value

How to start charging for your coaching – part one 1

 in Coaching  tagged beliefs / business coach / business coaching / career coaching / charging / coach / coaches / coaching / coaching content / coaching courses / coaching fees / coaching qualifications / coaching session / coaching skills / coaching techniques / executive coach / fear / leadership coaching / life coach / life coaches / life coaching / money / no / performance coaching / personal development / resource / value

One of the common questions asked by those at the start of their coaching journey is a variation of “How do I move from doing pro-bono/free coaching to charging?”

Before I go any further I invite you to consider why I selected the wording of that specific question. For example, one of the variations of that question is “how do you move from …”

I’d really like this post to be useful for you if you found yourself in this situation, not just an interesting piece of information. So before I go any further, let me ask you,

“What’s stopping you from charging for your coaching?”

There are many answers that could have come up for you to that question, each potentially with a different action that you can take. Below I’m going to discuss just a few of those answers.

Beliefs about the value of your coaching

These commonly are voiced as concerns about being good enough, questioning what a client would value about your work and why anyone would choose you etc.

I’ve written before about how to find the confidence to find clients to coach (Read “Finding the confidence to start coaching” for more specific actions you could take) I’ve also written “3 ways to keep your focus on your client and not your own inner critic/ thoughts” if those questions about your value distract you whilst coaching.

I’d certainly encourage anyone to continue to develop their own coaching skills and knowledge and add to that a plea to share that with others rather than keep it to yourself. If it’s beliefs about the value of your coaching, how will you know when you are good enough?

Beliefs around money

Your beliefs around money can be interwoven with your values and perceptions about the world. There are whole books written around the impact of money beliefs upon wealth and I’m certainly not going to try and sum them all up in such a short space.

What I will invite you to do is consider if your beliefs are getting in the way of you starting to charge for your coaching. If so, you have 3 principal options:

1.      Find a way that your money beliefs and charging for your coaching can work together.

2.      Change your beliefs

3.      Do nothing

If you choose number 1, next week’s post may give you some more ideas. For now, what would have to happen for your money beliefs and charging for your coaching to work together?

Not knowing what to charge and how to have that conversation.

There are many ways to decide upon what you want to charge. I suggest that you consider the points I wrote about in the post “How much is your coaching worth?”

It’s not at all uncommon for someone to tell me that they don’t know what to say when talking to someone about charging for their coaching.

One of the pieces of advice I was given when I first started to charge for my coaching was to practice saying my fees in advance. “I charge x for my coaching” The idea is that you become so used to saying the amount that by the time you come to speak to a real client there is no shock, amazement or doubt heard in the tone of your voice.

Practicing that also means that you “ask and then shut up”. It’s not at all unknown for a coach to have talked themselves out of their own coaching fee without the client saying a word. This usually happens after the coach has done a really good job of communicating the value and their offer to a potential client. Yet they just keep talking to try and answer objections that haven’t been raised.

Fear of getting told no

There’s so much that could be written on this topic. For now I’ll ask the following, if you offer someone a cup of tea/coffee and they decline, what would you think?

I suspect you’d probably presume that they weren’t thirsty, perhaps didn’t want a hot drink or maybe didn’t like tea/coffee at all. Immediately interpreting that as meaning they think you are a terrible person etc is probably not high on your list of possible explanations.

Yet, when it comes to inviting someone to experience your coaching service many view a no as meaning something personal about you as an individual. There will be individuals who at this moment in time aren’t “thirsty” for coaching, others who want to try a different approach and some that have tried coaching before and didn’t like it.

I generally find that it is much easier to have a conversation to invite someone to experience your coaching service if you think of it as a service/product and not as selling yourself.

Just to add …

Next Wednesday, I will continue this in part two and discuss when to make a transition to start charging for your coaching.

What else would you add to the question what is stopping you from charging?

About the Author

Jen WallerJen Waller is on a mission to support, nurture and encourage coaching skills and talents from non-coach to coach and beyond.

She has created a free 7 day e-course about how to create your own unique coaching welcome pack that works for you and your clients. Get your copy here.

How much is your coaching worth?

 in Coaching  tagged business coach / business coaching / career coaching / coach / coaches / coaching / coaching content / coaching courses / coaching qualifications / coaching session / coaching skills / coaching techniques / executive coach / leadership coaching / life coach / life coaches / life coaching / performance coaching / pricing / resource / value

The TV was on in a room I was in the other day and it was showing a daytime TV programme which involved 3 interior designers and antique experts each buying a house gift for a specific family. Each expert had a different monetary amount to spend buying their gift.

The family can only choose one gift to keep, which they do before finding out who brought the gift and how much that expert had to spend. As part of the show we got to see the families discussion about which gift was worth what price tag.

It was interesting to see what they valued in line with their lifestyle, personal preferences, tastes and needs. The value that the family was finding in each gift and their guess at a price tag was not in line with the actually amount that it cost.

