[00:00:00] EMMA: Are you charging for all that you're worth? Over the last few weeks, I have had conversations with clients about value, conversations with potential clients about pricing, and I've been watching what is happening in the coaching industry as a whole as it stands today. And some of it, ugh, gives me the irrits.
[00:00:19] The coaching industry itself is not regulated that much. You don't need to have a license to coach. I wish you did You can call yourself one and get on with things. I did my coach training maybe 15 years ago, yes, I'm old, through the Institute of Executive Coaching and Leadership. I have coaching supervision regularly.
[00:00:38] I have a bachelor's degree in commerce, and I trained with the Australian Institute of Company Directors. I feel qualified enough to, like, say these things. When I'm on a call with a potential client, anyone who is earning revenue of 150 grand or more and they're looking for one-on-one business coaching, we get to the conversation about price.
[00:00:57] If I haven't got there, it goes something [00:01:00] like this, "So how much is it to work with you?" And I'll say, "Well, my one-on-one coaching is 1,700 a month or around 20 grand a year." They go, "And how many sessions do I get?" And I go, "One a month." And I know exactly what happens in some people's brains at that point.
[00:01:15] They start doing the maths. Now, it's not hard to figure out, right? Hang on, $1,700, one coaching session. That's 1,700 for an hour, except the hour is not the product. And I wanna talk about this today because, yes, this is absolutely about business coaching, but it's also about every woman listening to this who sells her expertise.
[00:01:39] They are the consultants. They are the designers, the copywriters, the accountants, the bookkeepers, the lawyers, the HR consultants, the marketing strategists, the advisors, the coaches, anyone who has ever had someone look at their fee and immediately try to divide it by [00:02:00] the number of hours they can see.
[00:02:02] What's the problem with that? Well, they can see the hour. They can't always see everything surrounding the hour, and sometimes neither can we. I wanna share a story with you. Recently, I had a potential client come to me who needed help badly, and I mean really badly, and it was an industry that I knew well, I had worked in for years.
[00:02:25] I'd also coached businesses in that industry as well, so I knew I could help. I knew what the problems were. It was great. We'd been talking for a few months before they eventually decided to work with me. But guess what? By the time they decided to come and work with me, things had become pretty desperate.
[00:02:42] Now, normally, when someone starts working with us, there is a process. I love me a process. We send them a questionnaire. They fill it out. They get clarity on that. I get the information that I need, and Bob's your uncle. Bob is never your uncle. Anyway, we book the session and off [00:03:00] we go, except this particular business didn't have the luxury of a lovely, neat onboarding process.
[00:03:06] They were hurting, and they needed help, and they needed it now, not in a few weeks. So on a Friday I sent them a text message. It essentially said, "Send me these things via email, please. I need this, this, this, and this. P.S." It was all about profit and loss. "Just get it to me." So they sent everything through two days later on the Sunday.
[00:03:24] And as it happened, I was working that Sunday because kids, life, production, business, juggling all the things. So I opened it, and I spent about three hours going through their business. Three hours before we'd even had our first proper coaching session. I was looking at where the business was, what was happening, what wasn't happening, where the problems were, what I thought I could help them with, and also what was outside of my expertise and needed external advice, because P.S.
[00:03:53] I'm not an accountant, and what questions I still had, and what didn't add up, what I needed to understand [00:04:00] before we could even make any decisions. And then there were some text messages backwards and forwards. More information came because I didn't have the whole amount. More emails, more spreadsheets, more profit and loss.
[00:04:10] And I spent more time on it the following day thinking it through, making sure that I had some wisdom in there. And then we finally had our call. That call went for two hours because there was a lot to do. And they would've kept going, but I had already given them a lot of homework. There was a lot of homework for them to do, things that they needed to go away and do and feel before our next session, things I needed to think about, things we needed to investigate, decisions that needed to be made.
[00:04:35] So I sent the AI transcription over to them with all their next steps. I sent through what I needed to send through. And the next day there were some voice notes going back and forth. There was text messages. There were more bits and pieces of information and collateral. And I kind of realized something while I was on my walk.
[00:04:51] Within the first week of this person working with me, I'd probably already spent somewhere around eight hours on their business [00:05:00] Eight hours, not one, eight. It's a lot, hey. And that doesn't actually bother me, right? This is why we cap the numbers of our one-on-one clients, because that's actually the work.
