Issue #013
Price Like a Pro
A few months into building Coachstack, I was interviewing a career coach with fifteen years of corporate HR behind her. She knew her stuff cold — the kind of person who could diagnose a client's positioning problem in the first ten minutes of a conversation and have a clear direction by the end of the session.
I asked what she charged.
She said $150 an hour and then immediately added, "I know I should probably charge more."
I asked why she hadn't.
She paused for a moment. "I guess I'm not sure what I'd base a higher number on."
That answer has stayed with me. Because it gets to the real issue underneath most coaching pricing conversations — not confidence, or market research, or even the fear of rejection.
The issue is the unit itself.
When you price by the hour, the hour is the product. And an hour is easy to compare, easy to shop around, and nearly impossible to charge a premium for without the conversation becoming a negotiation about whether you're worth twice as much as the next coach.
When you offer coaching for an hourly rate, you're tempting people to compare your rate to other coaches' rates. The customer's focus becomes the hour, not what you can actually do for them.
The shift is about changing what you’re offering them.
WHAT’S ON DECK
The Playbook: Why hourly pricing works against you
Real Wins: How one coach tripled her rates after repricing
Your Next Move: A 3-step pricing exercise
Steal This: Pricing calculator template
Coachstack Connect: Present your offer professionally from the first client touchpoint
YOUR MISSING PIECE
We're still in Step 4 of the Coaching Flywheel: Sell Your Flagship Offer. The last few issues covered building the offer and closing with confidence. Pricing is where all of that either lands or falls apart. An offer built around a clear outcome deserves a price that reflects the outcome instead of the hours it takes to deliver it.
THE PLAYBOOK
Why Hourly Pricing Works Against You
There's a reason most coaches default to hourly rates when they're starting out. It feels safe and easy to explain, and it gives clients something concrete to evaluate.
The problem is that everything that makes it easy to explain also makes it hard to command a premium. When clients are focused on paying for an hour, they miss the bigger picture of what they're truly buying — your expertise and your ability to create lasting change. The hour becomes the thing under negotiation. And in that negotiation, you're competing against every other coach with an hour to sell.
Hormozi's core argument in $100M Offers is that price is a signal before it's a number. Premium pricing increases perceived value, client commitment, and results. Lowering prices reduces these. The price a prospect sees before they've spoken with you tells them something about what kind of engagement to expect — whether they're buying access to someone's time or investing in a specific outcome.
That's the distinction that matters. Time is cheap. Outcomes are not.
Coaches billing outcomes instead of hours can earn double or triple without working more. Hourly billing punishes efficiency: you solve in three months what takes others twelve, but you're pricing the same as someone who takes longer.
The decade of accumulated expertise that lets you get a client to clarity in two sessions gets priced the same as a raw beginner who needs twelve to cover the same ground. That's the structural problem with hourly rates — they price the input, not the output.
The Three Shifts That Change the Pricing Conversation
Shift 1: Define the result, not the engagement
The first thing to change is what the number is attached to.
Packages work better for outcome-based coaching because clients buy outcomes, not hours. Hourly rates can cap results and income because real change comes from longer-term support.
A package with a named outcome, aka "You'll have a VP offer at a company worth working for within 90 days,” is a different product than "60-minute coaching sessions."
One creates a finish line, while the other creates a meter running.
When you price a result, the client is no longer asking "is this coach worth $300 an hour?" They're asking "is landing that VP role worth this investment?" Those are completely different questions, and the second one is almost always easier to answer yes to.
Shift 2: Price the value to the client, not the cost to you
This is the part most coaches skip, and it's the one Hormozi is most direct about.
Value-based pricing focuses on the outcome, not the hours spent. The bigger the outcome you deliver, the higher you can charge. Your clients achieve results worth multiples of what you currently charge.
Start by asking: what is the outcome you reliably deliver actually worth to the client?
If a career coach helps someone land a role with a $40,000 salary increase, a fee of $5,000 for the engagement isn't high. Nope. That’s actually a 700% return on investment!
If an executive coach helps a founder build a leadership team that prevents a $200,000 hiring mistake, a $10,000 engagement is a bargain by any reasonable measure.
Most coaches never do this math.