So how does this apply to coaching? One of the things I often see coaches doing, particularly those just starting out, is deciding upon their price purely by looking at how much they want to charge per hour.

I’ve attended trainings in the past which taught that the way to decide upon your price is to decide upon the monthly/annual income you want from coaching and then the number of coaching sessions you want to carry out in that time. Dividing the financial amount you want by the number of coaching sessions gives you a price to charge per coaching session.

While this can be a useful piece of information to give an indication about the practicalities about the number of hours you want to be coaching for etc. I have to be honest, it’s not my preferred method of pricing a package.

There is lots that can be said about pricing and I want to focus primarily today on what value your coaching is worth. However, as I have mentioned the exercise above I wanted to briefly add an extra point. Interestingly, on the trainings I’ve seen this done there was no mention of being aware of what outgoings that you have in connection with your coaching. If you are planning on running a profitable coaching practice this information is useful to know!

However, as the family on the tv demonstrated with their house gifts, the “value is in the eye of the beholder.”

I invite you to consider the value that your coaching brings to your ideal clients, both emotionally, financially and practically. As well as what it costs them emotionally, financially and practically if they don’t choose to work with you.

Making the Most of Your Brand: YOU!

 in Guest Post  tagged behaviour / beliefs / brand / business coach / business coaching / charging / client / clients / coach / coaches / coaching / coaching courses / coaching qualifications / coaching skills / coaching techniques / coaching training / executive coach / image / Jennifer Holloway / leadership coaching / life coach / life coaches / life coaching / marketing / nlp coach / performance coaching / personal coach / personal development / reputation / selling / skills / value

In this week’s guest post Jennifer Holloway shares her expertise about what is your personal brand and some of the benefits you can get from personal branding.

Making the Most of Your Brand: YOU!

By Jennifer Holloway

Everyone has a personal brand – whether they know it or not; that mix of things that defines who you are and what you’re all about, including:

Your Values – the principles by which you live your life, the rules you use to define right and wrong. Think of these as the foundations on which your personal brand is built. For one of my clients, his values centred around an overarching desire to be genuine and honest whilst still showing empathy to others.

Your Beliefs – what you hold to be important to you, the things that motivate you to do what you do, that drive you to succeed. It could be money, it could be fame, it could be a wish to make a difference. So for instance, I had a client who felt you should always take responsibility and act as if someone is looking, even when they’re not.

Your Reputation – in a nutshell, what you’re known for. Looking at this in more traditional marketing terms, you might call this your strapline. I’ve generated a reputation as ‘The Antidote to Yes Men’ – saying what needs to be said and making things happen.

Your Behaviour – what you say and do that is an outward communication of those deeper values and beliefs. You could think about it as the three words they’d use to describe yourself. Just some of the words used by my clients have been ‘trailblazing’, ‘larger-than-life’, ‘dynamic’, ‘inspiring’, ‘rebel’, ‘connector’…the list goes on.

Your Skills – your strengths, your natural talents, the things you excel at doing. One way to think about this is to look at the things that others come to you for. When I worked in an office I became the ‘go to’ person for writing copy because of my way with words and a love of language (plus a qualification in editing which helped!)

And last, but certainly not least…

Your Image – not just how you look but how you sound as well. This tells people an awful lot about you and will usually tie back in to all the previous things. For instance, one director I worked with used his quirky cufflinks to add a bit of individuality, while another added a large sports watch to his pinstripes to give a hint to the fact he was a keen cyclist.

Put all those layers together and you have your personal brand and the great thing is that if you take the time to define exactly what that brand is and then learn how to promote that to your audiences, you’ll get payback – BIG TIME! Here are just 10 of the benefits of personal branding:

  1. Defining your personal brand gives you the confidence to be yourself.
  2. Being yourself is a lot easier than trying to be someone else.
  3. By focusing on what’s great you add clarity to your brand.
  4. You can also pinpoint the thing that really makes you stand out from the crowd.
  5. Promoting your personal brand helps you sell your benefits to your audiences.
  6. By selling the benefits people know what they’re buying into.
  7. Doing this consistently helps people to trust what they’re buying into.
  8. People like to put things into neat little boxes in their mind, so you give them the box to put you into.
  9. By having you in a neat box, it’s easier for people to sell you and your benefits to others.
  10. If you don’t do all of that, you’ll get left behind.

So do you know what your personal brand is?

About the Author/Further Resources

Jennifer HollowayWith a career including 15 years in the strategic PR and communications, Jennifer knows a thing or two about promoting a personal brand – she did it every time she picked up the phone to a journalist. The result? She stood out from the ‘press office crowd’ and got her stories on the front page as well as national TV.

When not making headlines Jennifer was mentoring and coaching colleagues and, sensing she had discovered a new passion, was inspired to change careers entirely, setting up her own personal brand coaching business, Spark.