[00:05:09] You're not paying me for one hour, and I think this is the misunderstanding. My clients aren't paying me 1,700 bucks for an hour of my time. They're paying me to have their business on my brain. That's very different, and I love that distinction. Because when you work closely with someone over time, you start holding the context of their business.
[00:05:33] Yeah? You know what happened six months ago. You know what happened three weeks ago. You know the conversation they had with that employee. You know the offer they've been trying to get off the ground. You know that they keep avoiding a certain conversation. You know what they're capable of. You know when they're making a strategic decision and when they're making decisions because they're scared.
[00:05:57] When they send you a message saying, "Emma, this [00:06:00] has happened. What do you think?" we're not starting from scratch. I already have the context that I need, and that's really valuable, and that's one of the things I think gets completely missed when we reduce professional services to time. The visible work and the invisible work.
[00:06:16] I kind of want you to think about your own business for a moment here. What is the bit your clients see? Maybe it's the one-hour strategy session. It could be the workshop. Maybe it's the finished website. It might be the coaching call. That's the visible bit, but what's sitting, like, underneath that? So much.
[00:06:35] Because I suspect there's a mountain of invisible work. There's the preparation, there's the thinking, there's the research, there's the follow-up. I could go on. There's the email you send afterwards because you remembered something that you needed to say. There's the five-minute voice note when something kind of changes.
[00:06:54] There's the time spent reviewing their documents or their proposals. There's the connections [00:07:00] you make for them from your black book. There's the thing you notice because you've seen this problem 50 times before. And then there are the years that came before all of that. That's the bit I really want service providers to hear.
[00:07:13] Sometimes 10 minutes took 20 years. I've been in business and leadership for a very long time. I'm a dinosaur. I've worked in HR, I've worked in organizations, I've led teams, I've had my own business, I've coached hundreds and hundreds of women over our last nine years. I've seen businesses at 50 grand, I've seen businesses at half a mil, I've seen businesses at two mil.
[00:07:36] I have seen a lot of things. I've seen businesses making loads of revenue and having no money. I've seen businesses growing beautifully, sustainably. I've seen businesses that are complete chaos behind the scenes but bright and shiny on the outside. I've seen people buy businesses. I've helped people sell businesses.
[00:07:55] I've helped people hire people. I've helped people fire. I've seen people launch [00:08:00] things, close things, make a ton of mistakes, and also make some brilliant decisions. So sometimes someone brings me something, and I can see the problem pretty quickly. It might make me, I don't know, 10 minutes, but you're not paying for 10 minutes.
[00:08:17] You're paying for the experience that allows me to see it in 10 minutes. And I think women particularly, I don't have this conversation much with blokes, can be terrible at valuing this because we think, "Well, that's easy for me," or, "That's common sense, right?" Yeah, yeah, it's easy for you because you're bloody good at it.
[00:08:37] That's not a reason to make it cheaper. Stop pricing the visible hour. This is where I want to turn this back onto you because maybe you're listening, thinking, "Yep, people do that to me." They look at the workshop, and they think, "That's a lot of money for two hours." They look at your consulting day and think, "That's a lot for a day."
[00:08:59] They look at your proposal, and they calculate an hourly rate even though you don't work in[00:09:00]
[00:09:03] hours. And here's my question. Are you doing it, too? Are you pricing the visible hour and forgetting the invisible work? Are you looking at your own service and thinking, "Well, the workshop is only 90 minutes"? Bollocks. How long did it take you to create that thing? How much experience sits behind it? How much preparation befo- happens beforehand?
[00:09:28] How much support happens afterwards? How many years did it take you to become the person who can walk into that room and deliver something useful in 90 minutes? Maybe you're selling a strategy. The client receives a 20-page document. Whoop-de-doo. They're not buying the 20 pages. They're buying your ability to work out which 20 pages matter.
[00:09:51] Maybe you're a designer. They're not paying you to move some things around on a screen. Nope, they're paying you for your eye, [00:10:00] your judgment, your creativity, your ability to understand their brand. Maybe you're a HR consultant, bless you. They're not paying you for the hour-long difficult conversation.
