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After this, you've decided to offer coaching. You've billed by the hour your entire career, so you do the math the only way you know how. Your hourly rate times six sessions. You put that number on a page and call it a package. Your first client signs up. You meet every week. The sessions go well. You listen, you ask good questions, you reflect things back. At session six, they say thank you, tell you it was really helpful, and that's it. Then you sit there afterward and realize you can't say what changed. If you asked for a testimonial, you'd get something like, She was supportive. You're not sure you'd raise your price, you're not even sure you'd buy it again yourself. That isn't a pricing problem. It's a destination problem. And it's the most common thing I see when clinicians start coaching. Today we're talking about how to price a coaching package when every instinct you have says to count the hours. This one's for the clinician who's about to launch coaching or already has and keeps wondering whether the price is right. When you bill by the hour, you're selling time. That's how most of us were trained. Insurance pays in units, agencies pay by the hour, your value gets measured in 60-minute blocks. So of course, that's the first place your brain goes when you price something new. But nobody buys coaching because they want six hours with you. They buy it because they want to be somewhere different when it's over. So your price has to reflect the change you create and not the time it takes. That shift sounds simple. Where clinicians get stuck is in how they set up the coaching itself. And there are two mistakes I see over and over. Mistake one, coaching with no destination. This is general coaching. You meet, you check in, you talk through the week, you help them process what's hard. It's supportive and it feels productive in the moment. It's also just knockoff therapy. When there's no end point, sessions drift toward processing, and processing has no finish line. That creates a scope problem. If you don't know where the client is supposed to end up, you can't tell anyone, including yourself, what they're paying for. Mistake two, a destination that's too vague to verify. Some people do set a goal, but it sounds like feel more confident or get clarity or have a better relationship with work. Those are nice. They're also impossible to confirm. So here's what I want you to do instead. Make the destination concrete, specific, and observable. If you're a BCBA, you already know how to do this. It's an operational definition. If two people watched your client at the end of the coaching, would they both agree the result happened? Here's what that looks like. Commer bedtimes is vague. Your child falls asleep in their own bed most nights of the week is something you can see. Feel ready to create a CEU is vague. Submit your first CEU for approval is something you can check off. Once the destination is clear, you work backward. What milestones have to happen between where your client starts and where they end up? Those milestones become the structure of your coaching. Every session has a job because every session moves them toward a specific milestone. And this is where it starts paying off for you, not just the client. Your confidence stays high because you can watch progress happen instead of wondering if you're helping. Your testimonials get stronger because clients can say what actually changed. And pricing gets easier because you can see the transformation with your own eyeballs. The change is obvious. It's a lot easier to charge for something that you can point to. So how do you get from there to a price? Start with your time. I'm serious. Take what you think your time is worth and use it as a starting point, not the answer, a floor. Then look at everything you add on top of that time. There are four questions I want you to ask about your coaching. First, are you shortening the time it takes them to reach the destination? If they could figure it out on their own in two years and you get them there in three months, that's worth a lot more than three months of hours. Second, are you making it more likely they actually get there? Your insight, your pattern recognition, the mistakes you can see coming before they make them. That reduces the chance they spend months trying and still don't arrive. Third, are you making it easier? Templates, resources, scripts, tools, anything that means they do less heavy lifting to get the same result. Fourth, how much access do they have to you? Are you building a customized plan, evaluating their strengths and weaknesses, available between sessions, more of you and more of you that's specific to them is worth more. Every one of those raises the value of what you're offering. Your hourly rate is where you start. It isn't where you land. Now there's a real gap between knowing those four questions and turning them into an actual number, but you can't get there at all until the destination is defined. That part comes first. Here are a few quick things you can do this week. One, write your destination in one sentence. Then run the two observer test. Would two people watching your client agree the result happened? If not, keep tightening until they would. Two, list the milestones. Write down what has to be true between where your client starts and that destination. If you can't come up with milestones, that's a signal the destination still isn't specific enough. Three, do the hourly math, then look at the gap. Write down your hourly rate times the number of sessions. Next to it, write what you add under each of the four questions. Faster, more likely, easier, more access. Look at both columns side by side. If your price only covers the first column, you're giving the second away. If coaching is the offer you're building or the one you're thinking about building, check out the coaching summit. It's a full day on building coaching that actually gets clients somewhere and you earn seven CEUs while you're at it. The link is in the show notes. Register if it's coming up, or watch the recordings if you're catching this later. So here's the one thing to take with you price the destination, not the hours. And this week, notice how you describe your coaching when someone asks. Do you tell them how many sessions they get or where they'll be when it's done? Go define it.