The print shop in Karama is cold enough to make Thandiwe's arms prickle, and the one-page sheet describing her first coaching package is still warm from the printer.
She reads it at the counter. The name of the package. Twelve sessions. Three months. Her price, in a clean font at the bottom of the page.
Then she takes the pen chained to the counter and writes a smaller number above it, by hand, and draws a line through the printed one. She hasn't met tomorrow's prospect. Nobody has asked her for anything. She just couldn't leave the number standing on its own.
The man behind the counter asks if she wants the other nine copies reprinted. She says no, she'll fix them herself.
How should you price a coaching package?
Design the package first and price it second. Decide what change the package is for, how many weeks and sessions that change realistically needs, what support sits between sessions and how the work will end. Then set one price for the whole container, write it down, and say it at the same pace as everything else.
A package isn't a bundle of sessions with a small saving attached. It's a promise about the shape of the work. The price belongs to that shape.
This guide carries no rate card, on purpose. A number borrowed from someone else's practice describes their clients, their method and their years, not yours.
What's the difference between selling sessions and selling a package?
A session is an hour. A package is a commitment to a piece of change, with edges.
When a client buys sessions one at a time, every session ends with a quiet question: do I book another? That question takes up room in the work. In our experience it pulls both of you toward sessions that feel good on the day, because the next booking depends on it.
A package moves that question to the start, where it belongs. The client decides once, at the beginning, with the whole shape in front of them: what it's for, how long it runs, how it ends. After that, every session can go where it needs to go, including the uncomfortable places a client might avoid if the next booking were still open.
A package also has a planned ending. A closing session where you look back together at what has changed is part of the work. Sessions bought one at a time tend to just stop.
Before you build a package at all, it's worth an hour with our free book, Why 88% of Life Coaches Fail, on why so many capable coaches stall in their first years. Or read on.
Three months or six: how long should a container run?
Long enough for the change it's for, and no longer. There's no ICF rule here, so this is our view, built from how the work tends to move.
A defined change often fits three months. A conversation someone keeps avoiding, a decision about a role, a habit they want to replace. There's a clear before and after, and both of you can tell when the after has arrived.
A pattern often needs longer. If the same thing keeps happening in different jobs, different relationships or different cities, the work is underneath the situation. Six months gives room to find it, work with it, and see whether it holds when life tests it.
Cadence matters as much as length. Weekly sessions keep momentum early. Fortnightly sessions later give the client time to live what has changed. In our view, starting weekly and widening the gap suits many packages.
Decide what sits between sessions. A short message after each session, a reflection page, a check-in when something comes up. Write down what's included and what isn't, so neither of you has to guess.
Whatever you choose, the client should be able to say in one sentence what the package is for. If they can't, the price will always feel arbitrary to them, because it's attached to nothing they can see. Knowing who you serve helps here, which we explore in how to choose a coaching niche.
Why does the discount arrive before the client asks?
Go back to the print shop. Thandiwe didn't cross out her price because of the market. She crossed it out because a printed number felt like a claim about herself, standing there in a clean font for anyone to judge.
In her case it's an old scene. Sunday lunch in her grandmother's yard in Durban, under a jacaranda, and the rule every child learned early: whoever asks for a second helping is greedy. She's a grown woman with a training certificate. She knows the rule was about too many cousins and too little food. And still, when she writes a number that asks for something, her hand reaches for the pen.
The rule and the reach are joined. There's the thought, "if I ask for much, I'm too much", and there's the heat that rose in her face at that lunch whenever a cousin was scolded. It's what the RS Method means by a thought fused to a charge. Thandiwe has rewritten the thought a dozen ways in a journal. The heat still comes up through her arm at the print shop counter, because it was never stored in the sentences. Our work goes to the heat. When it's gone, the jacaranda is a pleasant memory and the pen is only a pen.
There's a practical side too. In our view an unasked-for discount tells the client something before the work has started: that its own coach isn't sure of it. Whether or not a client notices, the coach can carry that doubt into the sessions that follow.
Our training puts this work at the front. The Inner Work First Principle says it in one line: the practitioner is transformed before the practitioner is trained. Inside the cohort, under supervision, your own charge around asking and being seen is worked on before you design anything for a client.
How do you build your first package on one page?
Here's a one-page package sheet. It takes an evening. Fill each line in order, and don't write the price until line seven.
- The change, in the client's words. Not "clarity" or "growth". A sentence a real person would say: "I want to stop rehearsing every conversation with my manager the night before."
- Who it isn't for. One line. This protects both of you, and it's where a good coaching discovery call starts.
- Length and cadence. For example, three months, weekly for six weeks and then fortnightly. Write down why that length suits that change.
- What happens between sessions. What's included, how quickly you'll reply, and what isn't included.
- How it ends. A closing session, what you'll review together, and what happens if the client wants to continue.
- A line that points to your coaching agreement. The terms belong in a separate written agreement that the client signs before session one. On this sheet, just note that it exists.
- The price, as one number for the whole package. Write it in ink. Then say it out loud to someone you trust, in a full sentence, and repeat it until your voice stays level and you stop adding words after it.
- Ask what the number is guarding. If line seven felt heavier than lines one to six, name whose voice you hear when you read it aloud. Often it isn't a client's. Write the name in the margin and leave the number where it is.
Keep the sheet. Once the first practice clients and introductions start, the subject of how to get your first coaching clients, you'll revise it, and the margin note usually changes before the number does.
What should a training give a coach who has to name a price?
A price is a moment when the coach's own material meets a stranger. When you compare trainings, ask each one about three things.
- Your own work, before you design anything. Inside the training and under supervision, so the old rules about asking are met in you first.
- A method with somewhere to go. Twelve sessions need a direction. The RS Method is one body of work for what sits under a recurring pattern, so a three or six month container has a course rather than a run of separate conversations.
- An institute that prices its own training in the open. RSCI publishes its programme prices on its site and doesn't run public discount campaigns on its certifications. RS Method Coach is AED 18,000 and RS Method Complete is AED 35,000, each with ICF education included, and payment plans are discussed with Sara, our veteran RS Method Master Coach. The ICF-accredited education inside our programmes is designed, delivered and certified by the Institute of Coaching and Mentoring (IICM), an ICF-accredited organisation. The ACC and PCC credentials are awarded only by the ICF.
Our razor is the job underneath any package. To witness. To hold. To walk them home.
A coach's price is quietly a statement about who they think they are, which is the question this work keeps returning to. Marko Mladenovic, three years on from his own work, gave his answer: "I am still in such a peaceful, blissful, joyful state. I feel like I have finally found the answers on my question, Who am I?" He was describing his own inner life, not a business, and nothing in his sentence predicts your clients or your fees.
If you're weighing whether to build a practice at all, start with our free book: Why 88% of Life Coaches Fail.
Robert Simic, training the next generation.
P.S. If there's a package sheet somewhere with a number you've already crossed out, leave the pen down for one evening and read our free book, Why 88% of Life Coaches Fail, first.