[00:10:11] They're paying for the fact that you know how to have the difficult conversation without it ending up much bigger or in a worse state. That distinction matters. And there's another part of my own coaching model that I have come to really value. Access. Access is part of the product. My one-on-one clients hear from me, and I hear from them regularly, sometimes every couple of days.
[00:10:37] Because business, business doesn't conveniently arrange its problems around your m- monthly coaching appointment. Have you noticed that? Wouldn't that be nice? "Oh, hello, problem. Oh, could you, do you mind coming back just about the third Wednesday of the month at 10:00 AM so I can talk to Emma about this?" No, that doesn't happen, right?
[00:10:55] Stuff happens. Someone resigns. Someone gets hired. Client says no. [00:11:00] A huge opportunity comes up. A huge opportunity is lost. Cash gets tight. Someone wants to buy your business. You wanna buy someone else's business. An opportunity arrives at your door. A proposal lands. A team member needs managing. You need to make some money quickly.
[00:11:16] You've got a decision that you need to make Tomorrow. This is where access becomes incredibly valuable for people. Because sometimes you don't need a full coaching session, you need a five-minute conversation voice note that says, "Do this first," or, "Do this next," or, "Don't reply to that yet," or, "Here's the recipe, I've got you," or, "Send me the proposal through, I'll take a look at it."
[00:11:40] That might save someone days of spinning, thousands of dollars employing the wrong person, making a terrible decision. Proximity has value, and I think this is actually what premium professional services often provide. Someone close enough to the problem that they can help while the decision still matters.[00:12:00]
[00:12:00] Not three weeks later, not when the opportunity has kind of left the building or disappeared, not when the problem has become so big it's hard to fix and you need to employ lawyers. I'm increasingly confident in saying that I don't need to justify my fee by saying, "Well, technically, if you add the emails and the texts and the voice notes and divide it by the number of hours," blah, blah, blah.
[00:12:22] Ugh. No, because I'm not selling hours. I'm selling access to my thinking, to me. I'm selling context, judgment, wisdom, experience, pattern recognition, accountability, strategy Action and proximity. So what are you actually selling? This is the question I want to leave you with. If you're a service-based business professional provider, what are people actually paying you for?
[00:12:50] Not the deliverable, not the hour, not the Zoom meeting, not the PowerPoint presentation, not the document. What's, [00:13:00] like, underneath it? Maybe they need that ... Maybe they pay you for certainty. Maybe they pay you to make a complicated thing simple. That's what my clients do. Maybe they pay you to make a decision faster.
[00:13:12] Maybe they pay you to avoid a very expensive mistake. Maybe they pay you because you've seen something 100 times that they're experiencing for the first time. Maybe they pay you for access. Maybe they pay you for judgment. Maybe they just pay you to hold the context so they don't have to carry everything alone.
[00:13:32] And once you understand that, something will shift, and you'll stop apologizing for how long something took. You'll stop thinking, "But that only took me 45 minutes." Can we get rid of that? Good. Yes, let's. Maybe it should only take you 45 minutes because you've spent 20 years getting good enough to do it in 45 minutes.
[00:13:52] The hour isn't the product. So the next time somebody looks at your professional fee and says something along the lines [00:14:00] of, "How much? For an hour?" don't immediately shrink, and don't automatically start justifying yourself. Instead, know what sits behind that hour. And if you're buying a professional service, for the love of chocolate, and you're tempted to do the calculation yourself, ask a better question.
[00:14:18] Don't just ask, "How many hours do I get?" It's such a boring question. Ask, "What does working with you actually look like on the daily? What happens before the meeting? What might happen during the meeting? What happens after the meeting? What access do I have to you? How involved are you? What are you actually helping me achieve?"
[00:14:41] Because the best professional services aren't necessarily selling time, if ever. They're selling what becomes possible when someone else's experience, and judgment, and thinking is applied to your specific problem. And sometimes that one hour you can see, [00:15:00] that's the least valuable part of the whole bloody thing.
[00:15:05] Don't you reckon? I think there's a lot of women who need to hear this episode. Send it to a friend. Remind them how brilliant they are. And, uh, I would love to hear what you think. Thanks for listening to Tea With The Queen. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a rating and review on Apple Podcasts.
[00:15:26] It really does help to get the word out. For more about me, please visit emmamcqueen.com.au and I look forward to your company next episode.
