All of my clients come to me with the $ question. How much should I charge?

A Recent Harvard Business Review report noted coaching fees range from around 100 bucks to over 3K for a session. That’s quite a range. How do you figure out your sweet spot-the place your clients are willing to pay for your services? Ah, this is not a simple question, nor a simply answered question. But here’s what I know:

• You can’t charge more than you can comfortably ask because your discomfort will show through and hurt your credibility
• Your mindset influences your ability to set fees, therefore, as your confidence grows, so will your fees
• You have to determine if you’re a commodity service or a professional service: we bargain for commodities, we respect professionals
• Consider Packaging your Services: Many in private practice charge by the hours per month. But that’s not the only way to make a living
• Develop different income streams to increase your revenues
• Pay attention to your ‘league’. Are you in the majors, minors or varsity league? Plan out what it will take to move up, if you want to.
• Align yourself with bigger league players and practice, practice, practice. Even if you’re on the bench for a while, you’re hanging with the home run set and that increases your credibility.
• Work your skills and talents: All you do should be based on, please, your unique abilities, not other people’s pre-written seminars or models. It’s very difficult to be credible as a trainer IF you haven’t developed your own materials.
• Develop your unique skills: Coaching and training models can and should be adapted to suit the needs of your clients and the strengths you bring to the work. Your creative adaptations will make you uniquely qualified to serve your clients and charge your worth

Focus on the Cornerstones of Confidence

Trust Yourself
Learn About Yourself
Build Emotional Support for Yourself
Focus on Your Productivity

For a complete report on the Cornerstones of Confidence click here: http://www.salterva.com/kathleen/JVGiftCornerstones.html

If you’re in private practice as a coach, therapist, or consultant, for example, then you’re dealing with potential clients and customers. And that means, like it or not, you’re…selling. And, likely you hate that word. (It has all sorts of overtones to widgets, pressure, disrespect, cold calling, etc.) All the junk we impute into the idea of selling are confidence trashers, by the way!

Okay, so let’s change the mindset to…relationship building. That way you don’t have to sell anything at all. You just have to listen and look for the match between your services and the person’s needs. Here’s what I teach my clients about ‘not-selling’.

If you goal is to build your practice and make a difference in the world, then your strategy is to get the ‘right’ clients to say something akin to: “I can’t wait to work with you.” Or, “ I hope you have room in your practice for me.” How do you implement this strategy?

1. Build trust: You do this by helping your prospective client feel safe with you by releasing them from any pressure to hire you. Then you build rapport by listening carefully to their presenting issues. If you can hear the ‘need under the need’ you can touch on that so the person feels understood. You’re building trust!

2. Make room for difference: Allow yourself and your prospective client to have differences of opinion or analysis. You can posit a different perspective, opportunities, and point of view so that it becomes obvious that you’re independent yet aligned with the person.

3. Look for commitments: NOT commitment to work together but commitment around how you work with your clients. Your strategy, for example.

4. Set accountability: How would you work with this person? In person, via telephone. How will they know you’re accountable? What do you tolerate from clients. For example, I work with many executives who cannot be sure they can make their appointments so I have a 12-hour cancellation policy instead of 24 hours. This gives us more freedom and I have designed projects I can do should I have a free slot in my day. It all works out well in the end. I do my best to be flexible where I can and yet set very high standards for completing assignments.

5. Outline goals: If the client comes to you with a presenting problem (difficult employee) but their fulfillment goal is a strong high-functioning dependable team, then invite the person to have this bigger goal.

More questions than answers? Call your Confidence Coach, Kathleen Schulweis, CPCC, PCC:
Building private practices and saving relationships for more years than she cares to admit.