They price from their own discomfort rather than their client's gain. Most coaches undercharge by 30–50% because they focus on hourly rates instead of outcome-based value. The number you arrive at when you price from the client's gain is almost always higher than the number you arrive at when you price from what feels reasonable to ask for.
Shift 3: Understand what premium pricing signals
There's a practical reason to charge more beyond just making more money, and it's counterintuitive until you've seen it a few times.
Higher pricing attracts more committed clients: those who invest seriously, show up prepared, do the work between sessions, and ultimately get better results. The client who pays $500 for a package approaches it differently than the client who pays $5,000. That’s because the investment changes the psychological relationship to the work. They've put something real on the line. They show up differently.
On the other side: clients who negotiate your rate down before the engagement starts are often the ones who will under-invest during it. The rate conversation is sometimes early information about how seriously they're approaching the work.
Premium pricing is about what you earn AND about the kind of client relationship it tends to create.
REAL WINS
A career coach I know spent her first two years of practice charging $175 an hour. She was good at what she did: consistently helping mid-career professionals land roles they'd been circling for years. But her calendar was packed and her income was flat, and she kept attracting clients who'd push back on her rate or ghost after the discovery call.
After working through a repricing exercise, she made two changes.
She stopped offering hourly sessions entirely and built a single 90-day program with a defined outcome: a senior leadership role at a company worth working for, with a structured process from positioning through offer negotiation.
And she priced it based on the average salary delta her clients achieved (roughly $35,000) setting her program fee at $6,000.
That's a significant jump from $175 an hour.
What happened was a surprise to the both of us. The discovery calls got easier. Prospects who'd been comfortable negotiating an hourly rate found it harder to argue with a $6,000 investment when she walked them through what the outcome was worth. The clients she signed were more prepared, engaged, and were a lot more likely to do the pre-session work that made the coaching actually land.
She took on fewer clients than before. Her revenue more than tripled.
When I asked what had changed most, she said: "I stopped feeling like I was defending a number. I started explaining a result. Those are completely different conversations."
TL;DR
Three things worth keeping from this issue:
Hourly pricing makes the hour the product. When the hour is the product, clients compare you to every other coach with an hour to sell. The outcome is what's actually worth buying. So, price that instead.
Value-based pricing starts with the client's gain, not your comfort level. What does the outcome you reliably deliver actually mean to the person who needs it? That math almost always points to a higher number than the one you've been using.
Premium pricing changes who shows up. Higher-investment clients tend to be more committed, more prepared, and more likely to get results that fuel referrals. The price shapes the engagement that follows.
STEAL THIS
Pricing Calculator: Three Steps to Find Your Number
Set aside 20 minutes. Work through these in order.
Step 1: Define the outcome.
What does the client's situation look like specifically at the end of working with you? Write it in one sentence. Be concrete. Consider a salary increase, a role, client roster, or a business milestone. Vague outcomes produce vague prices.
Step 2: Calculate the client's gain.
Put a number on the outcome.
If it's a salary increase, what's the typical delta?
If it's a business milestone, what's the revenue impact over the next 12 months?
If it's a career pivot, what's the difference between where they are and where they're going — in money, time, or both?
Write that number down. Your fee should represent a clear, proportionate return on that figure. It should be a price that makes the ROI obvious to the client doing the math.
Step 3: Pressure-test the number.
Take the price you've just arrived at and ask three questions:
Would a client who genuinely needs this outcome see it as a reasonable investment given what they'd gain?
Does this number allow you to take on the number of clients you want without burning out?
And does it make you feel like you're bringing full attention and energy to the work — or like you're already resentful before the first session?
If the answer to all three is yes, you have your number.
COACHSTACK CONNECT
Once you've made the shift to outcome-based pricing, your client-facing materials need to reflect it clearly — your marketing page, intake process, and onboarding should all present the offer the way you now think about it: as an investment in a result, not a purchase of sessions.
Coachstack's marketing hub and client portal are built to hold that presentation cohesively from the first touchpoint through the final deliverable. Learn more at coachstackhq.com.
YOUR NEXT MOVE
Work through the three-step pricing calculator above before the end of this week. Define the outcome, calculate the client's gain, and pressure-test the number you arrive at.
Then reply and tell me: what's stopping you from raising your prices?
I read every response — and the answers people give here consistently shape what shows up in future issues.
—Peter