How Much Should You Charge for Coaching with James FitzGerald

The health and fitness market is saturated, it’s no secret. To try to gain a competitive advantage some coaches will offer multiple price points or lower their price for certain groups. However, James FitzGerald, 25+ year coaching veteran, strongly advises against this, here’s why.

In this week’s Ask Me Anything (AMA) sneak peak OPEX Fitness Founder, James FitzGerald, addresses the question of whether or not a coach should lower his price to make his service accessible to more clients.

If you are currently an OPEX Coaching Certificate Program (CCP) Coach you can submit your question for next week’s AMA here. New to OPEX Fitness? In short, we are a fitness coaching education provider, get a free introduction to our principles here.

How Much Should You Charge for Coaching?

There are three steps to figuring out how much you should charge for coaching.

1) Understand Your Market’s Willingness to Pay

Firstly, you have to understand your market’s willingness to pay. As defined by Price Intelligently, your market’s willingness to pay (WTP) is the maximum amount a client is willing to pay for your service. How much you should charge for coaching is directly dependent on your market’s willingness to pay. Think of it as how much would they be willing to swipe their credit card for right now. 

2) Do Market Research

Secondly, start doing market research. This involves looking at services that are similar to yours and noticing how your service is better or worse and similar or different. Learn how you can stand out as a coach in this blog.

Do you have a nicer facility than most, more testimonials? Then charge more. Do you have lesser hours, and a limited service offering? Charge less. Learn the fundamentals of understanding your market in this free coaching download.

3) Earn Your Price Point

After doing market research, start charging the price point you came to based upon the market research. The third step is to earn your price point. If you are happy where you started, keep doing what you are doing. If you would like to charge more think of how you can build your price point e.g., get more testimonials, improve your marketing, or offer a more in-depth service.

Should I Dop My Price to Make it More Accessible?

During the majority of the AMA James focuses on answering the question “should I offer students a lower price?” To start off James says that he does not recommend offering two price points. “Ask yourself what are your higher-paying clients getting that your students are not. If you are going to change the price you need to change the service offering as well”. Understanding how to value yourself as a coach is not easy, but it is essential. Get an introduction to James’ best business practices here.

“Having multiple price points kills the coach in the long-term,” says James. But there are a couple strategies you can use if the goal is to reach more clients. First, master your business practices and build your book of clients to where you can easily take care of yourself. Then if you want to reach more clients you can slowly reduce price as you optimize your cash flow. The second is you can set up an affiliate program with a local cheaper gym in which you can recommend the clients to.

Business Person First, Coach Second

As a coach, you need to look out for yourself, while you may want to help everyone that you come in contact with you must make sure that you create a sustainable coaching business first. 

James has seen coaches fail time and time again because of lowering their price or offering multiple service offerings. Thus, he has devoted a whole section of the OPEX Coaching Certificate Program (CCP) to the business of coaching. Get an introduction to James’ business principles when you download this free Coach’s Toolkit.