How to Price Behavior Coaching

When considering offering Behavior Coaching as a service, the question is often:

 

“How much should I charge?”

 

When we share our recommendation on what a fitness professional should charge, it is often met with a bit of resistance at first:

 

“Whoa! Really? How can I charge that amount?”

 

But before we get ahead of ourselves, let’s start from the top. 

From a purely mathematical position, the recommended rate to charge for behavior coaching is 1.5 times your personal training rate or the prevailing training rate in your area. 

Let’s show a few examples. 

If you charge $75/hour for personal training, we recommend you charge $112.50/hour for behavior coaching. 

Or if you charge $100/hour for personal training, you should $150/hour for behavior coaching.

Now, that is a substantial increase and, at first glance, that’s an amount that makes a few people a bit apprehensive and leads to: 

 

“How am I supposed to present that price to a client?”

 

That’s an understandable concern. 

And although that may seem like a lot, there are a few key points to remember. 

 

#1. Behavior coaching sessions are only fifteen minutes long and a maximum of 1x week

 

The recommended length of a behavior coaching session is 15 minutes and you can find an article on why HERE. 

If we revisit the above example of $100/hour for personal training, an hour of behavior coaching would cost $150. 

That means a single session of behavior coaching would cost $37.50 or that a package of 4 Behavior Coaching Sessions would cost $150. 

That’s a much easier price for most coaches to comfortably present to clients. 

 

#2. Behavior coaching sessions are worth more. 

We’re with you, training is absolutely amazing and a very powerful tool to enhance your clients’ lives. 

But training alone rarely produces the results your clients are aiming at. 

You know this from experience. You have clients right now who work their tails off in the gym but don’t see the results they’re pursuing. 

And even when you’ve evolved your fitness practice and added nutritional guidance to your skillset, you see that it’s still an uphill battle. 

Even when you provide science-backed, effective nutrition strategies to your clients, they rarely adhere to them long enough to see the results they claim they want. 

And you know that acquiring more information on training and nutrition hasn’t helped that issue. 

Behavior coaching is the missing link. You can add this as a new service or use it to enhance an existing nutrition service you offer.  

Behavior coaching gives you the vehicle to sidestep that recurrent frustration you and your clients have with their weight loss (or lack thereof), and instead deliver real-world sustainable results that your clients will find easier and far more enjoyable than their previous efforts. 

That means it is more valuable and therefore should be priced accordingly. 

Dedicated coaches value their time and skillset, so this makes sense. 

With all that in mind and the objections addressed, it's clear to see why we recommend you price your behavior coaching service at 1.5X your training rate and can confidently justify that price to your clients. 

To sum it up...the Summary:

• The recommended cost for 1 hour of behavior coaching is 1.5 times your personal training rate (NOTE: 1 hour of behavior coaching is equivalent to 4 behavior coaching sessions)
• Behavior coaching costs more because it's more valuable to your clients' results than just training.
• Behavior coaching is an effective and efficient service you can add as new a offering in your fitness practice or as a powerful tool to enhance an existing nutrition service.  

One sentence takeaway:

Behavior coaching as a service comes at a premium price because it is the missing link to producing lasting results for your clients.