Today, she is a personal brand expert, using her knack for spotting someone’s USP and her way with words to help them promote that in everything they say and do. Known as ‘The Antidote to Yes-Men’ her down-to-earth, straight talking, honest style delivers real value by helping today’s leaders discover how, by being themselves, they can be even more successful.

And when she’s not doing all that, Jennifer is living her version of The Good Life, pottering around the garden in her anorak and wellies, keeping bees and feeding chickens – and occasionally sipping a nice glass of Rioja while listening to The Archers.

Visit Jennifer’s website at www.sparkexec.co.uk

One String to the Bow: Five Lessons for the Two-Dimensional Coach 4

 in Guest Post  tagged approaches / business coach / business coaching / charging / client / clients / coach / coaches / coaching / coaching courses / coaching qualifications / coaching skills / coaching techniques / coaching training / David Lurie / executive coach / leadership coaching / learning / lessons / life coach / life coaches / life coaching / niche / nlp coach / performance coaching / personal coach / personal development / selling / Setsights Ltd / value

In this week’s guest post David Lurie shares five lessons for coaches:

One String to the Bow: Five Lessons for the Two-Dimensional Coach

By David Lurie

I’ve been fortunate to work with a lot of coaches over the last couple of years, and it has been striking about the differences between them. While many coaches are truly excellent, some seem to suffer under the belief that by coaching others they can paper over their own cracks. It seems clear that coaches should be working under the same philosophy as professional therapists. If a therapist has to continue to receive therapy while providing it, why shouldn’t a coach receive coaching?

Lesson 1: Coaching others doesn’t mean you don’t need coaching yourself, although it is true that teaching leads to great amounts of learning.

A second problem that some coaches seem to face is that they don’t know what kind of coach they are. While a good coach may be able to focus on a wide number of areas, a good businessperson has a niche. I would imagine that we’re all capable to some degree of coaching on a number of different subjects, but that doesn’t mean we should. At Setsights Ltd, I officially provide Career Coaching and Interpersonal Skills training. That’s two simple services that more often than not are exactly the same: most clients need interpersonal skills training to aid their careers, and although I do my fair share of training on CV-writing and occasion relationship coaching, my bread and butter work is targeted.

Lesson 2: As a coach, ensure you not only have a niche, but that you’re selling that niche.

Training is another interesting area. I realise that I’m setting myself up for a lot of abuse here, but I thoroughly disagree with the high number of NLP Practitioners out there. While I have found some NLP principles are very worthwhile, I’m of the same thought as Derren Brown that only Bandler’s original work is valid, unlike more recent developments. There is no shortage of psychology research that proves NLP wrong.

I personally find it better to offer certain lessons from NLP, from CBT, from TA, from business (I have a background as a management consultant) and Lacanian Analysis, not to mention a whole host of other areas where I have picked out the best information

Lesson 3: The best coaches understand the valuable parts of what they offer and stop offering the rest. They seek to learn from a variety of approaches and not a single one.

Blog. Write. Contribute. I would hope to see the average coach taking part in #hashtag chats on Twitter (if they use Twitter), submitting research to magazines like The Psychologist and writing for publications like the national newspapers (I personally try to contribute to The Guardian as it has my favourite careers section). You should be blogging about your thoughts, getting guests to write on your blog, and writing on other people’s blogs. This doesn’t just raise your profile, it lets you learn – and for that matter, you need to be open to learning

Lesson 4: Contribute new thoughts, and through this process be open to learning.

The final lesson is that you should always leave lessons to be easily learnt, without having to tread new ground. In that spirit, find below the five lessons in one place:

Lesson 1: Coaching others doesn’t mean you don’t need coaching yourself, although it is true that teaching leads to great amounts of learning.

Lesson 2: As a coach, ensure you not only have a niche, but that you’re selling that niche.

Lesson 3: The best coaches understand the valuable parts of what they offer and stop offering the rest. They seek to learn from a variety of approaches and not a single one.

Lesson 4: Contribute new thoughts, and through this process be open to learning.

Lesson 5: Ensure clients can learn easily without repeatedly re-treading the same ground.

About the Author/Further Resources

David Lurie is the Managing Director of Setsights Ltd, through which he provides four services: he provides career coaching one-to-one to people looking for their first job or to change job; he runs training courses on career skills in top universities including Kings College London and the Queen’s University of Belfast; he teaches people to build stronger interpersonal skills, including helping them with their confidence and relationships (yes, even dating); he gives talks on mental health and careers in secondary schools. He juggles all of this thanks to a combination of caffeine, insomnia and a small army of interns (not to mention his three associate staff) who do all the difficult stuff while he gets to have fun with clients.

When he isn’t coaching, he enjoys reading, writing and arithmetic, and his hobbies include performing stand-up comedy and writing biographies about himself in the third person, which he struggles to take as seriously as he probably should.