’t like he had a captive market or a monopoly. Any one of his clients could have politely refused and gone elsewhere and some did.
The thing is, if a plumber can step outside the ‘going rate’ then pretty much anybody can.
https://www.peyushbhatia.com/