How to Price a Coaching Offer: Value Stacking Explained

Most coaches and consultants underprice, and the reason is rarely the market. It is that the offer feels expensive to the person selling it.

This guide covers a real example of a broken price, the three reasons your own offer feels expensive to you, and how to fix it with value stacking.

A real example: £60 an hour for a £250,000 result

One of our clients is a career coach. When she came to us she was charging £60 an hour.

Her clients are already on salaries of £80k or more. They are usually in their mid-30s with a PhD and another 20 to 30 years of career ahead of them.

We sat down and worked out what she actually does for them. Across more than 2,000 people she has worked with, the average client earns an extra £250,000 over the rest of their career because of her.

So a client could spend £250 with her and make a quarter of a million. That is not generous pricing. It is a broken price. It was so low that it made people distrust her.

She now charges over £1,000 and demand went up. Not despite the price, but because of it. A higher price stopped her being price-compared and started her being chosen.

Three reasons your offer feels expensive to you

None of these are about the market.

1. You are pricing your inputs, not their results

It is just talking, or just a document, or just your knowledge, so it feels like it should not cost much. But nobody is buying your hours. They are buying what changes for them afterwards.

2. You are price-comparing to competitors

Forget them. The people getting left behind online are the ones watching everyone else's ads, funnels and pricing instead of their own value.

3. You have never asked for more

You got comfortable at a number years ago, and charging more now feels like taking advantage. It is not.

What is value stacking?

Value stacking is a way of pricing an offer from the result backwards. You list every component a client receives, put an honest value on each one, and compare the total with the price you charge.

How value stacking fixes your price

1. Break your offer into every component a client receives.
2. Price each component honestly, on its own.
3. Add them up and get the total to 5 to 8 times what you charge.

Done properly, your price stops looking expensive and starts looking like a discount. You are no longer asking someone to pay for your time. You are showing them everything they get, and what it is worth, next to a number that is a fraction of it.

Does raising your price reduce demand?

Not when the price was the thing making people doubt you. In the career coach's case, the low price was the objection. Buyers on £80k salaries did not believe that something costing £60 an hour could change the next 20 years of their career. The higher price matched the size of the result.

A higher price has to be matched by what you deliver

One line Freddie stands by in the business: the fastest way to break trust is to promise one thing and deliver another. Trust is not usually broken by being bad at what you do. It is broken by a gap between what someone expected and what they got.

So when you raise a price, be exact about what the client gets.

• What happens in the first 24 hours
• What results look like at 90 days
• What is required from them

No surprises means no broken trust, and a client who knows exactly what they are buying is easier to sell to at any price.

There is a second way to justify a higher price, which is to do more of the hard parts for the client. Advice alone leaves the client to execute, and most do not. When you build the thing with them, they get the result, and the result is what they were paying for.

Saying the new price out loud

We hear the same sentence from clients again and again: "I know I can deliver the result. I just don't know if I can sell it."

That is not a skills problem. Those clients already have the results and the case studies. It is a state problem, and state is a direct input into sales. You can have the best offer in your market and still water down the price on a call because you walked in nervous.

The reframe Freddie gives is this: it is unethical not to help the people you can help. Stop making the moment about whether you feel ready, and make it about the person in front of you who needs the result. The nerves do not vanish, but they stop running the call.

Watch the full method

Freddie walks through the whole value stacking method in this video, including the exact numbers from her offer.

Watch on YouTube: Why your offer feels expensive to you

Frequently asked questions

What is value stacking?

Value stacking is a way of pricing an offer from the result backwards. You break the offer into every component the client receives, price each one honestly, and aim for a total worth 5 to 8 times what you charge.

Why does your own offer feel expensive to you?

Usually for three reasons: you are pricing your inputs instead of the client's result, you are comparing yourself to competitors, or you got comfortable at a number years ago and have never asked for more.

Does raising your prices reduce demand?

Not when the low price was causing doubt. One career coach we work with went from £60 an hour to over £1,000 and demand went up, because the higher price matched the size of the result her clients get.

Keep reading

• The parachute problem: how to find the urgent problem clients pay for
• How to get to your first £10k month as a coach or consultant
• The real cost of scaling a service business

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